It’s been 17 years since a document describing “peer-to-peer electronic cash” was published on a cypherpunk mailing list.

But people still ask: What’s all this stuff used for, anyway?

You’ll find four main answers in the inaugural issue of Use Case magazine: Bitcoin, which started it all; stablecoins, which Wall Street (now) says are the future of finance; open-source culture, which underpins the entire cryptocurrency world; and finance reinvented, the primitives of our onchain economy.

Today, corporations and countries are stockpiling bitcoin; the decentralized infrastructure of the previous decade and a half is finally being put to work; and banks and financial institutions are figuring out how to move dollars, equities, and more onchain.

None of this happened overnight. Our hope is that Use Case explains how we got here, and what comes next.