One of the reasons I was excited about Bitcoin early on was the belief that it could shrink what I saw as a bloated, extractive financial services industry. But that narrative hasn’t really played out. Since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, the financial sector has done nothing but expand:
Then again, the entire crypto space is still only around $3 trillion — just a drop in the bucket compared to the full weight of the global financial system, estimated to exceed $1 quadrillion when accounting for equities, bonds, real estate, banking assets, and the notional value of derivatives. So maybe there’s no indication of failure at all. Maybe it’s simply a sign that we’re still early, with plenty of room to grow and gain influence.
I also wonder if my naive vision of dismantling finance is evolving into something else entirely. Maybe it was never really about shrinking the financial system, but about supercharging it. Real innovation, in my view, isn’t defined by whether a sector expands or contracts in market cap, but by what it enables. Finance should be a catalyst, not an end in itself.
Crypto is already delivering tangible progress in areas like remittances, payments, futures, lending, digital identity, and elsewhere. It’s also injecting transparency, objectivity, and accessibility into a system that has long operated in opacity. And the potential extends beyond finance, intersecting with domains like AI, gaming, social, prediction markets — new spaces that may generate value to the world far beyond financial returns alone.
So maybe the more radical, anti-bank, techno-optimist version of me from 2012 might actually feel pretty stoked if crypto ends up expanding fintech and the broader financial services sector — as long as that expansion helps unlock even greater innovation in areas that truly move the world forward, and not just reinforce systems designed to seek rents from working people. Or maybe I’m just getting old.