Crypto: Vcs Clash Over Non-financial Use Cases In Web3 And Crypto 2026

Chris Dixon, a managing partner at a16z crypto, said that non-financial use cases in crypto will flourish when regulations become clear.

Prominent crypto venture capitalists are clashing online about whether non-financial use cases in crypto, Web3, and blockchain have failed due to a lack of investor demand and product-market fit or if the best days for non-financial applications still lay ahead.

The debate started on Friday when Chris Dixon, a managing partner at venture capital firm a16z crypto, published an article arguing that years of “scams, extractive behavior and regulatory attacks” were the reason that non-financial use cases in crypto have not taken off.

These use cases include decentralized social media, digital identity management, decentralized media streaming platforms, digital rights platforms, Web3 video games and more.

“Non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them,” Haseeb Quereshi, a managing partner at crypto venture firm Dragonfly, said in a response on Sunday. He added:

Dixon said that as a16z crypto’s funds are managed with at least a 10-year time horizon, “building new industries takes time.”

“You don't have the luxury of ‘waiting to be right’ in VC,” Nic Carter, the founding partner of venture firm Castle Island Ventures, said in a reply to Quereshi. “You need to be right about a market during the 2-3 year fund deployment period,” he said.

The debate follows a surge of VC investment into crypto projects in 2025, which mostly flowed to tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), physical or traditional financial assets represented onchain by digital tokens.

Related: Web3 revenue shifts from blockchains to wallets and DeFi apps

Dragonfly’s portfolio is built around financial use cases and blockchain infrastructure that helps move value and risk through the onchain financial system.

Source: CoinTelegraph