Crypto is showing signs of life again, but its biggest wins look different from what early believers imagined. After a decade of building, has it all been worth it?
Sentiment in crypto has dived lower than a snailfish in the Mariana Trench in recent months.
Miners are capitulating to AI, cold wallets are getting exploited, and you can hardly fire up LinkedIn without reading another message from a newly unemployed crypto journalist searching for new opportunities. Even for an industry that’s endured nation-state bans, exchange blowups, and years of regulatory pressure, morale has rarely felt this low.
With business models failing and public interest dropping, many long term crypto fans have begun to question whether we’ve all wasted a decade of our lives on a pipe dream.
Bitcoin has just seen its best August in years with a 26% return, while Ethereum gained 34%. President Trump even sang the praises of a decentralized offshore perpetual futures venue at the White House. Crypto’s finally getting interesting again.
But a short term price rise doesn’t mean all our dreams have come true. For anyone who spent years advocating for sovereign F-you money outside the control of the state and centralized entities, a custodial ETF is not exactly a version of BTC that sticks it to the man.
And there’s another problem with calling this a victory lap: many of the companies that helped build crypto’s foundations are no longer around to enjoy the latest pump.
Take BitMEX, one of the industry’s first Bitcoin futures exchanges that pioneered the perpetual swap and 100x leverage for degens. It’s shutting down operations in September after 11 years.
Former chief executive Stephan Lutz tells Magazine that BitMEX was a victim of its own success.
So what if crypto won — just not in the way we thought it would?
Lutz doesn’t think crypto can simply disappear anymore because the technology has become too deeply embedded in traditional finance to be unwound.
“From my point of view, we passed the point of no return,” he says.
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