I agree that we have more capable+flexible cryptographic primitives than ever before, but I don't really buy the "Universal Protocol" thing.

For non-cryptographic uses we have "universal protocols" already, JSON being an example. You can adapt just about any format to and from JSON, if you want. But the fact that this is possible has not solved the interop problem, in the general case.

Similarly for "Hallucinated Servers". Even if you trust all nodes (and don't need cryptography), distributed computing is still kinda hard, and we have to write programs in particular ways to make them efficiently distributable. I'm sure this can work really well for some problem domains, but it's a subset.

I think the idea is that if an API (or anything really) is using a flexible cryptographic model then it would be possible to string together any system for use in any cryptographic scheme.

For example: you could write the cryptographic equivalent of "if user deposits $100 into this bank account then allow them to redeem these crypto-currencies"

This would mean making systems broadly compatible. Anyone could envision new use-cases for pre-existing systems and be able to extend them without having to modify the existing system. But the challenge of this is (1) designing a simple, fast cryptographic stack (2) widespread adoption.