Crypto’s ’Coffee Pot’ Moment: Why the Long Wait is Finally Over

The 'coffee pot' moment—that instant when a technology shifts from niche curiosity to everyday necessity—has long eluded crypto. For years, proponents watched, waited, and wondered: when will digital assets become as mundane and essential as the morning brew?

The Tipping Point

Forget the hype cycles and the speculative mania. The real story isn't about price—it's about plumbing. The infrastructure built during the last bull run—layer-2 solutions, institutional-grade custody, and regulatory guardrails—finally works. It's boring, it's functional, and it's seeping into the financial background noise.

Adoption by Stealth

You won't see headlines screaming about it. Instead, look at the quiet integrations: settlement layers for cross-border payments, tokenized real-world assets on private ledgers, and corporate treasuries hedging with digital gold. The revolution isn't being televised; it's being reconciled on a balance sheet. A cynical finance veteran might note it's the first time in history an asset class needed a 'killer app' beyond making early adopters rich.

The Wait is Over

The 'coffee pot' moment was never going to arrive with a bang. It dripped into existence—one streamlined process, one cost-cut, and one bypassed intermediary at a time. The technology finally serves the user, not just the speculator. The long wait? It just made the first sip that much sweeter.

It was a novel arrangement in 1991 — and when the researchers migrated it from the laboratory network to the still-novel world wide web in 1993, it became the world’s first webcam.

It also became the web’s first mainstream use case.

The world wide web was a lonely place in 1993, with few web pages to look at and no search engines to find them with.

Somehow, though, people found their way to the coffee pot webcam.

These early surfers of the internet were so eager to do something — anything! — on the web that they found themselves enthralled by a fixed view of a standard coffee pot.

Is it almost empty? Is the coffee getting darker? Has someone had a cup while I was away???

It was reality TV at its very worst.

It was also a hit.

The opportunity to keep tabs on a Cambridge coffee pot must have spread strictly by word of mouth, because there was no social media to share it on, no search engines to find it with. 

But the pot’s audience grew steadily, with the lab’s servers receiving first hundreds and then thousands of visitors — and then exponentially: Millions of people were soon using the web to monitor someone else’s coffee.

One of the lab’s researchers received emails from Japan requesting that the kitchen light be left on overnight so that people in different time zones could have a chance to watch the (presumably empty) coffee pot.

The Cambridge, England tourist information office began offering directions to the lab to visitors hoping to see the star coffee pot in real life.

Finally, peak coffee pot mania hit in 2001, when the lab’s decision to permanently unplug its webcam made front-page headlines.

By that time, there were more substantial things to do on the internet, of course, like watching cat videos and pirating music — and not much later, there WOULD be all-consuming things to do like scrolling through Facebook and posting videos on TikTok.

None of that was imaginable in 1993. But the popularity of the coffee pot webcam was a first hint that the world wide web would soon go mainstream: People’s eagerness to use the web to watch coffee stay warm was a clear sign they’d also want to use it for anything and everything.

This is a hallmark of great technology: If people are eager to use new tech when it’s not very good (three-frames-per-minute video) and for unexpected reasons (watching coffee), it’s a surefire bet that much bigger things are coming.

So, here’s something on my wishlist for 2024 2026: crypto has its coffee pot moment.

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