Sometimes things happen in adjacent markets or industries that can impact us in unexpected ways. I’m a product person, not a finance person. But part of our role as product people should be to look around corners even if they’re a bit outside our typical realm. To try to understand what’s coming next. Because macro trends, (or as author John Naisbitt called them way back in 1988, Megatrends), are things we can take advantage of or potentially be crushed by.

What’s happening with global finance could easily impact a lot of our products. Especially in terms of how we handle payments, crypto, AI and any international interactions. I’ve noticed some finance types talking about the potential for de-dollarization due to crypto trends. But I think a lot of what I’ve seen is missing an entirely separate, but related, trend in AI. Specifically, trends in agent capabilities that could be a major catalyst for acceleration in crypto financial capabilities.

As I’ve been working a bit with both blockchain and crypto technology, I’m noticing more of a convergence. Or maybe a collision, of two formerly somewhat separate industries. In blockchain, ERC-4337, Account Abstraction, we’re going to see more functional crypto wallets. (Plain language takeaway: We’ll see easier to use tools for doing crypto things.) And we also have EIP-7521, “The Intent Standard.” (Plain language takeaway: This is a structured format for expressing user “intents” in Ethereum-like environments. So instead of submitting exact transaction steps, users express desired outcomes (e.g., “swap 1 ETH for best available USDC”), and decentralized solvers determine the optimal execution path. Again, a major jump in ease of use.) As well, we’re seeing maturing tools and services for institutional players as more start to realize, “like it or not, ready or not, we’re going to have to play here.”

Next up… In AI, we have attempts, (still nascent), battling over MCP (Multi-Agent Communication Protocol). There’s no standard here yet. (Plain language takeaway: This will enable AI agents to exchange structured messages, coordinate actions, and collaborate across systems in a consistent, interoperable way.)

I’m sensing, (or at least, this is my thesis here), when these things grow up a bit, they will potentially cause, (or at least enable), a drastic acceleration of de-dollarization.

In a previous post about Building a PM Helper with AI, I showed how a fun personal AI project I’d built to be my personal Product Management tool searched across multiple sources before synthesizing answers. Unfortunately, I made both a strategic and a tactical error in that 1.0 version. The solution? Using Retrieval Augmented Generation with a Vector Database. What I’m going to do here is offer some super fast high level definitions as I go through the problem space, and maybe in future posts, go more deeply into RAG and Vector databases in terms of value.

tl;dr:

• If your a product manager working with AI at any level, you will likely need to understand Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to some degree. The following is a small, practical use case to help see the value in action.
• For the most part, when using LLMs for your own custom work, you’re stuck with the foundation model.
• Fine tuning can change the weights of the model to various levels, depending on how deep you want to go. These weights basically control how models transform input and can be in the billions. The deeper you want to have impact, the higher the cost. (You’re not likely fine-tuning for personal projects though. And if you are, it will all but certainly be with open source foundational models.)
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) doesn’t change weights at all. RAG just passes more information into a Prompt, (which is a fancy name for an information query, unless you really add fuller instructions ), but is limited to something called a context window. Basically, how much info you can pass in. It’s like saying, “Here, read this before answering.” So theoretically RAG reduces the chances of hallucinations and offers more “truthy” answers. (Assuming good data in what you feed it.)

There’s good reasons why vibe coding is on a tear right now. In some ways, there’s potentially legitimate value that will come out of this. At the same time, I think it’s likely we’ll see some seriously tragic outcomes. Just in case you’re not up on the meme, vibe coding is simply a term for using AI to write computer code. (See the link for the origin of the meme.) Maybe you could argue that if we’re going to label things, you could call it vibe composing or vibe whatever-ing, given that there’s generative tools for a variety of object types from art to music and so on. But let’s focus on computer code for now.

So. Besides just having programmers possibly be more efficient, what are the benefits? Perhaps one of the loudest benefits right now is being shouted by a cohort of entrepreneurs and product managers. They’re thrilled! “I can just get software now!”

“I am free!”

What they mean is free from the stranglehold technology costs have had on the ability to get digital product done. The problem with the Temple of Tech has always been time, money, and perhaps worst, resource contention. And those pesky coders had something else the Kingpins of history have always had, “They who control the means of production control the world.” But now? Now it’s democratized! No more desperate postings by non-technical co-founders seeking technical help for zero dollars, but a little bit of stock. There’s perhaps some irony here if you look at historical Bourgeoisie Control the Means of Production. But we can skip the philosophy for now. If you’re old enough, you can remember that if you had a development request, you’d maybe literally head to some special room behind secure doors in a basement where florescent lights battled with the glow of the green or orange text emanating from terminals. There’d be a faint smell of ozone as even the loud ventilation system couldn’t quite keep up with all the buzzing electrons. Here, you would make your tech request. Ironically, it’s not that different now in many places. At least, from a relationship perspective, even if the scenery has changed.

So can entrepreneurs and product managers just ditch their tech colleagues now? Are the headlines true? Coding skills are no longer a hot ticket? Let’s take yet another deep breath. Come on with me now… breeethe… in through the nose, out through the mouth… one… two… three… Good. Yes. Things are changing again. And fast. But maybe don’t just lay off everyone just yet.

In Demystifying Crypto Basics through Metaphor, we started with some of the basic ideas about money and crypto tokens. But we didn’t talk about where these things live.

Blockchains

We kind of skipped this part. But I thought it was more important to go over some of the pieces first, then go big picture. So what’s a blockchain?

Here’s my simple definition of blockchains: It’s a place where you keep track of some stuff and let tons of people keep copies in a really secure way. That is really it.

Here’s the more typical matter-of-fact technical definition: A blockchain is a decentralized, cryptographically secured ledger that records transactions in a tamper-resistant chain of blocks across a distributed and decentralized network. There’s other details like how blocks are formed and linked, timestamps, and more. We’re not going to focus on those. Blockchains are mostly associated with crypto in popular perception, but guess what? They can be used for all kinds of other things; identity management, supply chain management, healthcare records, real estate and land titles, and a lot more. This is why this technology is simmering beneath the surface. It does have several core values and can be made actually useful. It’s not just about the so-called meme coins.

In the hype cycle of crypto, we’ve seen the whole market space rocket up and come back down, then slowly rise again. At least in terms of money and attention, it’s now just kind of there. After all, the Metaverse was popular for a couple of days, but then we got AI to gush about. Meanwhile, we still have the get rich YouTube crypto maxis, but the crypto industry itself has started – more quietly – finding some real world valuable use cases. And the underlying blockchain tech? Players in this area have been just trying to build more things of actual value. So it’s not going away. And if you do product management, it’s quite possible you’ll be looking at where or if some of these technical bits make sense in your offerings.