Why Crypto’s Next Boom May Come From Wall Street’s Pipes, Not Memecoins

“Meme coins overnight just, you know, disappeared.” That is the blunt case Yuval Rooz is making for why crypto’s next real winner may not be the loudest app, the hottest casino, or the next token that can rip 80% in a weekend. It may be something far less sexy - and potentially far more durable: the financial plumbing underneath Wall Street.

Rooz, the founder of Canton Network and co-founder and CEO of Digital Asset, joined Coinage with a pitch that is bigger than Canton alone. In his telling, crypto is finally approaching the moment where markets have to stop pretending every Layer-1 deserves to trade on vibes alone. If a chain says it is building the next generation of financial rails, then the question is no longer how loud the community is or how strong the narrative feels on social media platform X. The question is whether the network generates real economic value - and whether that value actually flows back to token holders.

“There’s one Bitcoin and that’s it,” Rooz said. But once you move beyond Bitcoin’s store-of-value lane and into smart contract chains, he argued, the standard should get tougher fast. “The actual financial value that you generate on those networks translates somehow into … the value of the token.” And in his view, most of crypto still fails that test.

That is what makes his broader argument so provocative. Rooz is not just saying Canton is undervalued or early. He is saying much of crypto is still priced backward. Too many chains continue to be valued like they already own the future, while the underlying activity on them does not justify the price tag. He took a direct shot at Cardano to make the point, saying “there’s really nothing happening on the chain yet. The chain is worth $10 billion. And I just don't understand how you can justify that.” It is an intentionally sharp line, but it lands because it taps into a bigger frustration in crypto right now: an industry that talks constantly about utility while often rewarding speculation far more than usage.

Rooz’s answer is a model where token value is tied much more directly to actual network economics. That is why, somewhat surprisingly, he goes out of his way to compliment Hyperliquid. “Hype and Canton are really the only layer ones that are actually doing that at the moment,” he said, arguing that both projects at least attempt to connect infrastructure-level financial returns with token-holder value. In other words, he is less interested in tribal chain wars than in whether the math works. If the network makes money, do token holders benefit? If not, what exactly are investors buying?

Where Canton splits from Hyperliquid, though, is in what kind of market it wants to win. Hyperliquid rose by capturing crypto-native trading flows. Canton is going after something bigger and, frankly, much more boring: institutional finance. Rooz’s case is that boring may be exactly what crypto needs.

Retail manias are powerful, but they are fickle. They explode, dominate the timeline, and vanish. That is why Rooz kept coming back to the repo market. “The repo market is about $10.5 trillion in notional a day,” he said. More importantly, that market does not care whether traders are euphoric, terrified, or posting frog memes. “If the market were to be up ten or down 10% or move sideways, that market would still print.” That kind of steady flow, he argued, creates “a much more stable kind of revenue generating mechanism” for a chain than trying to ride the next retail wave.

That may be the real thesis hiding underneath the Canton story: crypto’s next leg up may come from reliability, not adrenaline. The industry spent the last cycle obsessing over what could go viral. The next cycle may reward what can quietly keep producing fees.

Rooz also pushed back on the idea that institutions are only now “discovering” blockchain. His point was almost the opposite. A lot of the activity was already being explored behind the scenes; firms just had very little incentive to talk about it publicly when the political and regulatory posture around crypto felt openly hostile. What has changed, in his telling, is not that Wall Street suddenly woke up. It is that companies now feel safer saying out loud what they have already been building, especially if they can do it on public infrastructure while still meeting privacy requirements.

That privacy point matters more than a lot of crypto natives may want to admit. For all the talk about tokenization, the simple reality is that major financial players were never going to move serious activity onto rails that force them to expose everything. Rooz argued that solving privacy is not some side feature or luxury add-on. It is one of the main unlocks for institutional adoption. And in his closing pitch for Canton, he made clear that he sees that as one of the network’s defining advantages. Canton, he said, “solve privacy ahead of time,” alongside building “actual tokenomics that bring value directly to the token holders.”

Still, Rooz’s most interesting point may have nothing to do with banks at all. It has to do with what success should even look like for crypto from here. For him, the real signal is not more crypto companies using crypto rails. It is non-crypto businesses doing so because the rails are simply better. “When people use crypto rails to drive businesses that have nothing to do with crypto is the sign for us that things are heading in the right direction,” he said. The example he wants to see is not another on-chain degens’ playground. It is a construction company paying workers with stablecoins because it is cheaper, faster, and more efficient.

That is also where his realism shows up. Rooz is not pretending the industry is fully there yet. “The user experience still has to improve,” he said, comparing the missing piece to Apple Pay. People do not care how the pipes work if the payment feels instant and painless. Crypto still has too much wallet friction, too many weird edges, and too many products that feel like homework. But he also argued that the shift is already underway. The milestone, in his mind, will come when “majority of fees in the ecosystem are actually generated by non-crypto companies.” That is when crypto can stop congratulating itself for experimentation and start claiming real product-market fit.

For a market still addicted to excitement, that may sound almost disappointingly practical. No moon math. No memecoin messiah. No grand promise that retail mania alone will carry everything higher forever. Just a harder, more adult question: does the chain make money in a way that lasts?

If Rooz is right, that question is going to matter a lot more than the industry is used to. And if that shift is really here, then the next great crypto winner may not look like a casino at all. It may look like the back office.