The crypto industry was supposed to reshape the global financial system. Instead, it may have trapped itself in a loop of speculative hype and recycled ideas. For all the talk of disruption, the space’s most enduring product so far might just be… a digital version of the US dollar.
Stablecoins are the Industry’s Crown Jewel?
Let’s be honest: stablecoins are the most widely adopted crypto innovation to date. It works. Tether, USDC and others move billions daily, enabling fast settlements, cross-border transfers, and on-chain liquidity. But strip back the technical wrapper and it’s just a dollar on a blockchain. A digital IOU backed (hopefully) by reserves. That’s not groundbreaking. It’s infrastructure.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with building infrastructure. But when the standout innovation of an industry born from the chaos of 2008 is a pegged digital fiat, it begs the question – what exactly has all this noise and capital achieved?
The Speculation Trap
Much of the ecosystem is still driven by the next big token. Meme coins pump, crash, and repeat. NFT projects promise vague utility, vanish, and rebrand. New blockchains launch to solve “scalability” only to end up as ghost towns. Most of what’s being built is not trying to solve real problems. It’s trying to catch a trend.
Decentralised finance (DeFi) looked promising for a moment. But beyond yield farming, most products are complex versions of what banks already offer – often with worse UX, higher risk, and no clear regulation. Billions have been lost to hacks and exploits. The goal was to replace traditional finance, the result is a parallel casino with weaker security.
Copy-Paste Protocols and Forgotten Promises
Take a walk through the top 100 coins and you’ll see dozens of layer 1 chains, layer 2s, rollups, bridges, and swaps. Many are iterations of each other. Most aren’t interoperable. Few are genuinely used outside of trading and staking.
Meanwhile, early crypto ideals – privacy, permissionless access, censorship resistance – are increasingly sidelined. Many new chains are more centralised than the tech they aimed to replace. Binance Smart Chain launched with just 21 validators to write blocks, fewer decision-makers than my local football club.
What Real Innovation Might Look Like
It’s not all bad. There are glimpses of usefulness. On-chain ID experiments. Micropayment rails for content. DAOs organising real-world assets. But these are scattered. Underfunded. Often drowned out by noise.
If crypto wants to matter beyond speculation, it needs to move past its obsession with price. Real innovation would mean:
- Solving remittance at scale with better speed and cost
- Offering privacy without compromising compliance
- Creating on-chain systems people use without needing to know they’re on-chain
- Making financial tools accessible to people who don’t own an iPhone or understand MetaMask
Right now, that’s not where the talent or capital is going.
So, What Are We Doing Here?
Crypto is no longer new. It’s 15 years old. That’s enough time to graduate, start a career, and buy a house. Ironically, all things the average crypto user might still be struggling with.
If the most practical application of this technology is a digital dollar, we need to confront a hard truth: either the ambition was flawed, or the execution has failed. Possibly both.
There’s still time to build something better. But it means letting go of the hype cycle, questioning the industry’s incentives, and rethinking what problems blockchain is actually suited to solve.
Would you still back the technology if every token price chart vanished tomorrow?
