Project Crypto has sounded the starting gun, ushering in the era of crypto super applications

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

On July 31, the new chairman of the U.S. SEC, Paul Atkins, delivered a speech titled "America's Leadership in the Digital Financial Revolution," announcing a new initiative called "Project Crypto."

Although this news has not yet made mainstream media headlines, it could become one of the most far-reaching events for the crypto industry by 2025.

In January of this year, when Trump returned to the White House, he boldly proclaimed that he would make the U.S. the "world's cryptocurrency capital." Many viewed this as campaign rhetoric, and the entire industry was watching to see whether Trump's promise was just a hollow check.

Yesterday, the answer was revealed.

Project Crypto appears to be the first significant implementation of Trump's crypto-friendly policies.

Currently, there are many interpretations of this plan on social media, and I won't elaborate on them here; however, I believe the most valuable aspect is that it allows financial institutions to create "super apps" that provide all financial services, including traditional stock trading, cryptocurrency, and DeFi services, on a single platform.

What would it mean if JPMorgan's app could buy stocks, trade Bitcoin, and participate in DeFi mining all at once?

From campaign promises to regulatory actions, from "enforcement as regulation" to "embracing on-chain finance"—this transformation took only six months. When the world's largest capital market decides to pivot fully, the competitive landscape of the entire industry may be rewritten.

The All-in-One Super App

The concept of a super app mentioned in Atkins' speech easily brings to mind WeChat. Chatting, payments, investment management, purchasing insurance, and even applying for loans—one app solves all needs.

This experience, which is commonplace in China, is impossible in the U.S., which prides itself on a free market.

The reason is simple: regulatory barriers.

In the U.S., making payments requires a payment license, trading securities requires a brokerage license, and lending requires a banking license, with different requirements in each state.

Project Crypto breaks this deadlock for the first time.

According to the new regulations, a platform holding a brokerage license can simultaneously offer traditional stock trading, cryptocurrency buying and selling, DeFi lending services, NFT trading markets, and stablecoin payment functions—all of this requires just a unified licensing framework.

In the crypto industry, the additional benefit of this unified framework is its alignment with the composability of numerous products.

You can automatically purchase Bitcoin with stock profits, use NFTs as collateral to borrow stablecoins, and then invest those stablecoins in DeFi for returns… all operations can be completed on one interface, with assets freely circulating on-chain.

When users can freely navigate a single platform, the Web3 super financial platform seems less unattainable.

The SEC's decision essentially fired the starting gun for an arms race.

Three Types of Players, Diverging Fates

As the starting gun for Project Crypto fires, the circumstances of the competitors on the track vary greatly.

Existing crypto giants must shift from a winning-by-default mode to a competitive mode.

Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong may be experiencing complex emotions. On one hand, no longer having to worry about SEC lawsuits is a huge relief; on the other hand, the days of being the sole leader may be coming to an end.

In recent years, under Gensler's high-pressure regulation, Coinbase has become the default choice for U.S. users due to its compliance advantages.

Now that the doors are wide open, this "regulatory moat" is disappearing. Even more critically, Coinbase needs to quickly transform—becoming an all-in-one financial platform rather than just a trading exchange. This means developing stock trading (to compete with Robinhood), banking services (to compete with traditional banks), and DeFi integration (to compete with decentralized protocols). Each area has powerful existing players.

Kraken and Gemini face similar challenges but are in a more precarious position.

They lack Coinbase's scale advantage and the resources needed for rapid expansion. The most likely outcomes? Either being acquired or focusing on niche markets.

If crypto-native companies are on the defensive, traditional financial giants are preparing for an all-out attack.

JPMorgan is no longer a skeptic of cryptocurrencies. Their JPM Coin processes billions of dollars in transactions daily, and the Onyx blockchain platform has been running for years. Now, they can legitimately launch crypto services aimed at retail customers.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America—each is itching to get started. They possess what crypto companies dream of: a vast user base, deep financial strength, a mature risk control system, and most importantly—user trust.

When American grandmothers want to use their retirement funds to buy some Bitcoin, do they trust the bank app they've used for 30 years or a crypto exchange they've never heard of?

However, it's not easy for these giants to pivot. The bureaucratic systems of banks, outdated technological frameworks, and conservative corporate cultures could all become fatal weaknesses. Policies are both an opportunity and a challenge for them.

In addition, protocols like Uniswap, Aave, and Compound find themselves in the most delicate position.

Project Crypto explicitly protects "pure code publishers," theoretically benefiting DeFi.

But when Coinbase can directly integrate Uniswap's functionality, and when JPMorgan launches its own on-chain lending products, what is the value proposition of decentralized protocols?

One possibility is a clearer separation between "protocol layer" and "application layer." Uniswap continues to serve as an underlying liquidity protocol, while various "super apps" provide user interfaces and value-added services on the upper layer. This is similar to the TCP/IP protocol of the internet—important but invisible, content to play a supporting role.

Another, more radical possibility: some DeFi protocols may choose "centralization." Establishing companies, applying for licenses, and accepting regulation in exchange for greater market access.

Aave is already exploring an institutional version, and Uniswap Labs itself is a company. The ideal of decentralization is beautiful, but when competitors can legally reach billions of users, ideals may just become slogans.

Ultimately, DeFi may split into two camps: "protocol fundamentalists" who adhere to decentralization ideals and "pragmatists" who embrace regulation in search of growth. Both have room to survive, but the user groups they serve will be entirely different.

Three types of players, three fates. But one thing is common: the comfort zone no longer exists.

Under the new policy, everyone must redefine their position in the new ecosystem.

