From the Early Internet to Blockchain: How Utility Expands Markets
In the early days of the internet, few destinations offered deeply engaging, everyday utility. Browsing was sporadic, and persistent online activity was rare. Services like AOL and Yahoo were entry points, but they lacked platforms that could anchor users for hours at a time. Facebook changed that by creating an ecosystem where users scrolled, connected, and interacted for hours daily. This unprecedented level of engagement expanded the total addressable market (TAM) for internet businesses, enabling a new era of digital commerce. Businesses could reach billions of users with precision targeting based on rich personal profiles—a level of insight that was previously unimaginable.
This shift is analogous to how high-speed blockchains like Solana are redefining the TAM for crypto users today. Much like Facebook turned the internet into a dynamic, constantly engaged ecosystem, Solana’s low-cost, high-speed infrastructure is transforming blockchain from a niche space into a scalable digital economy.
The TAM Expansion Effect: From Social Feeds to Blockchain Transactions
Facebook’s model was simple yet revolutionary: by keeping users online longer, it turned sporadic web surfers into persistently engaged participants. The result was an ecosystem where businesses could reliably find and target consumers, driving platform-driven economic growth. Billions of people became addressable through one platform, creating an internet economy that generated trillions in value.
Similarly, blockchains like Solana are expanding crypto’s TAM by making decentralized services accessible, instant, and affordable. Earlier blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum established the foundation but were constrained by slower, costly transactions. While Bitcoin serves as a digital store of value and Ethereum powers decentralized apps, their high fees and limited scalability have historically kept them from mass-market adoption.
Solana breaks this barrier. Its near-instant, low-cost transactions make previously impractical use cases viable. Stablecoins, for example, become significantly more useful when transfers are virtually free and instantaneous. A small business in an emerging market can accept stablecoin payments without worrying about credit card fees or currency volatility—unlocking entirely new payment models.
Speculative Frenzy as Onboarding
Solana’s architecture has also enabled speculative, viral phenomena like memecoin mania. Platforms like Pump.fun, where anyone can create and trade meme tokens, wouldn’t be feasible on slower, more expensive chains. The result: over $300M in revenue generated by Pump.fun this year alone. This chaotic, speculative environment might seem trivial at first glance, but it serves a crucial purpose: onboarding millions of users who create wallets, transact, and explore decentralized ecosystems—often without realizing they’re using blockchain infrastructure.
Platforms Build Economies, Not Just Products
Facebook succeeded because it didn’t just offer one killer app; it built a platform where engagement bred utility, making opting out inconvenient. Similarly, high-speed blockchains like Solana are evolving from speculative playgrounds into robust economic platforms. They enable an interconnected ecosystem of apps, businesses, and financial services that collectively increase the value and utility of being on-chain.
In the same way that persistent online engagement unlocked vast new markets for internet businesses, persistent blockchain activity could unlock entirely new markets for decentralized applications, digital payments, and global finance. Blockchain’s TAM won’t expand through a single killer app—it will grow as the ecosystem itself becomes indispensable through cumulative, everyday use cases. The future of crypto isn’t about “getting people into blockchain.” It’s about making blockchain-powered services so useful that people can’t imagine life without them.
As a seed investor in crypto applications, this dynamic is exciting because it signals a massive, expanding TAM driven by the new foundational infrastructure high performance blockchains, like Solana, and others, offer. Just as Facebook’s persistent engagement unlocked unprecedented opportunities for internet businesses, high-speed blockchains are laying the groundwork for the next wave of decentralized apps. Every new wallet created through a speculative memecoin trade or a stablecoin transfer isn’t just a one-off event—it’s the start of a deeper engagement cycle. This growing base of active, transacting users creates fertile ground for builders to develop apps with real-world utility, sustainable business models, and scalable revenue streams. The opportunity lies not in chasing a single “killer app,” but in supporting the multiple builders creating compounding value for crypto users that ultimately leads to widespread usage without ever really "converting" people to crypto at all.
