Reflections on Crypto

From 2021 to early 2026, I worked for the cryptocurrency industry on software engineering teams, with roles at various times as an individual contributor and a manager. Very rarely do I hear stories of programmers leaving crypto, in large part because the salaries are so good and the opportunity for advancement have been so plentiful since 2020. As I write this in early 2026, there’s a bit of a crunch, as VC money moves toward AI/LLM projects and crypto is increasingly a commodified implementation detail of those trying to skirt regulations to move money. Independently, the popular culture has turned solidly against crypto. It now feels like a counterculture in the literal sense: against the current culture, which is itself against it.

Most people who work for crypto either end up at one of the countless startups with no product-market fit, trying to optimize some specific use case for which there is no market and no upside except token speculation. Most of these companies have only other crypto companies as customers, themselves supported by the same speculative activity or venture capital, rendering the whole sector an ouroboros. Everyone else works for the largest players, e.g. Coinbase. I worked for neither category. I have worked for mid-size companies with decent products and established customers inside and, to at least some extent, outside crypto. One of my last employers, Messari, is explicitly a crypto market intelligence and research company. As such I think I have a decent amount of perspective about the whole industry, its purposes and problems, and what it’s like to contribute to it.

Seeing as I have left the industry and do not expect to return, it seems prudent to chronicle what happened—to me, to it, and (separately) to its reputation—in the last five years.

What crypto actually provides

Put simply, it is not clear to me that crypto provides anything of tangible value to the world. I maintained optimistic beliefs to the contrary, and, seeing that optimism erode over five years of alleged progress, there remain just three use cases: (1) an alternative cross-border payment settlement scheme to SWIFT,¹ (2) expanding access to USD-denominated consumer banking (or banking eqiuvalents that work well enough) in mostly second-world countries, and (3) genuine privacy-oriented transactional currencies such as Monero.² These use cases matter, but not enough to justify crypto’s existence as a fraud vehicle or means of wealth redistribution via scams.

To whatever extent crypto helps people achieve “financial freedom”, it also places their assets in harm’s way, increases their volatility and places them squarely outside the arms of state protection. It is simply a very aggressive speculative investment vehicle now, and there is no way out of this, because nobody can honestly kid themselves that the typical consumer wants anything out of crypto except to skirt whatever regulations to which they are subject, and/or to get rich. The only reasons the crypto sector has any activity outside countries where its services are potentially an improvement for consumers over their banks, such as Argentina, is because of the potential upside—and even within such countries, one ultimately must convert the crypto back to fiat assets to spend it, which is now perfectly traceable. Regardless, by its very nature, crypto’s potential financial upside is either funded directly from market movements, and thus zero-sum, or funded from the pockets of VCs, which is unsustainable.

It no longer strikes me as an intelligent decision to work in this industry on the basis of what it provides for consumers.

For businesses, the story is different. Businesses have legitimate cross-border payment use cases. We then look to SWIFT as the canonical cross-border payment rail. SWIFT is hard to use and often comes with high fees for consumers. This is also true for businesses; although the relevance of fees on payments tends to be lower for businesses (and crypto firms expect you to pay some basis points on the conversion of your payments back to fiat currency anyway), it remains that there is probably some marginal efficiency to be gained by using a proof-of-stake blockchain for interbank settlement.

Of course, we are not in a vaccum. We have same-day ACH in the US now, at long last, and modern processing networks like Checkbook (or just Chase Bank directly) are now capable of settling SWIFT transfers almost instantly. One must also consider the capital locked in the operation of blockchains which may be better deployed elsewhere. Finally, on this matter, it is telling that Dakota, likely the leading business banking product in the crypto sector at time of writing, is differentiated from its competition in large part because it offers the option to off-ramp your crypto in the form of a SWIFT payment and its competitors do not, rather than offering some viable alternative to it that businesses actually want to use. In fact, crypto businesses cannot offer such alternatives, because none are viable, because nobody outside crypto actually wants to hold it: they want to convert it immediately back to fiat currency. In this sense crypto is reinventing the wheel: all financial transactions relevant to the actual operation of non-crypto businesses must resolve to fiat currency anyway, and everybody knows this.

