Every revolution ends up becoming an establishment. What began as a peer-to-peer challenge to the global financial order was quickly being co-opted by traditional industries, trading its anti-elite soul for the legitimacy of spot ETFs, institutional custody and the same banking frameworks it was designed to circumvent.
This is a familiar arc. Throughout history, every revolution has begun with the promise of disrupting old power structures and disrupting the status quo. Once power is seized, the priority shifts to stabilization and maintenance, transforming ideals into institutions. The movement has inevitably reached the limits of insurgency, and to survive it must seek what it once shunned: venture capital, institutional trust, and regulatory tolerance. This requires compliance, which triggers a process of assimilation. What the revolution began solidifies into orthodoxy as the original emancipatory goals are diluted or abandoned. To quote American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, “The most radical revolutionaries will become conservatives the day after the revolution.”
In a 1999 interview, the late great David Bowie described the process, saying that if he had started over, he probably wouldn’t have gone into music; he would have worked on the Internet. He believes that the Internet feels subversive, chaotic and nihilistic. It felt like a revolutionary force. It makes you feel like you can effect change. By comparison, rock music has lost its power. It was once a disruptor that shocked people with its sound, style and symbols, but was eventually embraced by the mainstream. He described rock music as a “currency” that was certainly still a conveyor of information, but no longer a conveyor of rebellion.
Bowie’s reflection reminded me of how I felt when I entered the cryptocurrency industry in 2016, the year of his death. At the time, cryptocurrencies had the age-old insurgent energy of the internet, while the internet itself (controlled by FAANG giants like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) had gone mainstream, exchanging its anarchic and distributed beginnings for a centralized corporate order.
For us in the cryptocurrency industry, it was an era of idealism and lax rules that attracted outsiders and activists, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who were widely caricatured as wily criminals emerging from the depths of the dark web. Any association with cryptocurrencies feels like an objection in itself.
Inspired by the cypherpunks who came before us, we advocate for a decentralized internet where personal privacy is protected from government and corporate surveillance; where sovereign funds cannot be exploited by the same actors who destroyed the system in 2008; and a digital future where information and transactions cannot be stopped. We stand up for those who have long been excluded from the traditional financial system and believe that power can be re-architected at the protocol level. It really felt like we could effect change.
I mourn the early days, recalling the humble gatherings we held, eating cold pizza and warm beer, giving evangelical seminars on self-monitoring, the place lit with laser lights. Today, we once prided ourselves on being your own bank, but the convenience of ETFs has paved the way. Now, you don’t need to know what a mnemonic phrase is to get “exposure.” The conversation has moved from the fringes to boardrooms in banks and government buildings, moderated by people who have been doxxed by default, and whose job titles include Digital Asset Risk Manager and Blockchain Policy Advisor. But that’s always the goal, isn’t it?
The goal of mass adoption is both a growth metric and a moral validation of our insane mission. Mass adoption will prove us right. Although in 2016, we thought “mass adoption” would be us moms using hot wallets on their phones to buy their daily latte at the local coffee shop. By 2026, TP ICAP, a wholesale broker that handles up to $200 trillion in commodities trades for banks and hedge funds annually, has decided to route 1% of its trading volume through the cryptocurrency market. Traffic on this scale would dwarf any vision of retail autonomy or utility.
Just as rock music was finally incorporated into a multi-billion dollar corporate industry and the once fragmented internet became a landscape dominated by a handful of platforms, the dream of mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is coming true. As the title of a16z’s annual State of Cryptocurrency Report states, 2025 is the year cryptocurrencies become mainstream. We succeeded in creating something worth protecting, and conservation is inherently conservative. We did it. Cryptocurrency is the new order.
What was unthinkable in 2016 is now a reality. At this year’s Davos, cryptocurrencies have gone from hosting self-organized, semi-illegal side events a few years ago to taking center stage on the main stage. Heads of state are openly competing to make cryptocurrencies a national priority, while the CEOs of the world’s largest banks now see it as an existential threat.
The JPMorgans, BlackRocks and Morgan Stanleys of the world are united in promoting cryptocurrencies – and Bitcoin in particular – as a legitimate, regulated asset class with the same institutional seriousness as gold and stocks. Publicly traded companies are stockpiling crypto assets on their balance sheets.
Stablecoins have more annual transaction volume than major payment networks. Tokenized real-world assets are moving from crypto-native experiments to the core conduits of markets, from funds and treasury bills to settlement and collateral, while DeFi is becoming increasingly clear 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 the “MiCA” in Europe, regulatory gray areas are becoming black and white, and the space for violations is getting smaller and smaller.
Purists will argue that the real goal is to create a parallel economic reality, and that cryptocurrencies are simply being bolted onto existing systems. Even so, the movement introduced primitives that changed TradFi forever:
- Programmable value shifts trust from institutions to code.
- Instant settlement ends the era of multi-day settlement, dragging funds into a 24/7 world.
- Composability turns siled financial products into interoperable building blocks, breaking down walled gardens and restoring user choice.
- For the first time, self-custody gives individuals direct, sovereign control over their assets.
- Smart contracts replace intermediaries with transparent, automated rules of engagement.
- New asset classes expand the scope of investability and lower barriers to markets and instruments.
- Stablecoins democratize cross-border payments, making them fast, cheap, and global.
- DeFi proves that lending, trading, derivatives and even insurance can operate entirely without traditional gatekeepers.
Cryptocurrency 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 actually forces the powerful to take action. Agencies can adopt, regulate, and package these primitives, but they cannot uninvent them.
Will cryptocurrencies always be weird? History suggests that much of this will normalize. Cryptocurrencies can Express Rebellious, but can’t yes Rebellious.
This leaves changemakers looking for the next frontier. You can see this shift in the cryptocurrency’s once rising sign. The laser eye meme was born as a provocation and a rallying cry for the belief that Bitcoin would reach $100,000—an optimism that, at the time, was repulsive. Now, the number has come and gone, and the meme itself has been worn by presidents, peeling away its underground edge.
Cryptocurrencies no longer shock anyone. Its evolution from counterculture to classic proves that rebellion always migrates to the newest, least understood medium.