Crypto Was Supposed to Be for Everyone. What Happened?

On a Thursday evening in the Meatpacking District, 161 people filed into Betaworks to attend something called the Resonant Computing Collective. The hosts -- ex/ante, Betaworks, and Analogue -- had assembled authors of the Resonant Computing Manifesto for short talks, demos, and conversation about a single premise: technology should strengthen human agency, not strip-mine it.

The manifesto had been circulating quietly for months. Then the signatories crossed a thousand. Then WIRED picked it up. The Atlantic. Hacker News. Tech Twitter. What started as a document became a signal, and the signal drew a crowd -- founders, funders, operators -- gathered around an idea that sounds obvious but is, in practice, radical.

I was in that room. And I kept thinking about crypto.

Not because anyone was talking about crypto. They were talking about AI, about attention, about the architect Christopher Alexander's "quality without a name" -- the property that makes certain systems feel alive and others feel dead. But the diagnosis they were running on the attention economy landed with uncomfortable precision on the industry I've spent the last decade in.

Crypto set out to build a parallel social infrastructure for humanity. Somewhere along the way, it became one of the most anti-social corners of the internet.

The Parasocial Promise

Go back to the intellectual beginning. The cypherpunks of the 1990s weren't trying to get rich. They were trying to solve a coordination problem that had haunted political theorists for centuries: how do you get strangers to cooperate without a trusted third party extracting rent from the middle?

Satoshi's white paper doesn't mention price once. It mentions "trust" fourteen times. The entire architecture of Bitcoin rested on a radical premise: cryptographic proof could replace institutional trust, making cooperation between strangers not just possible but default. You wouldn't need to know someone, or like them, or share their politics. You'd just need to verify their transaction.

This is what made early crypto genuinely parasocial -- not in the influencer sense of manufactured one-way intimacy, but in the older sense. Para: alongside. Social: of or relating to society. A system designed to run alongside human social structures, augmenting them without replacing them. DAOs before anyone called them DAOs. Shared ownership before "community" became a growth hack.

Ethereum extended the promise. Smart contracts meant you could encode not just transactions but agreements -- the kind of complex social contracts that previously required lawyers, courts, and centuries of institutional credibility. Vitalik Buterin talked about "credible neutrality" the way an architect talks about load-bearing walls: it wasn't a feature. It was the structural requirement that made everything else possible.

For a brief window, it worked. Bitcoin meetups had the energy of mutual aid societies. Ethereum hackathons felt like barn raisings. People built for each other because the cost of coordination had dropped to nearly zero and the shared upside was legible to everyone in the room.

Then speculation became the point.

When the Chart Replaced the Mission

It didn't happen because bad people showed up. It happened because the incentive structure made speculation the path of least resistance -- and human beings are exceptionally good at following the path of least resistance.

The original sin was subtle. Bitcoin's price went up. That was good -- it meant more people were finding the network useful, more miners were securing it, more nodes were validating it. Price was a signal of adoption. But somewhere along the way, the signal became the thing. Price stopped reflecting utility and started replacing it. The chart became the product. The mission became the marketing copy you put underneath the chart.

Once that inversion took hold, everything else followed.

Founders stopped asking "what problem does this solve?" and started asking "what narrative will move the token?" Builders optimized for TVL instead of users, because TVL moved price and users were hard to count and harder to keep. Communities formed around portfolios, not purposes. Your allegiance was to whatever you held. Your enemies were whoever held something else.

The vocabulary tells the story. "NGMI." "Have fun staying poor." "Few understand." These aren't the phrases of a movement building for everyone. They're the phrases of a trading floor -- status markers, loyalty oaths, ways of sorting winners from losers in real time. The language of crypto doesn't invite. It evaluates.

And the culture followed the language. Crypto Twitter became a tribal war zone where the primary activity wasn't building or learning but performing conviction. Bitcoin maximalists against Ethereum builders. Ethereum against Solana. Solana against whatever launched last Tuesday. Every faction defined not by what it was building for but by what it was building against.

Token-gated everything completed the transformation. Discord servers. Governance votes. Events. Information. Access priced in tokens, which is to say access priced by speculative conviction. The people who needed permissionless infrastructure the most -- the unbanked, the marginalized, the economically precarious -- locked out of the communities that claimed to be building for them. Not by design, exactly. By the accumulated weight of a thousand small decisions that all pointed the same direction: inward.

We told ourselves speculation was bootstrapping. That the degens would give way to the builders, the builders would ship real products, and the real products would find real users. Some of that happened. Most of it didn't. The speculation wasn't the bootstrap phase. It was the product.

