During a recent podcast appearance, Balaji, author of "The Cyber Nation" and former CTO of Coinbase, proposed dividing the development of the crypto industry into "three eight-year cycles":
- From 2009 to 2017, the industry spent eight years proving that Bitcoin was viable;
- 2017–2025, Ethereum rises, proving that on-chain programmability and scaling are indeed feasible;
- From 2025 to 2030, we will enter the third stage - the privacy era.
Balaji believes that the core narrative of crypto over the next five years will no longer be assets or programmability, but rather the use of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) to restructure all financial and identity processes: ZKYC, ZK DEX, ZK smart contracts... The entire system will only expose the "minimum necessary information".
He pointed out that ZK's technological depth is no less than that of AI. Relying on a different mathematical system, it will attract a large number of top talents and may reshape traditional financial, regulatory, and digital identity infrastructure. The concepts of crypto communities, on-chain identity systems such as ENS/SNS, and even "cyber states" will also take shape during this cycle.
Balaji stated bluntly: Privacy is not a supplementary narrative, but the underlying answer to the next generation of the crypto world.