Four Dimensions, Competition Among Many

When everyone rushes to the same track, what determines victory and defeat?

First and foremost, of course, is licensing.

In the past, compliance was a bottomless pit of money. Now, it may become the most important moat.

Project Crypto seems to lower the threshold but actually raises the standards. A "super app" license means you need to meet regulatory requirements across multiple fields, including securities, banking, payments, and crypto. This is not a game that small companies can afford to play.

The true value of a license lies in the network effect. When users can complete all financial needs on a single platform, the switching costs rise sharply. This is akin to banking licenses of the past—seemingly available to everyone, but ultimately only a few players built empires.

Next is technical architecture.

The user experience standard for on-chain finance is: the smoothness of Web2 + the sovereignty of Web3. This is a very high technical threshold.

Traditional financial institutions need to build crypto infrastructure from scratch, while crypto companies must achieve bank-level stability.

The complexity of cross-chain interoperability adds another layer—when users want to transfer assets from Ethereum to Solana to participate in DeFi, can your system complete it securely in 3 seconds? When the market is highly volatile, can your risk control system respond in milliseconds?

Technical debt could become a fatal flaw.

The system that Coinbase spent 10 years building is optimized for a single function, and transforming it into an all-in-one platform is no easy task. The legacy systems of banks are even more of a nightmare—some core systems still use COBOL, how can they interface with blockchain?

Again, there's the age-old topic of liquidity.

In the financial world, liquidity is everything. In the era of super apps, this truth is magnified several times.

Users expect that any asset, at any time, and of any size can be traded instantly. This requires access to all major trading venues, aggregating global liquidity, and providing the best prices. More importantly, capital efficiency—how can the same funds flow efficiently between stocks, crypto, and DeFi?

Finally, there's user experience.

This may be the most underestimated competitive dimension. When functionalities converge and fees are similar, experience determines everything.

The challenge lies in the vast differences among the target audiences. You need to satisfy crypto veterans (who want self-custody and to view on-chain data) while also reassuring traditional users (who may not even know what a mnemonic phrase is). One app, two languages—this tests the product managers' ability to balance.

Overall, Project Crypto presents a challenge to practitioners: Licensing determines what you can do, technology determines how well you can do it, liquidity determines how big you can get, and experience determines how far you can go. In this multi-dimensional competitive chess game, every move could change the entire landscape.

Potential Winners and Losers

Under the new policies of Project Crypto, I know you're eager to find out which companies and assets have a greater chance of winning.

But predicting the future is a dangerous game; nothing is certain, and we can only see some clues for now. The winners in the era of crypto super apps will not have just one face. Instead, we may see three distinctly different but equally successful models.

The first is the "alliance" model.

The smartest players have realized that going solo is less effective than joining forces.

Take Fidelity, for example. This giant, managing $11 trillion in assets, established a digital asset division back in 2018, but has remained lukewarm in retail crypto trading.

What if Fidelity deeply integrates with a tech-leading crypto company (like Fireblocks)? Fidelity's 200 million customers would gain a seamless crypto experience, while the partner would acquire the most coveted resources in traditional finance—trust and users. The outcome may not necessarily be a merger of these two companies, but such "1+1>2" combinations will likely appear frequently in the future.

The second is the "arms dealer" model.

When a gold rush occurs, the most stable business is certainly selling shovels.

In the era of super apps, "shovels" are those critical infrastructures. Take Chainalysis, for example; whoever wins the super app war will need its compliance tools. The beauty of these companies lies in their diverse clientele, which strengthens their position. They don't need to choose sides because every party needs them.

The third is the "specialization" model.

Not everyone needs a Swiss Army knife; if there were a financial platform specifically serving DAOs or a vertical application focused on the financialization of NFTs, these specialized players might capture long-tail value in niche markets while giants are busy building large, all-encompassing platforms.

The ways to win are likely among the above models, but regarding losers, it will likely be those stuck in the middle—neither here nor there—institutions and speculators.

Take some regional banks in the U.S. as an example; they neither have JPMorgan's resources for large-scale tech investments nor the agility of small fintech companies. When customers can obtain a full suite of crypto services from large banks, the survival space for these mid-sized institutions will be severely compressed.

As for speculators, in recent years, many projects have evaded regulation through complex legal structures—registered in the Cayman Islands, operating through DAOs, claiming to be "fully decentralized."

The clear rules of Project Crypto mean these gray areas will no longer exist. Either be truly decentralized (accepting limitations on liquidity and user experience) or be fully compliant (accepting regulatory costs); fence-sitters will have no place to hide.

From a competitive business perspective, the time window is rapidly closing.

First-mover advantage in a winner-takes-all platform economy may be decisive. Whoever can establish a complete ecosystem in the coming months may become the next crypto financial giant.

The iPhone Moment?

In 2007, when Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPhone, Nokia executives scoffed—how could a phone without a keyboard possibly succeed? Eighteen months later, the entire mobile phone industry's rules were completely rewritten.

Project Crypto may be the "iPhone launch event" for crypto finance.

Not because it is perfect, but because it is the first time mainstream financial institutions have seen the possibilities: financial services can be provided this way, traditional assets and crypto assets can be integrated this way, and compliance and innovation can be balanced this way.

However, remember that the iPhone truly changed the world not in 2007, but after the App Store appeared. Project Crypto is just the beginning; the real revolution will erupt after the ecosystem is formed.

When millions of developers begin innovating on the new platform and billions of users become accustomed to on-chain finance, that will be the good times.

It's too early to draw conclusions now; everything is still unfolding.