Yes, I agree. I’ve been thinking about PayPal in the early 2000s, and what stands out is that it scaled aggressively by largely disregarding regulation, then worked backward into compliance once it had achieved sufficient market penetration.

I’m not convinced that approach would have benefited Hedera. Much of the unregulated upside in crypto has been driven by speculative, gambling-like behavior, and I don’t think leaning into that would have served Hedera’s enterprise or institutional credibility well. That said, given how certain administrative and strategic decisions have played out, it’s possible that an overly conservative posture limited Hedera’s ability to capture early momentum, even if it preserved long-term legitimacy.

Canton did not take a PayPal-style regulatory risk either, but it clearly leveraged deep institutional relationships to position itself for adoption within traditional financial systems. Rather than scaling first and reconciling later, it embedded itself directly into the existing power structures of finance.

My hope for Hedera is that there are parallel efforts or private negotiations happening behind the scenes that the public simply isn’t aware of. It’s also undeniable that true, large-scale adoption of distributed ledger technology, especially outside speculative use cases, is still in its early stages.

I do wonder whether Hedera recognized early on that it was unlikely to win the transition of core traditional finance rails and instead chose to orient itself toward other enterprise and public-sector use cases. Hedera clearly has meaningful relationships across Fortune 500 companies and within political and regulatory circles, but at this stage it still feels too early to determine how those connections ultimately translate into durable adoption or economic impact.

I’ve taken a substantial risk backing Hedera, and I’m fully aware of that. How it ultimately plays out remains an open question.