Crypto

Crypto is, at heart, a secession movement. A group of people looked at banks and decided they didn't like them, looked at regulators and decided they didn't like them either, and concluded: we'll build our own financial system, with our own rules, free of the bureaucrats. The movement has been around long enough that we can stop arguing about the premise and start looking at what actually got built.

What got built is a worse version of the thing the movement claimed to be escaping.

What crypto actually does well

Set the maximalism aside. There are three things the technology genuinely does better than the incumbents, and any honest critique has to start there.

First, digital dollarisation in countries whose currencies are collapsing. In Venezuela, nearly half of all domestic transfers under $10,000 are now in stablecoins as annual inflation runs near 229%. In Argentina, over 60% of crypto transactions are in USD stablecoins. In Turkey, stablecoin purchases run to 4.3% of GDP — the highest ratio in the world. In Nigeria, roughly 26 million people hold stablecoins. These users aren't buying Bored Apes. They're keeping their savings in dollars because the local currency won't hold value until Friday, and their domestic banks can't or won't give them a dollar account.

Second, remittances at a fraction of the legacy cost. World Bank data puts the average global remittance fee above 6%; stablecoin rails deliver 1–3%, and on low-cost chains closer to a penny per transaction. Western Union and MoneyGram are themselves piloting stablecoin settlement — the strongest possible signal that this isn't vapor.

Third, exit capital for people the banking system turns off. Ukraine raised more than $212 million in crypto donations in the months after Russia's invasion, money that moved in hours through rails that conventional finance would have taken weeks to open. Russian opposition networks, journalists in sanctioned economies, activists in authoritarian states — a long, unglamorous record of self-custody being the only rail that stays open when the banks get leaned on. The same rails serve donors on the other side of that war too. That is a feature of neutrality, not a refutation of it.

The grassroots map of actual crypto use — Chainalysis' top three adoption countries in 2024 were India, Nigeria, and Indonesia — looks nothing like the picture you get from a crypto conference. The technology has real users who need it.

So why does the rest of this essay exist?

Because none of the above is what the industry is structured around, profits from, or lobbies for.

The 500 years they threw out

Modern banking is the residue of roughly five centuries of expensive, bloody lessons — deposit insurance, capital requirements, unfair-terms law, bankruptcy courts, consumer arbitration, securities registration. Not all of it works. Some of it is genuinely bad. But a lot of it exists because, when left unsupervised, financial intermediaries do extremely predictable things to their customers.

Poland's frankowicze — roughly 700,000 households that took out Swiss-franc-denominated mortgages in the 2000s and got shredded when the franc unpegged in 2015 — are the textbook case. Polish courts have ruled for the consumer in around 97% of verdicts, and the Court of Justice of the EU has repeatedly sided with borrowers, establishing that abusive contract clauses are abusive even when the customer signed them. That's what "bad regulation" looks like in practice: a court system an ordinary person can actually use to claw money back from a bank that sold them a grenade with a smiley face on it.

Crypto threw that entire apparatus in the bin and replaced it with Terms of Service written in Miami.

Who actually benefits

The libertarian framing — escape the banks, escape the state — wears badly when you look at the names on the balance sheet.

The new central bankers are exchange CEOs. Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations in November 2023. Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines; CZ served four months, was pardoned by Trump in October 2025, and remains one of the wealthiest people in the industry. Brian Armstrong's Coinbase and affiliated individuals put more than $37 million into a single US election cycle.

The new reserve bank is a company nobody independently audits. Tether booked $13 billion in profit in 2024 and holds roughly $113 billion in US Treasuries, making it the seventh-largest holder of US government debt on the planet, above Canada and Germany. The alternative to fiat is, structurally, financing the fiat issuer. If the US Treasury sneezes, the crypto economy breaks a rib.

The new oligarchs are more concentrated than the old ones. Roughly 2,000 addresses hold more than a third of all Bitcoin; about 2% of addresses control 95% of supply; and nearly half of whale-owned BTC now sits inside institutional custody — ETFs, corporate treasuries, regulated custodians. Fiat money is distributed more evenly than Bitcoin.

