What did you expect to happen since Carbon’s launch that hasn’t?
Mark admitted one of the biggest surprises since Carbon DeFi’s launch:
“There are fewer people today using blockchains than there were in 2020. And the trend isn’t slowing down — it just keeps going down. That really does strike me as strange.”
At first, he assumed the drop in human users was a symptom of the bear market, and that adoption would rebound with new highs in Bitcoin. But the recovery never came.
Why? Partly because many “users” may not actually be onchain.
“A lot of people trading on Coinbase think they’re using Bitcoin, but they’re not. They’re just interacting with a website. The same goes for apps in the app store that look blockchain-centric but actually have nothing to do with the chain itself.”
Meanwhile, institutional adoption is finding ways to sidestep the blockchain altogether — trading database entries instead of moving assets on-chain.
And yet, one audience has only grown: robots.
“Robots love using blockchains. They don’t need a UI, they don’t hesitate in decision-making, they read directly from smart contracts. In many ways, they’re the ideal customer.”
Looking ahead, Mark suggested that even the humans who remain may no longer accept one-size-fits-all interfaces.
“Very soon, your browser could have an AI plugin that knows exactly what kind of UI you prefer — and generates it for you. In that paradigm, you’re still building for the AI. The human user becomes secondary.”
For Bancor, the unexpected decline in human adoption — and the overwhelming rise in bot activity — poses a challenge, but also an opportunity. The question now is how to build for a future where machines, not humans, dominate onchain activity.
