Leah Callon-Butler recently wrote that the rock and roll era of cryptocurrencies is over, and she is largely right about the arc. But I lived inside the music industry when rock and roll really died, and there’s more to the story.
I was a product leader at Universal Music during the torrent era. I sat in the rooms where executives decided to sue grandmas instead of building Spotify. I saw them spend more on lawyers than on artists. And they finally fired me for pointing out that we had already lost.
So when someone uses rock and roll as a metaphor for what’s happening with digital assets, I know what the metaphor really contains.
This is what the end of the rock and roll era really looked like from the inside. The loudest, most exciting part of the culture died, while the boring underlying infrastructure quietly became what mattered. Rock stars disappeared. Streaming executives took over. And the audience grew even as the culture became less interesting.
Callon-Butler frames this as a kind of mourning. The cypherpunk dream was diluted by ETFs and institutional custody. The laser eyes meme that presidents use. And yes, I understand the pain. I felt it watching Universal Music move from featured artists to optimizing playlists.
But this is where the parallel in the music industry really comes in handy, and no one talks about this part.
The labels survived. They ended streaming and called it innovation. They went from fighting Napster to owning shares in Spotify. The same executives who wanted to destroy file sharing ended up profiting from the file sharing infrastructure that was forced into existence. The establishment absorbed the revolution and renamed it.
That is what is happening now with digital assets. JP Morgan is doing what Universal did with streaming. They are wrapping up what they fought against and calling it a product. And just like with music, the audience will increase, the infrastructure will improve, and the culture will become less interesting. That part Callon-Butler nails.
But what is lost is what happened next in the music. Something that the establishment could not absorb.
While Universal was busy becoming a streaming company, ten thousand teenagers with blogs and bedroom studios were building something that record labels couldn’t build. The Swedish death metal guy. Brazilian dance funk producer. The techno archaeologist of Detroit. They didn’t know about each other. They didn’t even know Universal mattered. They just wanted to document what they loved.
And collectively, without any coordination, they created something that institutions could not replicate: infinite specificity. Every possible taste has its own ecosystem. Each microgenre has its own distribution channel. The monoculture dissolved into something so granular that no corporate structure could put it back together.
The rock and roll era is obviously over. The question is what is being built in the quiet spaces where institutions are not looking.
Stablecoins are moving value across borders for people who have never heard of DeFi. Tokenized assets are creating markets in places where traditional finance never bothered to appear. Self-custody tools are quietly improving while everyone is distracted by ETF inflows. The boring infrastructure that makes the next wave possible.
I grew up in Argentina. I saw a government freeze bank accounts overnight and tell people that their dollars were now worth a third of what they were worth yesterday. That experience teaches you something about money that stays with you forever. And it teaches you that the people who build the pipelines during the quiet periods are the ones who matter when things get loud again.
Callon-Butler asks if cryptocurrencies will remain rare. I would rephrase the question. the music industry remained strange. It just stopped being strange in the places where executives looked. Weirdness migrated to the edges, to bedroom producers, to niche communities, and to distribution channels that didn’t need permission.
The end of the rock and roll era of cryptocurrencies is the most optimistic thing that can happen to the industry. It means that adults appeared and adults bring capital that does not leave when the vibrations change. Cryptocurrencies need boring institutional plumbing. And that is exactly what is being built now.
But somewhere, some kid in Lagos, Buenos Aires or Beirut is building something on these rails that no one in a boardroom has imagined yet. They don’t even know the establishment exists. They just need the infrastructure to function.
That’s the beginning of the interesting part.
