Author: Connor Dempsey
Compiled by Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
The crypto revolution has indeed happened—just not at all as originally expected.
When I first entered the space in 2017, the industry consensus was that this technology would change everything.
Government-issued fiat currency will be replaced by decentralized money. Blockchain will eliminate rent-seeking intermediaries between every transaction. Power will shift from corporations to users.
These hardly happened at all. But other things did.
So far, I’ve spent eight years at four crypto companies: @circle, @MessariCrypto, @coinbase, and @crossmint.
I watched this asset class grow from less than $1 billion to over $4 trillion, going through multiple rounds of speculative bubbles and a crisis that nearly triggered a systemic collapse. I found that what the industry actually built is far more interesting than what was predicted back then.
Before starting my fifth job, I want to document these eight years and share my thoughts on where I believe it’s headed next.
False prosperity (2017–18 token issuance frenzy)
In early 2017, I came across an explanation of Bitcoin in a book and was instantly hooked. Soon after, I read every related book I could find, then made a plan: move to Singapore and write a blog documenting this new technology that fascinated me.
At the time, I didn’t realize I was witnessing the tail end of a massive speculative bubble surrounding "early token financing," a model that allowed anyone to raise funds online by selling digital tokens to investors.
Ethereum is the main battlefield for all of this.
In November 2017, I posted a simplified guide to Ethereum that went viral on Reddit. It was right at the peak of the bubble, which burst a month later.
Looking back at that article now, it feels more like a time capsule—capturing the optimism of that era and predicting a future that never arrived.
That year's prediction
The core idea of the article: Blockchain networks like Ethereum can be used to build new types of consumer applications.
The value created by most consumer-grade apps—like Facebook and Uber—flows to large corporations and a small group of investors. In contrast, the value generated by these new types of applications is shared collectively among early participants and early token investors.
The article envisions building a "decentralized Uber" on Ethereum, where early users and drivers earn tokens for each trip completed, giving them partial ownership of the network. This approach more fairly rewards early adopters who helped bootstrap the network.
On paper, it’s an admirable goal. But the decentralized revolution ultimately stumbled badly.
What actually happened
A speculative frenzy reminiscent of the 2001 dot-com bubble.
Ethereum has proven to be the most efficient crowdfunding platform in history, raising $22 billion from investors worldwide across more than 3,000 token issuance projects.
But like in 2001, the underlying technology is far from capable of supporting the wildly overvalued use cases assigned to it.
Worse still, this model undermines the normal incentive structure between investors and builders: builders can raise $10 million overnight with nothing more than an idea.
Investors receive only tokens, which only appreciate in value after the project is completed. However, builders retain their own tokens and can cash out for profit from day one, removing their incentive to build useful products.
Founders and early investors made huge profits, while inexperienced investors were left behind. Although there were genuinely motivated individuals involved, this model unfortunately became a breeding ground for greed, fraud, and exploiting retail investors.
No different from every speculative bubble over the past few centuries.
Building from the Ruins (Circle, 2018–19)
My wallet kept shrinking day by day. I landed an entry-level marketing role at Circle in early 2018, leveraging the small reputation I’d built on Reddit.
At the time, Circle was four years old. It had a portfolio of unprofitable consumer-facing applications (investing, payments, trading) and a quiet over-the-counter trading desk that was printing money and keeping the company afloat.
Over the next two years, the entire industry staggered through the hangover of token mania. Most projects were abandoned, and most tokens dropped to zero. The atmosphere was terrible.
But it was also at this time that the seeds of the next crypto revival were sown.
The focus this time is no longer on consumer applications, but on reshaping finance through the internet.
Dollar and DeFi
Dollar-backed "stablecoins" were originally designed to allow traders to easily switch between crypto positions. They maintain a value pegged to $1 through reserves of dollars and U.S. Treasury securities at a 1:1 ratio.
Tether's USDT led the surge during the token boom, with its dollar reserves rapidly expanding in offshore bank accounts.
Although initially used for trading, stablecoins offer tremendous value to those who wish to hold U.S. dollars but cannot access the traditional banking system.
For example, people seeking to evade capital controls, Chinese wealthy individuals looking to diversify their assets, and Argentinians and Turks fleeing inflation.
In 2018, Circle partnered with Coinbase to launch the compliant U.S. version: USDC. Early usage was primarily focused on trading, but some began predicting that this new internet dollar could enable anyone with internet access to receive dollar services 24/7.