The Institutional Double Edge

And now the institutions are arriving, and the sword cuts both ways.

Bitcoin ETFs brought billions in new capital. BlackRock, Fidelity, Franklin Templeton -- names that would have been punchlines in a 2017 crypto group chat are now the industry's largest stakeholders. The ETFs did something the industry had been trying to do for a decade: they gave ordinary people a way to gain exposure to crypto without understanding wallets, keys, bridges, or gas fees. Your financial advisor can now allocate 2% of your retirement portfolio to Bitcoin. Your mom's 401(k) might hold some without her knowing.

This is, in one frame, exactly what crypto always wanted. Mainstream adoption. Broad distribution. Normalization.

In another frame, it's the final step in speculation replacing the mission entirely.

The ETF holder doesn't run a node. Doesn't participate in governance. Doesn't use a dApp. Doesn't send a transaction. Doesn't experience anything that makes crypto crypto. They experience a line on a brokerage statement going up or down. The revolutionary technology has been reduced to a ticker symbol -- another asset class in a diversified portfolio, managed by the same institutions the cypherpunks were trying to route around.

The legitimacy is real and it matters. Institutional capital means regulatory clarity follows. It means custody infrastructure improves. It means the existential risk of a government ban recedes. These are not small things.

But the legitimacy comes at the cost of the animating energy. Every step toward institutional adoption is a step away from the weird, idealistic, slightly feral community that gave crypto its life force. The early Bitcoin forums didn't feel like a Fidelity product. They felt unsanctioned, experimental, and intensely alive. That energy -- the sense of participating in something the establishment hadn't yet absorbed or formalized -- was the quality that drew people in before there was any money to be made.

Institutional capital doesn't produce that energy. It consumes it. Not maliciously -- institutional capital does what institutional capital does, which is seek risk-adjusted returns within regulatory frameworks. But the result is an industry increasingly optimized for the preferences of allocators who want volatility dampened, narratives simplified, and edges sanded off. Bitcoin as digital gold. Crypto as an asset class. The revolution as a line item.

The danger isn't that institutions will destroy crypto. It's that they'll domesticate it. That the technology will survive but the culture won't. That we'll end up with a perfectly functional, perfectly boring financial product that happens to use a blockchain under the hood -- and that the people who needed a different kind of financial system will still be waiting.

The double edge: institutional capital solved crypto's distribution problem and created a new one. The technology is reaching more people than ever. But what's reaching them isn't the parasocial promise of coordination without gatekeepers. It's a speculative asset in a Schwab wrapper.

The Regulation We Actually Need

Crypto's libertarian instincts weren't wrong at the outset. Early regulatory responses were often clumsy, adversarial, or designed to protect incumbents rather than users. For much of the last decade, builders faced a fog of enforcement-by-ambiguity: no clear rules, only consequences after the fact. That environment rewarded caution, workarounds, and silence -- not openness or long-term thinking.

But over time, skepticism of regulation hardened into something less defensible: the idea that any shared rules were a betrayal of decentralization itself. That a system could remain fair, open, and resilient simply by refusing formal constraints. In practice, that assumption didn't produce a flourishing free market. It produced repeated failures -- FTX. Terra/Luna. Celsius. Voyager. Three Arrows Capital. Not because decentralization is flawed, but because even libertarian systems need ground rules to function at scale.

Every durable commons has them. Markets need standards. Protocols need norms. Coordination among strangers only works when there are shared expectations about custody, disclosure, and accountability. Without those, bad actors don't get filtered out -- they get amplified, and everyone else pays the price.

The regulation crypto actually needs isn't about smothering innovation or re-centralizing control. It's about drawing clear lines: segregate customer funds, disclose risks and conflicts, punish fraud decisively. The effect is not to weaken decentralization, but to make it legible and trustworthy to people who aren't already insiders.

Permissionless systems don't collapse because they have rules. They collapse because they don't. If crypto is going to serve people beyond its own subculture, it needs a framework that lets honest builders signal credibility and lets users tell the difference between experimentation and extraction. Ground rules aren't the end of the libertarian experiment. They're what keep it from eating itself.

The Dead Architecture

Christopher Alexander spent decades studying why some buildings feel alive -- why you linger in certain courtyards, why certain streets invite you to walk slowly -- and why others feel dead. His conclusion was structural, not aesthetic. When a building is designed to satisfy an abstraction -- a zoning code, an investor's return model, an architect's ego -- instead of the people who will actually inhabit it, something essential disappears. The structure might be sound. It might even be beautiful. But you walk through without stopping. You leave without remembering.

