(and the little guys are losing again)
In 2017, Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan, called crypto a “fraud … worse than tulips.” His sentiment reflected the way most people thought about crypto at the time. Anything new and different is often treated with skepticism, especially if it has the power to revolutionize the world and radically change an industry.
JP Morgan now owns over 5 million shares in a Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), valued at over $340M, according to its Q3 2025 filing. The bank’s token, The JPM Coin, facilitates over $1B in interbank payments each month. If we compare that to the tulip craze referenced by Dimond, most historians believe the bubble – at its height – generated less than $10 million worth of trade each month. What does this all mean?
Crypto is having its mainstream moment.
Crypto is having its mainstream moment. It is no longer fringe, no longer “Internet funny money,” and that means the battle over control has reached its final stages. But before we wave the white flag, we need a history lesson to understand how we got here. Young people, especially, need to know the recent history of the money system, because most don’t remember the 2008 financial collapse. Crypto was born from the ashes created by that banking fire.
I was in Zuccotti Park in New York City when Occupy Wall Street was gaining momentum. People were sick and tired of the concentration of wealth and the bank bailouts, and they’d lost trust in central banks and financial institutions. Bitcoin, the first crypto, was the answer to our problems. It was decentralized, permissionless, and inclusive. No one controlled it, and anyone could use it to access the financial system. It reduced our reliance on banks, gave us control over our money, and leveled the playing field globally.
In the Global South, Bitcoin adoption exploded. People in places like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and many others saw crypto as a store of value and a hedge against inflation and currency risk. The unbanked and underbanked used crypto for savings, payments, and cross-border transactions. Mobile technology made wallets and on-ramps accessible, and this aided mass adoption. We were heading in the right direction, and the money system was changing for the better – and then it wasn’t.
Around about that time, I stopped being a Bitcoin Maxi.
At the same time, Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a fraud, saying there would never be a currency "that gets around government controls." This was the sticking point for crypto. This was the battle line that would decide the war over crypto control.
When global markets crashed at the beginning of COVID, crypto use surged. People questioned the stability of fiat, the role of central banks (again), and long-term inflation. The number of crypto users tripled in less than two years — from 100 million in 2019 to over 300 million by 2021. Realizing they had the most to gain, the Global South led the way, driven by inflation, currency devaluation, capital controls, remittances, and inaccessible Western banking systems.
While the Global South was focused on the utility of crypto and its ability to change their lives, alarm bells rang in the corridors of power. The elites were losing control. And guess what – institutional infrastructure began to form, regulatory scrutiny intensified, and some people went to jail. For the past 3 years, that has been the playbook. The big losers are the little guys – the people crypto was built for. The new crypto explosion after COVID came from institutional adoption – ETFs, futures and options, bank custody and brokerage services, tokenized funds, and RWAs. Derivatives and structured products now dominate trading volume because crypto is increasingly treated like a macro asset or a speculative instrument. It has come to mirror the traditional finance it was meant to disrupt.
The massive increase in regulation has driven institutional investment and persuaded large investors to have greater trust in crypto. There is no doubt that it also reduced fraud in some jurisdictions. But what about the cost? The barriers to entry have been raised, favoring large, well-capitalized firms, and crypto has been re-shaped into another form of traditional finance. They’ve taken our technology and used it against us. We don’t even have to ask who crypto now serves. The answer is obvious.
The real problem is what some of us have been talking about for years — the argument between speculation and utility. The West discusses crypto in terms of price speculation, yields, and leverage, while the Global South remains focused on P2P, payments, remittances, and financial access.
The paradox of mainstream adoption.
The paradox of mainstream adoption is that the institutions have brought liquidity, infrastructure, and legitimacy, but they’ve done it by re-centralizing power and control, extracting value upward, and they’ve turned crypto users into customers instead of participants.
Sure, crypto is winning adoption, but it’s losing its soul. The only way the crypto mission can be saved is for the true believers in crypto to stand up. The incentives should be realigned so that value is shared among users. Affiliate and partner programs should share profits with the people who make crypto work. We need to reward participation, not just capital.
We need revenue-backed rewards, community ownership, and transparency, models that uphold the original crypto mission. The challenge is to make a system where anyone can participate, but no one can dominate. The final battle in the war over crypto control will not be about price or adoption. It will be about who benefits. Will crypto create a fairer financial system, or will it just re-create the old one, faster and on-chain?