Meanwhile, the projects that have survived from the token era are almost all financial in nature.
Since Ethereum can be used for fundraising, it can also be used to rebuild other foundational components of financial markets. Protocols like Uniswap for trading and Aave and Compound for lending later became known as "decentralized finance," or DeFi.
Stablecoins and DeFi will ultimately converge, propelled by a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Wild growth reemerges (Messari, 2019–2021)
At the end of 2019, I joined Messari, a 13-person data research startup, as their first full-time marketing hire.
The company has a four-person analyst team conducting cutting-edge research in the DeFi space. At the time, the total value locked in DeFi had grown to $665 million.
Then, in early 2020, a mysterious virus erupted from China, threatening to bring the global economy to a halt. All markets plummeted.
Central banks around the world responded by injecting trillions of dollars into the global economy to prevent a collapse—just by the end of 2020, $9 trillion had been injected.
This money needed somewhere to go. With everyone stuck at home, massive amounts of capital flowed into Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and various speculative assets.
Bitcoin surged from under $4,000 to nearly $70,000, with its market capitalization surpassing $1 trillion driven by institutional investors, outperforming all other macro assets, including gold.
Connor Dempsey: Central banks continue to print money, sending all markets to the moon, while also telling the world one thing: a non-depreciable currency has its place in this world.
Bitcoin achieved the fastest growth, surpassing $1 trillion and outperforming all other macro assets.
These conditions also gave rise to the so-called "DeFi Summer," during which the total value locked in DeFi protocols increased 250-fold, reaching $180 billion.
DeFi was meant to rebuild traditional finance. But the "DeFi Summer" looked more like a massive online game, with a cohort of profit-driven traders betting billions of dollars.
The gameplay is called liquidity mining. Anonymous developers have launched new protocols, and for some reason, most of them use food as a theme.
YAM Finance, Spaghetti Money, SushiSwap. Traders deposit existing tokens (ETH, USDC, USDT) and earn newly minted tokens: $YAM, $SPAGHETTI, $SUSHI.
The entire process was both absurd and astonishing. As soon as the protocol launched, the newly minted tokens surged to a $1 billion market cap within days—then early participants sold off, causing the token to crash.
This is the real Wild West era.
Like the previous token boom, DeFi Summer created a wave of millionaires before its own collapse.
It also created a billionaire—Sam Bankman-Fried—who would become the center of the next crypto disaster.
At the summit (Coinbase, 2021)
In April 2021, Coinbase completed its IPO with a $100 billion valuation. Shortly after, I joined their corporate development and venture capital team.
My job was sitting next to people who did mergers and acquisitions or invested in early-stage crypto startups, writing articles on industry themes and hosting that short-lived Coinbase podcast. It was one of the most interesting rooms I’ve ever been in, often leaving me with this feeling:
(The original image shows the author at Coinbase headquarters)
This was also the period when the second speculative bubble took shape—centered around digital artworks known as NFTs.
If DeFi is the domain of professional traders, NFTs are more appealing to the general public. They provide artists with new ways to monetize their work online and demonstrate potential in networked property standards.
But, like early tokens and DeFi Summer, NFT speculation quickly got out of control.
Digital images of cartoon monkeys, "punks," and penguins began selling for $1 million each. An artist named Beeple assembled a collection of these images into a single piece, which sold at Christie’s for the staggering price of $69 million.
Crypto culture is everywhere. Larry David mocked crypto skeptics in a Super Bowl ad. Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange, FTX, spent $135 million to secure the naming rights for the Miami Heat’s home arena.
Everyone is making money through tokens, NFTs, and stocks.
This is a replay of the madness seen in 2017. Fueled by record money printing, the bubble is nearly four times the size of the previous one.
Settlement (2022)
But soon, the flywheel began to come loose.
The interest rate cuts, money printing, and economic stimulus that pushed up all asset prices eventually seeped into consumer prices.
BTC, ETH, Nasdaq, and S&P all peaked at the end of 2021. At that moment, everyone realized: inflation could not be contained, and central banks were forced to reverse course, gradually withdrawing the policies that had previously pushed stocks and cryptocurrencies to all-time highs.
Under rising interest rates and fiscal tightening, everyone is beginning to doubt the high-priced assets they hold.
Maybe monkey pictures aren't worth a million. Maybe SUSHI shouldn't be worth $30 billion. Maybe Dogecoin shouldn't be worth $90 billion.
Then, everything began to collapse.
If the token boom was most like the 2001 internet crash, what followed was more like the 2008 financial crisis: a few toxic assets, combined with high leverage, nearly dragged down everything connected to them.
The first toxic asset was Terra's UST stablecoin.
Major stablecoins like USDC and USDT are simply backed by cash and government bonds. UST, however, relies on a complex algorithmic mechanism to maintain its peg. This mechanism works well in good market conditions but collapses entirely during market sell-offs.
$32 billion vanished in a few days. Those who thought they held it woke up to find they had nothing.
Next, a $10 billion hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital collapsed—it had heavy exposure to Terra and was over-leveraged across the entire industry.
Three Arrows Capital borrowed large sums from the crypto lending platforms Celsius and Voyager. These platforms lent out user deposits in pursuit of "safe" 8% returns. When Three Arrows collapsed, the platforms froze withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy, dragging retail investors' deposits down with them.
At Coinbase, we watched as FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried stepped in to rescue insolvent lending platforms like BlockFi.
He has been hailed as the "J.P. Morgan of crypto" and the industry's white knight.
But the truth is that SBF and FTX themselves were the ones with the greatest exposure to risk.
Do you remember FTX buying the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s home arena? That deal, along with the entire SBF empire, was propped up by FTX’s artificially created token—FTT. SBF used FTT as collateral to secure massive loans. When the price of FTT collapsed, the loans were called in, and FTX went bankrupt.
Worst of all, FTX had been misappropriating customer deposits to fund investments and cover various losses. The company, once valued at $32 billion, collapsed within a week, with $8 billion in customer funds disappearing.
SBF violated the fundamental rule of exchange operations: never touch customer funds.
This is the crypto equivalent of the Lehman moment.
Elections and Casinos (2023–25)
After the FTX collapse, SBF was imprisoned. The crypto market dropped from $3 trillion to under $1 trillion within 12 months.
Next, the Biden administration moved to crush the industry within the United States.
Under Gary Gensler’s leadership, the SEC has sued nearly all domestic compliant companies for violations of securities laws.
Coinbase, Kraken, Uniswap, and Robinhood have all received enforcement notices. Companies that have spent years striving to operate legally have become the SEC’s primary targets.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren has quietly pressured banks to abandon cryptocurrency clients, cut off the industry’s access to banking services, and drive teams overseas.
This strategy resulted in several unexpected consequences.
First, introducing anything with a business model in crypto—such as DeFi—will be classified as a security and could be subject to litigation at any time.
So the legally safest option became issuing "meme coins"—tokens with no clear utility.
On a platform called Pump.fun, millions of meme coins have been launched. Iggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner, and the Hawk Tuah girl all released their own meme coins—none of them succeeded.
Another casino has emerged in crypto, and it’s even bigger than the last one. Over 6 million meme coins have been launched. This sector peaked at $150 billion by the end of 2024, surpassing the scale of the NFT bubble in dollar terms.
Second, the industry conducted its first political mobilization. Several leading companies injected tens of millions of dollars into pro-crypto PACs and organized lobbying efforts in Washington.
Third, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. He pledged to fire Gensler, end the hostility toward banks, and make the U.S. the "world's crypto capital," successfully turning the newly mobilized industry into a campaign asset. Many believe it was crypto voters who helped him win the election.
Then, three days before he took office, Trump launched a memecoin: $TRUMP. His wife also launched one: $MELANIA.
This is the most absurd thing I’ve seen in eight years in the space. Ironically, $TRUMP marked the end of the meme coin bubble—it drained all other liquidity, followed immediately by the collapse of the entire meme coin market.
走向机构 (Crossmint, 2025-26)
Setting aside that awkward incident, the industry's bet on Trump paid off.
At the moment Trump’s victory became certain, Bitcoin reached a new high. The market had already priced in the reality that the world’s largest economy was shifting from hostility toward cryptocurrency to a more favorable stance.
Gensler resigned. The new SEC dropped the lawsuit against U.S. crypto companies. Banks are once again able to engage with this industry.
Most importantly, the GENIUS Act was passed in July 2025—the first major federal cryptocurrency legislation in the United States, establishing clear rules for stablecoins.