Crypto feels like that now. Sound structures. Elegant cryptography. Institutional-grade custody. And no one wants to stay.

The quality disappeared because the systems were redesigned, one market cycle at a time, to serve abstractions instead of people. Not users -- token holders. Not coordination -- price discovery. Not the person sending forty dollars home -- the portfolio manager rebalancing quarterly.

When you optimize for abstractions, you get abstract communities. Ghost towns with impressive TVL. Governance forums where twelve wallets decide the outcome. Discords with ten thousand members and no conversation worth reading. The numbers look right. The life is gone.

Stablecoins are the exception that proves the rule. USDC in Argentina. USDT in Nigeria. Dollar-denominated value moving to people who need it through technology they never think about. No one in Lagos posting about USDT on Crypto Twitter. They're sending money to their family. The technology is invisible. The utility is everything.

That's the tell. The one corner of crypto that actually reached the people it was supposed to reach is the one corner where speculation was never the point.

The Revival Path

Here is what we must build. Not what we could build. Not what the market might reward. What we owe to the premise we started with.

We must make the speculation incidental and the utility primary. This sounds like a platitude. It is the hardest product discipline in the industry. It means building things where the token is the infrastructure, not the product -- where people use the system because it solves a problem, and the token mechanics are as invisible as HTTP. Stablecoins proved it works. The question is whether the rest of the industry can build with the same discipline.

We must converge. The proliferation of competing chains fragmented the community and confused every person trying to use this technology for the first time. The internet didn't win because it had fifty competing protocol stacks. It won because it had one, and that one became boring enough to build interesting things on top of. Crypto's infrastructure layer should aspire to be TCP/IP -- invisible, universal, taken for granted.

We must welcome regulation that separates the builders from the grifters -- and we must help write it. Not wait for legislators to guess at the right framework. Not lobby to water it down to nothing. Engage seriously, propose clear standards, and accept that an industry serving hundreds of millions of people cannot operate on the honor system. The builders who want to do this right should be demanding regulatory clarity, not running from it. Clear rules are a competitive advantage for everyone who isn't committing fraud.

We must remember what blockchains actually are: trust machines. Systems that make commitments legible, enforceable, and composable without asking anyone for permission. That is the primitive. Everything else is derivative.

For creators, that means new services anchored in programmable ownership. Royalties that execute automatically. Revenue shares that don't require a label or a platform to adjudicate. Communities that can collectively fund, own, and benefit from the things they build together. Not speculative tokens for their own sake, but infrastructure that makes creative labor investable, divisible, and durable.

For capital markets, it means moving from closed, intermediated pipes to transparent settlement layers. Assets that clear in minutes, not days. Markets that are open 24/7 and globally accessible by default. Instruments that can be issued, traded, and governed with the same clarity as open-source software. Not because faster is flashier, but because programmable trust lowers the cost of participation.

And for online organizations, it means coordination at scale. Shared treasuries with auditable rules. Global teams that can allocate capital, compensate contributors, and ship product without forming a Delaware C‑corp first. Structures where incentives are embedded in code and visible to everyone involved. The point is not voting mechanics or abstract purity. The point is that blockchains let strangers organize around shared goals with a level of credibility that used to require institutions.

If we build on that foundation -- blockchains as neutral trust infrastructure -- everything else becomes possible. Services that benefit creators. Markets that are more open and efficient. Organizations that can operate globally from day one. That is the real promise. The rest is noise.

We must find a way to welcome institutional capital without letting it rewrite the mission. The ETFs, the custody solutions, the regulatory frameworks -- all of it is necessary. But necessary is not sufficient. If institutional adoption means crypto becomes just another asset class managed by the same gatekeepers the cypherpunks were trying to bypass, then the technology survived and the point of it didn't. The answer isn't to reject institutional capital. It's to ensure that the products being built with that capital still serve the person who needed a better system -- not just the person who wanted a better return.

And we must distribute. Not to other crypto users. Not through airdrops to the already-converted. To people who have problems we can solve and who have never heard of a blockchain. The stablecoin story proves it's possible. The question is whether the rest of the industry can build with the same discipline -- real utility, invisible technology, no speculation required.

None of this is technically impossible. Most of it is being built already, somewhere, by someone, with no token and no hype cycle.

The Resonant Computing Collective drew 161 people to a room on a weeknight. No token incentive. No airdrop. Just ideas worth showing up for.

Crypto had that once. We traded it for liquidity and have been trying to buy it back ever since.

You can't buy it back. You rebuild it. And rebuilding starts with an honest answer to a simple question: who are we building for?

Not the allocators. Not the whales. Not each other.

Everyone.