Siddharth Ramakrishnan

Writing

Crypto is Dead

December 30, 2025

I've been seeing the same thing everyone else has been seeing: a steady drip of "serious" crypto adoption from large companies:

This is what crypto people were waiting for in 2019: mainstream adoption.

And yet… as someone who became interested in crypto in 2015 and worked in the industry from 2019–2023, I'm maybe more pessimistic than I should be.

Because it's easy to forget what this was supposed to look like.

There was a genuine belief in the early 2010s that the internet would fundamentally change how the world worked economically and politically. Not just change how we communicate, but change the basic rules: who can transact with whom, who controls money, what states can and can't do. "Let's be honest. There's basically no chance the nation state survives the internet" wasn't a fringe take in 2017.

The analogy people reached for was the printing press. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change showed how movable made books cheaper and in the process it broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on truth, enabled the Reformation, and eventually dissolved the feudal order. The internet was supposed to do the same thing to nation-states that the printing press did to the Church.

And Bitcoin was the purest expression of that thesis.

Imagine you're a journalist covering government corruption. Getting paid might be tricky, unless you’re using bitcoin. No bank account to freeze. No PayPal to comply with a subpoena. Just a string of characters that moves value peer-to-peer, like sending an email. Your source sends you documents through an encrypted channel. You pay your hosting fees with Bitcoin. The state can't see you, can't stop you, can't cut you off any financial rails.

That was the dream. Not "payments that settle 2% faster," but a parallel economy where states and banks weren't chokepoints.

And Satoshi literally embedded this into Bitcoin's DNA. The genesis block—the very first block of Bitcoin ever mined—contains a headline from The Times: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." That wasn't a random timestamp. It was a mission statement. A declaration that this new system was being born precisely because the old one—the one where central banks bail out failing institutions while regular people's savings evaporate—was fundamentally broken.

So when people say "crypto adoption is here," I agree but think about what we've really achieved over the last 16 years since that genesis block.

The way I see it, crypto is currently going down one of 3 paths.

1) Crypto is boring

This is the current consensus take. Crypto is no longer the crazy stuff that people imagined would happen in 2020.

We won't replace the stock market with DeFi. We won't have decentralized infrastructure power the whole internet. We won't have personal identity tied to private keys and crypto rails.

We'll use crypto as programmable money (money being USD). It'll let us do effectively the same things we currently do but faster and cheaper.

That's great! But it's not the cypherpunk dream.

And this is the lane the "serious" companies keep validating:

So if you define success as "crypto becomes embedded in the global financial stack," then boring crypto is still very much a success.

2) Crypto is subversive

Another way of looking at it: the current wave of crypto adoption is a necessary step to unlocking the next stages of adoption which are more in line with what crypto native folks imagined.

Here's how it could unfold:

This is the "slow burn" adoption of the cypherpunk dream: not an overnight overthrow, but a compounding migration. Infrastructure first, ideology later.

Stablecoins are the wedge because they're the first thing crypto built that clearly outcompetes legacy rails for some real-world flows. Once stablecoins are default money-movement objects, everything around them becomes a surface area for bigger changes. "Decentralization" doesn't have to win arguments; it can win by being the substrate.

This is why people like Paradigm use metaphors like "The Casino on Mars": skeptics see speculation; believers see a bootstrapping mechanism for building a new world.

3) Crypto failed

But there's a third possibility we have to consider.

The Bitcoin genesis block has the inscription about bailouts. The cypherpunk and crypto-anarchist lineage was explicitly about shifting power away from centralized institutions.

But now, 15+ years after Bitcoin was created, we may have to admit that this iteration of that revolution just didn't happen.

We didn't overthrow fiat currencies. We didn't create a new property system that transcends all nations. We didn't make censorship-resistant finance a normal default for ordinary people. So far we created a digital casino + some valuable programmable money for existing institutions.

And this is where my pessimism comes from: it's not that crypto is "dead." It's that crypto might be thriving in a way that quietly abandons what it said it was for.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Stablecoins are overwhelmingly dollar-denominated. The regulatory momentum is around "payment stablecoins," not stateless money. The companies shipping the hardest are shipping "dollars that move like software," not "a new sovereign monetary order."

That's not nothing. In fact, it is massive. But it reframes what "adoption" means.

It means crypto can be mainstream without being cypherpunk, and crypto can be huge without being revolutionary in the way 2013–2017 imagined.

So depending on why you came to crypto, the same facts tell very different stories: