CZ's Modest Dream: Make Crypto So Boring We Stop Talking About It Entirely

Binance co-founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao has a humble vision for crypto's future: become so mainstream that nobody even notices it anymore. In other words, he wants to engineer the ultimate rug pull on the news cycle itself—make crypto so boring that even your normie uncle stops texting you about "the Bitcoin thing."

Speaking on Scott Melker's Wolf of All Streets podcast, Zhao said he hopes that by 2031, cryptocurrencies and blockchain will simply fade into daily infrastructure—like the internet does today. Yes, the same internet that currently hosts both groundbreaking research and people arguing about whether water is wet in comment sections.

"I'm hoping that we don't talk about crypto as crypto in five years, just like we don't talk about the internet anymore, we don't talk about TCP/IP, we don't talk about HTML, JavaScript, etc. We don't talk about that stuff anymore. We just use it." The man is essentially dreaming of a world where crypto becomes as thrilling as WiFi password persistence—a necessary annoyance we stop fetishizing entirely.

"I think in five years, I'm hoping we'll just use crypto," he added. "There will be other use cases for the blockchain, for data storage, so there will be other cases, but I'm hoping in five years, we stopped talking about the technology, we are just using it and it will be used everywhere." Imagine: no more "wen moon" tweets, no more Telegram groups explaining why your altcoin is "actually good this time." Just pure, beautiful mundanity.

The optimistic outlook aligns with broader industry predictions. An estimated 559 million people worldwide use crypto in 2026, and insiders speculate the sector may be just one market cycle away from full-scale mainstream adoption. That's roughly the population of every person in the UK, France, and Germany combined deciding to YOLO into digital assets. No big deal.

Other industry players share the bullish sentiment. Cathie Wood's ARK Invest predicted in a January report that digital assets could grow into a $28 trillion market by 2030. Tether co-founder Reeve Collins expects all currencies to become stablecoins in the same timeframe. Chainalysis estimated stablecoin volumes could hit $1.5 quadrillion by 2035, while a Citi survey found most banks and asset managers expect a tenth of the global post-trade market turnover to be handled through stablecoins and tokenized securities in less than five years. For those keeping score at home, $1.5 quadrillion is roughly the GDP of several planets—assuming those planets have functioning economies and aren't run by devs who vanished with the presale funds.

Zhao also sees AI giving blockchain a significant boost. "The speed of development, the speed of writing code is going to increase quite dramatically, and AI agents are going to use crypto a lot," he said. Soon your AI assistant won't just order your coffee—it'll also manage your DeFi positions and silently judge your token selection.

He warned that countries avoiding blockchain and AI will face serious disadvantages. "I think there's really three big industries in my adult lifetime: the internet, blockchain and AI. Any country that misses one of them is going to be severely disadvantaged." So basically, it's now internet, crypto, or become a digital hermit kingdom. Choose wisely.