Crypto is dead. Long live crypto?

Every cycle of innovation comes with an obituary. People wrote off the internet when Pets.com collapsed. They dismissed e-commerce when Amazon’s stock fell 90 percent. They gave up on direct-to-consumer brands when legacy retailers copied their playbooks. And they’ve written off crypto more times than I can count. How many times in the past decade have you read an article declaring, “Crypto is dead”? Yet each time, the obituary misses the point.

Crypto isn’t dying. It’s evolving. It’s being absorbed into the very financial systems it set out to disrupt, and it’s changing the world. BlackRock ETFs. Visa settlements. Stripe and Circle are building their own chains. Mexico is moving billions in remittances over stablecoins. These are just a few of the transformations happening right in front of us. The crypto dream is not dead. In fact, we’re only at the beginning of a new and massively bullish era, the one where worlds converge to move money into the 21st century.

Escape the binary trap

There’s a loud argument from some DeFi purists: if the financial system adopts crypto, then the dream dies. I don’t buy that. Progress is not binary; it is incremental. Each step forward compounds, and what looks like a compromise to some often ends up being a net positive. Just look at the numbers:

• BlackRock’s Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund, IBIT, already holds over $90 billion in AUM (as of August 2025).
• Tether (USDT) sits at around $165 billion in circulation; USDC (USDC) is at $65 billion and rising.
• JPMorgan’s Kinexys blockchain rail has processed more than $1.5 trillion in notional volume, averaging $2 billion daily.

These are no longer experiments. They are production systems at scale. Purists might argue that only “pure DeFi” counts. But incremental improvements to legacy finance can add up to transformational change. Even if most people experience crypto through a Stripe checkout or a Visa settlement, the fact that crypto is running in the background is massive. 

And frankly, the permissionless and pure DeFi world will continue to exist in parallel for those who want to live fully onchain. Crypto never promised purity. It promised progress.

Stablecoins are the new Visa rails

If Bitcoin ETFs helped normalize crypto as an investable asset, stablecoins are now normalizing it as a payment rail. Visa and Mastercard are rapidly adopting crypto rails because they know that if they don’t, they’ll be left behind. Credit to them.

Stripe reintroduced stablecoin payments, letting merchants accept USD to bring all their partners onchain And PayPal is pushing PYUSD directly into consumer wallets and offering 3.7 percent rewards to get balances up.

Why do all this? Simple economics. Card networks charge one to three percent, plus fixed fees. Micro and nano transactions are uneconomical in that system. Stablecoins compress those costs and settle instantly, unlocking an entirely new design space for payments.

Stablecoins aren’t just a crypto story anymore; they’re a global financial story. As Myosin’s Stablecoins: The Future of Finance report shows, stablecoins already power about $33 trillion in annual transaction volume, compared to Visa’s $13 trillion. They’re used for remittances, business treasury, humanitarian aid, and more. They’re no longer a Trojan horse; they’re already operating as global infrastructure.

Everyone gets a blockchain?

Crypto adoption is accelerating fast. Major players like Circle and Stripe are launching their own blockchains, Arc and Tempo, respectively, signaling a new phase in stablecoin infrastructure. Arc, built by Circle, is unique in that all transactions settle natively in USDC, unlike Ethereum (ETH), which uses ETH. This shift is significant: brands can now issue their own stablecoins. Imagine Starbucks Bucks trading seamlessly with Amazon Bucks. Airline miles could finally become programmable and tradable. Companies can effectively mint their own money—settled in USDC.

Stripe is following suit with Tempo, an Ethereum-compatible chain tailored for payments. While Arc puts USDC at the core, Tempo is built around Stripe’s merchant ecosystem, designed to handle refunds, disputes, and protections onchain. It’s the payment processor mindset reimagined as blockchain infrastructure. Both Arc and Tempo reflect the same trend: stablecoin-native chains purpose-built for commerce.

Here’s the hot take: most of these stablecoin-focused Layer 1s will eventually migrate to Ethereum as Layer 2s. Developers crave composability. Regulators are warming to Ethereum. And at scale, vendors and platforms need open, permissionless systems to ensure credible neutrality. Without that neutrality, what stops a company from being cut off just for upsetting Stripe or Circle?

Arc and Tempo may look like standalone chains today, but in time, they’re likely to integrate into Ethereum’s ecosystem, where scale, trust, and openness converge.

The stablecoin powerplay

Visa and Mastercard aren’t disappearing overnight — but their dominance is under pressure. Around the world, countries have strong incentives to reduce reliance on the U.S. duopoly, especially as American policy increasingly extends abroad.

Europe is acting fast. Regulators have greenlit euro-backed stablecoins like EURAU, and the EU is exploring deploying a digital euro on public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana (SOL). Credible neutrality matters.

In emerging markets, stablecoins are already the infrastructure. In Mexico alone, $6.4 billion in 2024 remittances flowed via USDT and USDC. Across Latin America, over 90% of exchange volume is stablecoin-based.

Stablecoins aren’t an alternative; they’re becoming the rails. Families use USDC to save, freelancers to get paid, and businesses to settle. The shift won’t be sudden, but as a few percent of payment flows move off-card and onto stablecoins, the wedge is in.

From rails to real-world adoption

This next era of crypto isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s also about narrative, marketing, and go-to-market strategy. As crypto goes mainstream, marketers will rediscover tried-and-true tactics: paid campaigns, Instagram ads, TikTok, and Reels, the same channels that built DTC brands over the past decade. But the winners won’t be those who only buy ads. They’ll be the ones who blend crypto-native mechanics with mainstream reach.

Airdrops, onchain incentives, token-gated communities, KOL campaigns, Discord and Telegram activation, all of these can work when executed effectively. And now they’re being paired with billboards, brand films, and influencer marketing at scale.

Take Coinbase’s Onchain Summer as an example: the campaign featured billboards tied to NFT minting, resulting in over 500,000 on-chain interactions and more than 50 brand collaborations. It wasn’t just a marketing push; it was a cultural moment that brought crypto into the mainstream spotlight. And this is just the beginning. In 2024, crypto companies spent over $1.3 billion on advertising, up 35% from the year before. The largest web3 projects are allocating 20–40% of their treasury toward growth, community, and partnerships.

For marketers in this space, the challenge is learning to speak two dialects: one for the crypto-native, one for the mainstream. The mainstream doesn’t want jargon about rollups or MEV. They want faster payments, better rewards, and products that just work.

But the crypto-native crowd still cares deeply about ethos and culture. Winning teams will be bilingual.

The hotter take: Crypto becomes invisible

Crypto isn’t dying; it’s becoming invisible. Just as e-commerce has simply become shopping, crypto is evolving into just finance. 

Users won’t say they used a stablecoin; they’ll say they paid. While the purist lane will always exist, with permissionless DeFi serving as the R&D lab and cultural counterweight pushing the frontier, traditional finance rails rebuilt on stablecoins will form the mass-market layer. Both can coexist, and both worlds can thrive. 

So, is crypto dead? Yes and no. The cypherpunk dream may feel like it’s fading as Wall Street and payments giants step in, but with every adoption cycle, crypto’s foundation grows deeper within the global economy. 

Crypto is dead as a niche movement; long live crypto as the foundation of global finance.