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 mainstream fold, trading its anti-elite soul for the legitimacy of spot ETFs, institutional custody, and the same banking frameworks it was built for.
It’s a familiar arc. Throughout history, every revolution began with the promise of breaking down 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 insurgency and, to survive, it must court what it once shunned: venture capital, institutional trust and regulatory tolerance. This requires conformity, triggering a process of assimilation. As the initial 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 David Bowie described this process, saying that if he had started over, he probably would not have pursued music; he would have rather worked on the Internet. According to him, the Internet seems subversive, chaotic and nihilistic. It was like a revolutionary force. It made you feel like you could make a change. Rock’n’roll, on the other hand, had lost its power. Once a disruptor who shocked people with his sounds, styles and symbols, he was finally accepted by the general public. He describes rock’n’roll as a “currency” which, certainly, always carries information, but no longer carries rebellion.
Bowie’s thoughts remind me of how I felt when I got into crypto in 2016, the year he died. At the time, crypto had the old insurrectionary energy of the Internet, while the Internet itself (with the FAANG giants of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google at the helm) had become the establishment, trading its anarchic, distributed beginnings for a centralized corporate order.
For us in crypto, it was a time of idealism and loose rules, attracting outsiders and activists, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, who were largely caricatured as dubious, deadly delinquents rising from the depths of the dark web. Any association with crypto seemed like a form of dissent in itself.
Inspired by the cypherpunks who came before us, we advocated for a decentralized Internet that protects individual privacy from government and corporate surveillance; for sovereign money that could not be exploited by the same actors who razed 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 sincerely believed that power could be reorganized at the protocol level. We really felt like we could make a change.
I cried those first days, remembering the lousy get-togethers we had over cold pizza and hot beer, holding evangelical workshops on self-care, the place ablaze with laser eyes. These days, the pride we once had in the responsibility of being your own bank has been offset 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 margins to the boardrooms of banks and government buildings, manned by doxxed-by-default types with job titles like Digital Asset Risk Manager And Blockchain Policy Advisor. But that was always the goal, wasn’t it?
The goal of mass adoption was as much a measure of growth as it was a moral validation of our crazy mission. Mass adoption would prove us right. Although in 2016 we thought “mass adoption” would see our mothers using their phone’s hot wallets to buy their daily lattes at their local cafes. In 2026, it’s TP ICAP – the wholesale broker that processes $200 trillion in commodities trades annually for banks and hedge funds – that decides to route even 1% of that volume through crypto markets. Flows on this scale will eclipse any vision of retail autonomy or utility.
Just as rock ‘n’ roll eventually evolved into a multi-billion dollar business industry and a once decentralized internet became a landscape dominated by a handful of platforms, the dream of mass crypto adoption is also becoming a reality. As the title of a16z’s annual State of Crypto report says, 2025 was the year crypto went mainstream. We’ve managed to create 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, just a few years ago, crypto had gone from hosting its own self-organized, semi-illegitimate side events to taking center stage in the main arena. Heads of state are openly vying to make crypto a national priority, while CEOs of the world’s biggest banks now talk about it as an existential threat.
The JP Morgans, Blackrocks and Morgan Stanleys of the world are all humming the same tune, touting cryptocurrencies – particularly Bitcoin – as a legitimate asset class regulated with the same institutional seriousness as gold and stocks. Publicly traded companies store crypto assets on their balance sheets.
Stablecoins generate higher annual transaction volume than major payment networks. Real-world tokenized assets are moving from crypto-native experiences to core markets, funds and treasuries to settlement and collateral, while DeFi becomes increasingly readable to traditional asset managers, corporate treasuries and family offices who 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 say that the real goal was to create a parallel economic reality and that crypto was simply integrated into the existing system. Despite this, the movement introduced primitives that changed TradFi forever:
- Programmable value has shifted trust from institutions to code.
- Instant settlement ended the era of multi-day clearing, bringing 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 have replaced intermediaries with transparent and automated rules of engagement.
- New asset classes have expanded the investment universe, lowering barriers to markets and instruments.
- Stablecoins have democratized cross-border payments, making them fast, cheap and global.
- DeFi has proven that lending, trading, derivatives, and even insurance can operate 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, he has effectively forced the hand of the establishment. Institutions can adopt, regulate, and envelop these primitives, but they cannot uninvent them.
Will crypto remain weird at all? History says most of it will be normalized. Crypto can express rebellion, but it can’t be no more rebellion.
This leaves changemakers searching for the next frontier. You can see this change in the symbols that crypto once rallied around. The laser eye meme originated as a provocation, a rallying cry for the belief that Bitcoin would reach $100,000 – which, at the time, was obscene in its optimism. Today, this number has disappeared, and the meme itself has been carried by presidents, thus eliminating its underground side.
Crypto no longer shocks anyone. It evolved from counterculture to canon, proving that rebellion always migrates to the newest, least understood medium.