And the largest state-level beneficiaries are exactly the states you'd expect. Sanctioned entities received $104 billion in crypto in 2025 — an almost eightfold jump — led by Russia, North Korea, and Iran-linked networks. Russia's ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin alone processed roughly $93 billion in its first year before the US and EU sanctioned it. Eastern Europe accounts for about 11% of all on-chain value received globally, with Russia the lead. "Independent money" turns out to be extremely useful if your problem is that the existing money system refuses to help you fund a war.

The movement bought a government

The clearest sign that the anti-state framing was always rhetorical is what the industry did when regulators leaned in. It didn't go build a separate economy in international waters. It walked into Washington and bought one.

The crypto super-PAC Fairshake raised $260 million in the 2024 cycle and posted a 91% win rate — 53 of 58 races for its endorsed candidates. Ninety-four percent of the money came from four entities: Ripple, a16z, Coinbase, and Jump Crypto. Primary targets included Katie Porter and Jamaal Bowman — two of the most crypto-sceptic Democrats in Congress. Both lost.

The payoff arrived quickly. The current administration has a dedicated White House crypto czar, an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset Stockpile, and a president whose family owns 60% of World Liberty Financial, runs its own stablecoin, and launched a memecoin whose initial supply was 80% held by a Trump-owned entity.

The libertarian promise was exit. What got delivered was capture. The people who told you to distrust central banks built themselves a worse central bank, filled it with US Treasury bonds, and then spent a quarter-billion dollars to make sure the government they claimed you didn't need would keep protecting it.

This is not a uniquely American story. In Poland, the 2025 presidential campaign produced Sławomir Mentzen — a Confederation-party candidate who personally holds 33.7 BTC and campaigned on turning the country into "a cryptocurrency haven," complete with a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve modelled on Trump's. President Nawrocki has since vetoed the MiCA implementation bill twice, citing threats to the "freedoms of Poles." Prime Minister Tusk alleges that Zondacrypto, one of the firms behind the anti-regulation push, was bankrolled by Russia-linked money and routing funds to Polish right-wing groups. The script is the same script, translated: where there are enough crypto voters to court (about 18% of Poles already hold some) and enough industry money to spend, national politics responds.

The irony

The defining comedy of crypto is that every attempt to escape an institution leads straight into a worse version of it. You didn't like banks with FDIC insurance, so you put your money on an exchange with no insurance and no auditor. You didn't like the Fed, so you now denominate your savings in a stablecoin backed by Treasury bonds the Fed's counterparty issues. You didn't like regulators, so you bought the regulators.

Between 2022 and 2024, roughly $46.5 billion in customer value was trapped inside the bankruptcies of FTX, Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi, and Genesis. Sam Bankman-Fried got 25 years and an $11 billion forfeiture order. A million Celsius depositors discovered that "earn 18% on your crypto" is not a financial product but a narrative. Had any of these firms been supervised banks, their customers would have had deposit insurance, a clear creditor waterfall, and a regulator who had been yelling about the balance sheet eighteen months earlier.

Where I land

The last defence of crypto is epistemic. Any attempt to point out that the industry has shipped a worse version of the thing it promised to replace is answered with you don't understand the technology. Blockchain. Bitcoin. Merkle trees. You just don't get it.

I get it. The technology is fine. The chain does what the whitepaper says. That was never in question.

So where does this leave someone writing from Poland in 2026? In the accept bucket. Crypto isn't going away. It's going to be legitimised, slowly, clause by clause, because the politicians who might stop it need the votes of the 18% of Poles who already hold some, and the money of the firms that own them. The trajectory isn't abolition. It's drift into respectability — in Warsaw and Washington both.

Personally, I stay away. I tell the people I care about to stay away. The structural case against the industry — concentration, capture, rent-seeking — doesn't require me to disbelieve the technology; it requires me to notice who profits from it.

I am reconciled with one thing, though. Crypto replaces weak currencies. The złoty isn't weak today. Nothing guarantees it won't be tomorrow. Argentina didn't think it was Argentina in 1975 either. If the day comes when I need to hold my savings in something that doesn't melt, the rails I just spent this essay critiquing will be there — run by the people I just spent this essay critiquing, extracting what they can.

The useful version of crypto is real. It's also not what the industry is organised around. Whether anything gets built on those rails that actually serves the people who need them, or whether the entire structure keeps routing value to the four companies that funded Fairshake and the Russian money bankrolling the veto in Warsaw — that is the only question left worth arguing about.