One of my formative moments in the cryptography industry was attending an institutional infrastructure conference on behalf of the IOTA Foundation. It was immediately clear to me that blockchains were an emerging category of digital infrastructure. The space was so young in 2018-2019 that conservative investors had a difficult time incorporating the blockchain category into their existing investment models. Today, I think it’s clearer that digital infrastructure protocols are a coordination mechanism for many groups and individuals to own and participate in solving large scale societal problems. The coordination of these problems will back new hard digital assets that propagate certain species of cryptography. These assets will inherent the underlying properties of the system whether they coordinate Quantum, AI, or other hard future problems. Framing these new systems as “Digital Infrastructure Protocols” is important because it distinguishes previous attempts and/or new systems against a wave of previous products, services, and economic models that tried to mimic DIPs, yet due to their funding models, economics, or technical architectures made them unsuitable as real digital infrastructure investments. I believe we will see more protocols in this category emerge and position in this way. They will be taken seriously as a result of the problems they are solving, the new cryptography available today, and how the assets protecting and backing these protocols are perceived in the eyes of a more mature industry.