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Remember when crypto was about decentralization, empowerment, and giving power back to the people? When the dream was to build a new kind of internet — open, borderless, and community-owned? Yeah, that’s all gone now. What started as a digital rebellion against Wall Street has slowly become Wall Street with worse UX and more memes.

Crypto used to attract hackers, artists, and idealists — people who wanted to change how money worked. Then the finance bros showed up. Suddenly, it wasn’t about innovation; it was about yield farming, pump-and-dumps, and “number go up.” The space became an echo chamber of alpha calls, “networking” on yachts, and endless Twitter threads about how someone’s dog coin was going to “revolutionize payments.”

Now, the culture feels less like the cypherpunk underground and more like a frat house with Bloomberg terminals. Every project has a “tokenomics lead” and a “growth hacker,” but no one seems interested in actually building something useful. The ethos of decentralization got replaced by the hustle culture of speculation.

Crypto didn’t just get co-opted — it got rebranded into another asset class for people who already had too many. And in the process, it lost the very thing that made it exciting in the first place: purpose. Maybe, someday, the idealists will take it back. Until then, it’s hard not to look at crypto and think: we wanted freedom, and all we got was finance bros in Patagonia vests talking about “liquidity.”