A remarkable feature of QCD is that the mass scale which controls color confinement and hadron mass scales does not appear explicitly in the QCD Lagrangian. However, de Alfaro, Fubini, and Furlan have shown that a mass scale can appear in the equations of motion without affecting the conformal invariance of the action if one adds a term to the Hamiltonian proportional to the dilatation operator or the special conformal operator. Applying the same procedure to the light-front Hamiltonian leads to a unique color confinement potential. The same result, including spin terms, is obtained using light-front holography, the duality between the front form and anti-deSitter space if one modifies the action by the soft-wall dilaton in the fifth dimension z.

Generalizing this procedure using superconformal algebra, leads to a unified Regge spectroscopy of meson, baryon, and tetraquarks, including remarkable supersymmetric relations between the masses of mesons and baryons. One also predicts observables such as hadron structure functions, transverse momentum distributions, and the distribution amplitudes defined from hadronic light-front wavefunctions. The mass scale underlying confinement and hadron masses can be connected to the mass parameter in the QCD running coupling by matching the nonperturbative dynamics to the perturbative QCD regime. The result is an effective coupling defined at all momenta and the determination of a momentum scale which sets the interface between perturbative and nonperturbative hadron dynamics.