Every revolution eventually becomes the establishment. What began as a cryptocurrency peer-to-peer challenge to the global financial order is quickly being absorbed into the traditional fold, trading its anti-elite soul for the legitimacy of spot ETFs, institutional custody, and the very banking frameworks it was created to circumvent.
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 taken, the priority becomes stability and preservation, transforming ideals into systems. Inevitably, the movement reaches the limits of insurgency, and to survive, it must court what it once rejected: venture capital, institutional trust, and regulatory tolerance. This requires conformity, which triggers a process of assimilation. As the original liberatory goals are diluted or abandoned, what began as a revolution solidifies into orthodoxy. To quote 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 had started over, he probably wouldn’t have gone into music; Instead, I would have worked on the Internet. The Internet, he argued, felt subversive, chaotic and nihilistic. He felt like a force for revolution. It made you feel like you could effect a change. Rock ‘n’ roll, on the other hand, had lost its power. He was once a disruptor who surprised people with his sounds, styles and symbols, but 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 the cryptocurrency world in 2016, the year he died. At the time, cryptocurrencies had the old insurgent energy of the Internet, while the Internet itself (with the FAANG giants of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google in control) had become the establishment, exchanging its anarchic, distributed beginnings for a centralized corporate order.
For us in crypto, it was a time of idealism and lax rules, attracting outsiders and activists, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who were widely caricatured as dodgy criminals emerging from the depths of the dark web. Any association with cryptocurrencies felt like a form of dissent in itself.
Inspired by the cypherpunks before us, we advocated for a decentralized Internet that protected individual privacy from government and corporate surveillance; for sovereign money that cannot be exploited by the same actors who devastated the system in 2008; and for a digital future where information and transactions cannot stop. We stood up for those who had long been excluded by the traditional financial system and truly believed that power could be restructured at the protocol layer. I really felt like we could make a change.
I’ve cried those first few days, remembering the silly gatherings we held with cold pizza and hot beer, teaching evangelical workshops on self-custody, the place burning with laser eyes. Today, the pride we once took in the responsibility of being your own bank has been surpassed by the convenience of the ETF. Now, you can get “exposure” without having to learn what a seed phrase is. The conversation has moved from the periphery to the boardrooms inside banks and government buildings, in the hands of default-doxed 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 both a growth metric and a moral validation of our crazy mission. Mass adoption would prove us right. Although in 2016 we thought “mass adoption” would be our moms using their phones’ hot wallets to buy their daily lattes at their local cafes. In 2026, TP ICAP, the wholesale broker that processes commodity transactions to the tune of $200 trillion annually for banks and hedge funds, decides to channel even 1% of that volume through cryptocurrency markets. Flows on that scale will eclipse any vision of self-sovereignty or retail utility.
Just as rock ‘n’ roll eventually became a multibillion-dollar corporate industry, and a once-decentralized Internet became a landscape dominated by a handful of platforms, the dream of mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is also becoming a reality. As the title of a16z’s annual State of Cryptocurrency report puts it, 2025 was the year cryptocurrencies went mainstream. We managed to create something worth protecting, and protection is inherently conservative. We did it. Cryptocurrencies are the new order.
What was unthinkable in 2016 is now a reality. At Davos this year, cryptocurrencies had gone from hosting their own semi-illegitimate, self-organized side events just a few years ago to taking center stage on the main stage. Heads of state are openly competing to claim cryptocurrencies as a national priority, while CEOs of the world’s largest banks now talk about them as an existential threat.
The JP Morgans, Blackrocks and Morgan Stanleys of the world are humming the same tune, promoting cryptocurrencies (particularly Bitcoin) as a legitimate and regulated asset class with the same institutional seriousness as gold and stocks. Publicly traded companies are accumulating crypto assets on their balance sheets.
Stablecoins are generating more annual transaction volume than major payment networks. Real-world tokenized assets are moving from crypto-native experiments to the core of markets, from funds and treasuries to settlement and collateral, while DeFi is becoming increasingly legible to traditional asset managers, corporate treasuries and family offices that have been waiting for regulatory clarity and operational maturity. With the GENIUS Act in the United States and MiCA in Europe, regulatory gray areas are becoming black and white, leaving less and less room for transgression.
Purists will argue that the real goal was to create a parallel economic reality and that cryptocurrencies have simply been incorporated into the existing system. Still, the movement has introduced primitives that have altered TradFi forever:
- The programmable value transferred the trust of institutions to the code.
- Instant settlement ended the era of multi-day clearing, dragging money into a 24/7 world.
- Composability turned isolated financial products into interoperable building blocks, breaking down walled gardens and restoring user choice.
- Self-custody gave individuals for the first time direct, sovereign control over their assets.
- Smart contracts replaced intermediaries with transparent and automated rules of engagement.
- New asset classes expanded the investment universe, reducing barriers to markets and instruments.
- Stablecoins democratized cross-border payments, making them fast, cheap and global.
- DeFi demonstrated that lending, trading, derivatives, and even insurance can operate completely without traditional gatekeepers.
Cryptocurrencies may not have replaced the traditional financial system, but they have fundamentally rewritten its underlying logic, making their impact irrefutable and immutable. By challenging long-standing monopolies and forcing incumbents to innovate or die, it has effectively forced the hand of the establishment. Institutions can adopt, regulate, and envelope these primitives, but they cannot uninvent them.
Will cryptocurrencies remain rare? History says that most of it will become normal. Crypto can express rebellion, but can’t be rebellion never again.
That leaves change agents looking for the next frontier. You can see this change in the symbols around which cryptocurrencies once rallied. The laser eyes meme was born as a provocation, a rallying cry for the belief that Bitcoin would reach $100,000, which, at the time, was obscene in its optimism. Now the number has come and gone, and the meme itself has been used by presidents, stripping it of its clandestine nature.
Cryptocurrencies no longer surprise anyone. It has evolved from counterculture to canon, proving that rebellion always migrates to the newer, less understood medium.
