coindesk.com
Maybe crypto really has made it. Eighteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, it's unclear whether the oldest decentralized digital asset itself is truly closer to becoming a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash" than it was during the financial crisis, but the tools and cultural legacy it spurred have cemented themselves as a part of the current zeitgeist.
You can see this in the financial products being marketed to people, in the novel technologies being incorporated by small startups and massive established institutions alike, the evolving narratives for this financial system that just won't go away, the fact that North Korea's turned hacking crypto exchanges into a major GDP source — you can even see this in video games.
Bitcoin BTC$77,397.98 itself is now firmly entrenched in the financial system. Sure, you may not be using it to buy a cup of coffee, but retail and institutional investors can put money into the asset through exchange-traded funds. Companies are announcing products to let you borrow against your bitcoin.
The crypto industry it spawned has gone further still. Over the past nine years reporting on this sector, I've seen various trends rise and fall. Cryptokitties took 2018 by storm, yield farming was briefly all the rage, everyone got really into DOGE early on during the pandemic, and non-fungible tokens saw buy-in from Christie's and Time Magazine. The crypto industry was the biggest political donor in the 2024 elections and has already made some of the 2026 midterm elections the most expensive in history. Most of these trends were contained to the crypto industry itself, but remain cultural touchpoints that the broader world — normies, if you will — at least heard of.
The flip side of this is, of course, the fact that the crypto industry keeps getting hacked for ever-increasing figures, and usually by North Korea. The most recent hack, which took place two days ago, saw Binance lose over $6 billion worth of assets, in the biggest crypto hack of all time. Each hack sees more and more funds lost. The irony of the Binance hack is that it was the centralized players — Tether, Circle, so on — who had the biggest role in limiting the losses. The two stablecoin issuers alone froze some $2.4 billion worth of stolen funds, while decentralized autonomous organizations and smaller platforms froze a few hundred million more.