Relatedly, one matter that I’ve always found darkly funny is how crypto advocates tend to be staunchly opposed to central banks around the world deploying their own stablecoins. There are good reasons to be against it—the fact that routine use of crypto for everyday purchases would consign most folks’ transaction histories to an open public record, for example—but the most often cited reason is that it is bad for the decentralization of crypto for such currencies to exist. But crypto advocates of this kind have no problem using USDC or Tether or acknowledging that the existence of reliable, redeemable stablecoins is the only reason why the financial sector (outside investment firms e.g. hedge funds) or business world cares about crypto at all. Thus a CBDC wouldn’t be any different from the status quo, and would in fact legitimize crypto. But there’s the grift: crypto advocates do not want to legitimize crypto. They want their own investments to rise faster than the S&P and they want safe deposit instruments to rise faster than US treasuries. Neither are possible unless crypto can figure out a single product that can stand on its own as valuable.

The tacit agreement

Journalist Molly White is a known persona non grata in my industry, on account of pointing out its many flaws, shortcomings, increasingly common outright political manipulations, and so on. Once in 2023 I was reprimanded at work for invoking her name. Naturally, I thus became a loyal fan of her newsletter/podcast. From that point on I suppose I was lost, perhaps adrift, in an industry that wouldn’t dare learn about itself from a critical outside perspective.

No employer, at any time in history, would be happy to learn that someone on the payroll was ideologically opposed to what they do. But there are not many ways a software engineer deals with that. Crypto joins a short list of other industries like surveillance, weapons, gambling, or drugs and alcohol perhaps, wherein there is an inherently political bent to the work—until recently, a nonpartisan one, but now much more partisan—such that folks are primed to think in those terms and the wrong signaling can break your career.³ Especially since 2024, crypto has also become a prickly political issue. You can be visibly liberal at some companies, but it is risky, and the libertarian spirit of the industry has vanished. What remains is either apathy or alignment with a certain presently-prominent populist, and that is all.

As best I can tell, everyone in crypto has agreed not to talk about this. That the sector is painfully aligned with American right-wing populism is uncomfortable, and so it is ignored. This has caused great cognitive dissonance in me for years. My own experience of this is a mixed bag, but certainly since 2024 there is a clear tacit agreement not to talk about it, because everyone sensible knows both that (1) crypto is only doing so well as of 2026 due to the irresponsible and often outright harmful decisions by the current government, and therefore that the sector’s best hope of survival is to force as much beneficial new law onto the books as possible before the next Democratic administration; and (2) considering all the harm this administration is inflicting on the country’s stability, on balance it is probably not worth it, except for us, of course, because we’re already in so deep and our bank accounts stand to personally benefit if we can just get this company sold before the end of 2028.

Such patterns of thinking (“I just need to get mine”) are antisocial, counterproductive, and dangerous. At risk of hyperbole, the patterns of such thinking have destroyed societies throughout history. Crypto as a vehicle has certainly done the United States political harm by making it trivial to give money to the president as directly as can be reasonably imagined while being technically in compliance with current law. The only way to walk it back is to reel it in, which nobody in crypto has any interest in doing, because it would bring down asset prices. All is done in the name of number go up and we have all agreed not to talk about it until after we’ve benefitted, when we can all silently buy land and go away.

In this environment I found myself becoming less honest over time. Relative to my years of experience, the crypto industry overpaid me, gave me unusually early management and general leadership opportunities, and flew me all over the world. In exchange, I shut up, spoke the talking points on podcasts, and felt increasingly like I was compromising something important.

This feeling, more than any other, is why I have decided to leave the industry behind.

