Every revolution eventually becomes the establishment. What began as crypto’s peer-to-peer challenge to the global financial order is quickly being absorbed into the traditional fold, its anti-elite spirit traded with the legitimacy of spot ETFs, institutional custody and the very banking frameworks it was built to bypass.
This is a familiar arc. Throughout history, every revolution has begun with the promise of breaking old power structures and dismantling the status quo. Once power is seized, the priority shifts to stability and preservation, transforming ideals into systems. Inevitably, the movement reaches the limits of rebellion, and to survive it must court what it once shunned: venture capital, institutional trust, and regulatory tolerance. This requires conformity that triggers a process of assimilation. As the original emancipatory goals are diluted or abandoned, what began as revolution solidifies into orthodoxy. To quote the American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
In a 1999 interview, the late, great David Bowie described this process, saying that if he started over, he probably wouldn’t have gone into music; he would have worked on the internet instead. The Internet, he argued, felt subversive, chaotic and nihilistic. It felt like a force for revolution. It made you feel like you could make a difference. Rock ‘n’ roll, on the other hand, had lost its power. Once a disruptor that shocked people with its sounds, styles and symbols, it was eventually accepted by the mainstream. He described rock ‘n’ roll as a “currency” that was certainly still a transmitter of information, but no longer a transmitter of rebellion.
Bowie’s reflections remind me of how I felt when I got into crypto in 2016, the year he died. At the time, crypto had the old insurgent energy of the internet, while the internet itself (with FAANG giants Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google in control) had become the establishment, trading its anarchic and distributed beginnings for a centralized corporate order.
For us in crypto, it was a time of idealism and loose rules that attracted outsiders and activists, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, widely caricatured as dim-witted criminals emerging from the depths of the dark web. Any association with crypto felt like a form of dissent in itself.
Inspired by the cypherpunks who came before us, we advocated for a decentralized Internet that protected individual privacy from government and corporate surveillance; for sovereign money that could not be exploited by the same actors that destroyed the system in 2008; and for a digital future where information and transactions could not be stopped. We stood up for those who had long been excluded from the traditional financial system, and we truly believed that power could be rebuilt at the protocol layer. It really felt like we could make a difference.
I’ve mourned the early days, reminisced about quirky meetings we hosted over cold pizza and hot beer, held evangelistic self-help workshops, the place that burned with laser eyes. These days, the pride we once took in the responsibility of being your own bank has been paved over by the convenience of the ETF. Now you can get “exposure” without ever learning what a seed phrase is. The conversation has moved from the fringes to the boardrooms inside banks and government buildings, held by doxxed-by-default guys with job titles like Digital Asset Risk Manager and Blockchain Policy Advisor. But this was always the goal, right?
The goal of mass adoption was as much a growth goal as it was moral validation for our crazy mission. Mass adoption would prove us right. Although in 2016 we thought “mass adoption” would be our moms using the hot wallets on their phones to buy their daily lattes at their local coffee shops. In 2026, it is TP ICAP – the wholesale broker that processes $200 trillion worth of commodity trades annually for banks and hedge funds – that decides to route even 1% of this volume through crypto markets. Flows on that scale will eclipse any vision of retail self-sovereignty or utility.
Just as rock ‘n’ roll eventually leveled off into a multibillion-dollar corporate industry, and a once-decentralized internet became a landscape dominated by a handful of platforms, crypto’s mass adoption dream is also coming true. As the title of a16z’s annual State of Crypto report put it, 2025 was the year crypto went mainstream. We succeeded in creating something worth protecting, and protection is inherently conservative. We did it. Crypto is the new order.
What was unthinkable in 2016 is now a reality. At Davos this year, crypto had gone from hosting its own self-organized, semi-illegitimate side events just a few years ago to taking center stage in the main arena. Heads of state are openly competing to claim crypto as a national priority, while CEOs of the world’s biggest banks are now talking about it as an existential threat.
The JP Morgans, Blackrocks and Morgan Stanleys of the world are all humming the same tune, touting crypto – especially Bitcoin – as a legitimate, regulated asset class with the same institutional seriousness as gold and stocks. Publicly traded companies store crypto assets on their balance sheets.
Stablecoins do more in annual transaction volume than the major payment networks. Real-world tokenized assets are moving from crypto-native experiments to the core piping of markets, from funds and government bonds to settlement and collateral, while DeFi is becoming increasingly legible to traditional asset managers, corporate treasuries and family offices that had been waiting for regulatory clarity and operational maturity. With the GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in Europe, regulatory gray areas are becoming black and white, leaving less and less room for violations.
Purists will argue that the real goal was to create a parallel economic reality and that crypto has simply been bolted onto the existing system. Yet the movement has introduced primitives that have changed TradFi forever:
- Programmable value shifted trust from institutions to code.
- Instant settlement ended the era of multi-day clearing and ushered money into a 24/7 world.
- Composability transformed siled financial products into interoperable building blocks, breaking down walled gardens and restoring user choice.
- Self-custody gave individuals direct, sovereign control over their assets for the first time.
- Smart contracts replaced intermediaries with transparent, automated rules of engagement.
- New asset classes expanded the investable universe and lowered barriers to markets and instruments.
- Stablecoins democratized cross-border payments, making them fast, cheap and global.
- DeFi proved that lending, trading, derivatives and even insurance can work entirely without traditional gatekeepers.
Crypto may not have replaced the traditional financial system, but it has fundamentally rewritten its underlying logic, making its impact irrefutable and immutable. By challenging long-standing monopolies and forcing incumbents to innovate-or-die, it has effectively forced the establishment’s hand. Institutions can adopt, regulate, and package these primitives, but they cannot invent them.
Will crypto even stay weird? History says that most things will be normalized. Crypto can express rebellion, but it cannot be riot anymore.
That leaves the changemakers looking for the next frontier. You can see this shift in the symbols around which crypto once rallied. The laser eyes meme was born as a provocation, a rallying cry for the belief that Bitcoin would hit $100,000 – which at the time was obscene in its optimism. Now the number has come and gone, and the meme itself has been worn by presidents, shedding its underground edge.
Crypto is no longer shocking to anyone. It has evolved from counterculture to canon, proving that rebellion always migrates to the newest, least understood medium.