The message Washington is sending to institutions is clear: crypto, especially stablecoins, is about to become big business.
Stablecoin companies like Bridge and BVNK have been acquired by Stripe and Mastercard at valuations exceeding $1 billion. Rain completed its C-round of approximately $2 billion. My former employer, Circle, the company behind USDC, is set for an IPO in June 2025, with a peak valuation reaching $60 billion.
At this point, I was the Head of Marketing at Crossmint. We secured a partnership with MoneyGram to enable the century-old remittance giant to conduct cross-border fund transfers using stablecoins.
Crossmint @crossmint · 2025/9/18 Major announcement: MoneyGram, serving 200 countries and 50 million users, is adopting stablecoins—powered by Crossmint’s wallet and stablecoin infrastructure. This is the future of cross-border finance.
As the benefits of tokenized dollars become clearer, Wall Street is beginning to take the tokenization of other assets seriously.
Even Larry Fink has changed his tune. He once called Bitcoin a "money laundering index." Now, the CEO of BlackRock, which manages $14 trillion, calls tokenization "the next generation of markets," predicting that all stocks, bonds, and asset classes will eventually run on blockchain.
The revolution we didn't predict (now)
Eight years since my Reddit post, we still don’t have a decentralized Uber.
Blockchain has not eliminated all intermediaries, and fully decentralized currency has not replaced government-issued fiat money.
But I believe that, looking back in the future, this period will be remembered as the early chaotic era of an entirely new internet financial system.
Each cycle of boom and bust refines that infrastructure—the infrastructure capable of reshaping global finance and bringing it to anyone with an internet connection.
Token fundraising demonstrates that a company can raise money from anyone around the world.
DeFi has proven that trading and lending can run entirely on code (see @HyperliquidX and @pendle_fi).
NFTs laid the foundation for digital ownership on the internet.
Even the most absurd cycle—meme coins—demonstrated that this underlying network can handle massive global transactions.
Replacing them with non-fungible assets such as stocks, bonds, and real estate, along with a clear regulatory framework, makes the entire financial system’s transition a natural next step.
Critics could also try to ignore all of this. But the data on stablecoins is the hardest to dispute.
With over $3 trillion in stablecoin supply currently in circulation, $33 trillion in settlement volume was achieved in 2025. So far this year, over $40 trillion has been settled, with the potential to reach $100 trillion.
Skeptics will say that a large portion of this is crypto trading and bot activity. And they’re right. But the scale is there, and the U.S. government is telling you exactly where the direction lies.
One crucial point, though slightly complex: stablecoins are backed by U.S. Treasury bonds, which are debt instruments issued by the U.S. government to raise funds.
For every stablecoin issued, a new demand is created for U.S. debt—and this is precisely the kind of demand the U.S. government most needs right now. For this reason, the Secretary of the Treasury has ranked stablecoin growth as a strategic priority for the United States:
Recent reports predict that by the end of this century, stablecoins could grow into a $3.7 trillion market. With the passage of the GENIUS Act, this scenario is becoming increasingly likely. A thriving stablecoin ecosystem will drive private sector demand for U.S. Treasuries...
Where is the path?
AI is changing everything, and cryptocurrency is no exception.
The marriage of cryptography and AI has already begun. Millions of AI agents will soon conduct transactions in the real world, using stablecoin-backed cards to interact with merchants in over 200 countries. They will also transact directly with one another using crypto wallets and stablecoins.
Agents that shop for us, manage our finances, and conduct transactions on behalf of the entire company are essentially inevitable.
Looking further ahead, we’ll see business models entirely driven by agents, with no humans in the loop. Imagine a hedge fund that reads every SEC filing, builds its own models, and executes its own trades—without a single analyst or portfolio manager in sight.
As this science fiction future gradually becomes reality, cryptocurrency will go mainstream by integrating with existing systems, rather than replacing them.
The backend will be encrypted. The frontend will look exactly like what people are already using. Most people won’t even notice.
Institutions will replace outdated infrastructure that has been in use for decades. Startups will launch financial products globally at an unprecedented speed and scale. The end result is a 24/7 financial system that is just as accessible to people in Nigeria as it is to those in New York.
From here, a million more innovations will emerge.
Will these predictions look as embarrassing eight years from now as I find my old article today? Let’s wait and see.