Crypto’s Rock ’n’ Roll Era Is Over

Every revolution eventually becomes the establishment. What began as crypto’s peer-to-peer challenge to the global financial order is rapidly being absorbed into the traditional fold, trading its anti-elite soul for the legitimacy of spot ETFs, institutional custody and the same banking frameworks it was built to bypass.

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 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 original liberatory goals are diluted or abandoned, what began as revolution solidifies into orthodoxy. To quote the 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 were starting out again, he probably wouldn’t have gone into music; he would have worked on the internet instead. The internet, he argued, felt subversive, chaotic and nihilistic. It felt like a force for revolution. It made you feel like you could effect change. Rock ’n’ roll, by contrast, had lost its power. Once a disruptor that shocked people with its sounds, styles, and symbols, it eventually became accepted by the mainstream. He described rock ’n’ roll as a “currency” that was certainly still a conveyer of information, but no longer a conveyer of rebellion.

Bowie’s reflections remind me of how I felt when I got into crypto in 2016, the year he died. At the time, crypto had the internet’s old insurgent energy, while the internet itself (with the FAANG giants of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google in control) had become the establishment, trading its anarchic and 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 widely caricatured as dead-dodgy delinquents surfacing from the depths of the dark web. Any association with crypto felt like a form of dissent in itself.

Inspired by the cypherpunks that came before us, we advocated for a decentralized internet that protected individual privacy from government and corporate surveillance; for sovereign money that couldn’t be exploited by the same actors that 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 by the traditional financial system, and we truly believed that power could be re-architected at the protocol layer. It really felt like we could effect change.

I’ve mourned those early days, reminiscing over shonky meetups we hosted over cold pizza and warm beer, running evangelical workshops on self-custody, the place ablaze with laser eyes. These days, the pride we once took in the responsibility of being your own bank has been paved over 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 fringe to the boardrooms inside banks and government buildings, held by doxxed-by-default guys with job titles like Digital Asset Risk Manager and Blockchain Policy Advisor. But this was always the goal, wasn’t it?

The goal of mass adoption was as much a growth metric as it was moral validation for our crazy mission. Mass adoption would prove us right. Although in 2016, we thought “mass adoption” would be our moms using the hot wallets on their phones to buy their daily lattes at their local cafés. In 2026, it’s TP ICAP — the wholesale broker that processes commodities trades to the tune of $200 trillion annually for banks and hedge funds — deciding to route even 1% of that volume through crypto markets. Flows at that scale will dwarf any vision of retail self-sovereignty or utility.

Just as rock ‘n’ roll was eventually smoothed over into a multi-billion-dollar corporate industry, and a once-decentralized internet became a landscape dominated by a handful of platforms, crypto’s mass adoption dream is coming true, too. As the title of a16z’s annual State of Crypto report put it, 2025 was the year crypto went mainstream. We succeeded in creating 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, crypto had gone from hosting its own self-organized, semi-illegitimate sideline events just a few years ago to taking center stage in the main arena. Heads of state openly compete to claim crypto as a national priority, while the CEOs of the world’s largest banks now speak about it as an existential threat.

The JP Morgans, Blackrocks and Morgan Stanleys of the world are all humming the same tune, touting crypto—particularly Bitcoin—as a legitimate, regulated asset class with the same institutional seriousness as gold and equities. Publicly-traded companies are stockpiling crypto assets on their balance sheets.

Stablecoins are doing more in annual transaction volume than the major payment networks. Tokenized real-world assets are moving from crypto-native experiments into the core plumbing 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 had been waiting for regulatory clarity and operational maturity. With the GENIUS Act in the U.S. and MiCA in Europe, regulatory gray areas are turning 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 crypto has merely been bolted onto the existing system. Even so, the movement has introduced primitives that have altered TradFi forever:

• Programmable value shifted trust from institutions into code.
• Instant settlement ended the era of multi-day clearing, dragging money into a 24/7 world.
• Composability turned siloed 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 replaced intermediaries with transparent, automated rules of engagement.
• New asset classes expanded the investable universe, lowering barriers to markets and instruments.
• Stablecoins democratized cross-border payments, making them fast, cheap and global.
• DeFi proved 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-held monopolies and forcing incumbents to innovate-or-die, it has effectively forced the establishment’s hand. Institutions can adopt, regulate and wrap these primitives, but they cannot uninvent them.

Will crypto stay weird at all? History says most of it will be normalized. Crypto can express rebellion, but it can’t be rebellion anymore.

That leaves the changemakers searching for the next frontier. You can see this shift in the symbols that crypto once rallied around. The laser-eyes meme was born as a provocation, a rallying cry for the belief that Bitcoin would hit $100,000 — which, at the time, was obscene in its optimism. Now the number has come and gone, and the meme itself has been worn by presidents, stripping away its underground edge. 

Crypto isn’t shocking to anyone anymore. It’s evolved from counterculture to canon, proving rebellion always migrates to the newest, least understood medium.