Idealism, grifters, and you

It is also a skewed industry. In most professional settings there is a clear delineation between idealists and pragmatists. Healthy companies need both: those who ideate and consider the future, and those who constrain and mold the vision into what is feasible. In crypto, the pragmatists have all but surrendered to the idealists and left the industry, skewing the situation further, and leaving space for grifters who claim to be idealists. Some of these grifters have become billionaires and thus legitimized themselves somewhat, but they aren’t taken seriously—I mean, come on, nobody thinks Justin Sun and, say, Michael Bloomberg are on the same level, or even the same conceptual universe, despite both being billionaires. One has built a business on which the financial industry depends, and the other merely claimed to have done that. This is how we get communities like Bitcoin Cash which somehow capture $12B of capital without accomplishing anything, all through narrative driven by those idealists. Or so they would have you believe in the optimistic case.

The truth, of course, is that it’s all speculation: the idealists spin tall tales of how the product could be used, but that is not the product. Instead, the product is the dream of unearned riches at the whims of the volatile, unregulated market. The dream is the amoral libertarian dream: to participate in the correct pump-and-dump in the correct way. The dream is most certainly not to change the world, in any sense that extends past one’s own bottom line. The crypto billionaries, excepting cases like e.g. Brian Armstrong, are those who convinced the world of the greatest potential of tangible value and reached the top of the pile. Only few, like Armstrong, have built something of value.

So far what Armstrong has built is a viable, albeit riskier, banking alternative for Americans, primarily, and an above-average money laundering vehicle. But at least Coinbase attempts to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations and at least Kraken collaborates with Kitboga. Most firms in crypto do nothing at all to comply with anything, hoping to avoid enforcement through obscurity or delay it as long as possible as they scale.

They can do this, again, because the enforcement apparatus has been gutted by the current government, something which the crypto industry applauds with no care at all for how it affects the common person’s susceptibility to scams, frauds, and, in rare cases, violence. A world in which the long arm of the law cannot do anything to recover your assets if your private keys (or account login) are stolen by a violent criminal is not a world in which the average consumer of banking services wants to live. Advocates of crypto decentralization often hear this critique, but at this stage it applies even to those who don’t care at all about private key custody or defi because law enforcement also cannot compel Coinbase to return assets it no longer possesses, FDIC insurance doesn’t apply, and also, at baseline, the government doesn’t care.

An insular business culture

Much has been said in the last year about the interconnected financial dealings of the AI companies. It’s at a larger scale than crypto, but I encourage anyone to find and read the customer list for the average crypto startup. The problem is that only crypto companies are terribly comfortable doing business with crypto companies, which both constrains the potential of those companies and drifts the crypto culture further from broader business culture.

Maybe the most visible such drift is the general lack of professionalism at crypto companies. The same forces that conspired to give me outsized opportunity for my age and experience also conspired to make sure my bosses had less experience. This is not an insult: most, like me, deemed themselves better than average at figuring it out on the fly, without so much red tape. Not to toot my own horn here, but I think they were right. Simply put, crypto isn’t an intellectual culture anymore, but individuals who build teams within companies, and who build companies themselves, are very impressive as people.

But there is a fundamental lack of discipline in crypto. It attracts people who want to get around regulations, not follow them. People seek it out strictly because it is transgressive, especially nowadays. One could say it selects for people with low trait conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent, low trait agreeableness. Based on my experience I would say that is a fair top-line description.

This is why, throughout four years of leadership in the crypto industry, I only encountered two other leaders who had ever mentioned any books about management, leadership, or organizational design. I encountered many more who were captured by hype cycles, addicted to the notion of getting their mind blown, and who therefore, somewhere along the way, lost situational awareness. This is not unique to crypto, but I notice a stark contrast. The problem is much worse than average in crypto, I promise you.

Looking forward

It is a software engineering cliché that everyone wants their work to make the world a better place. This may be true. Certainly it is true for me. I want to build tools that help people maximize the time they have available to live their lives on their own terms. Crypto, like every industry, has some pockets of value there. But it is not much.

I am grateful for what the crypto industry did for my career. I am further grateful that my new employer recognized my abilities and did not bucket my resume into crypto-as-proxy-for-illegitimate and ignore me outright, as often happens. I think I was wise to work for crypto companies that did not directly depend on speculative markets for their revenue (even if all crypto companies do indirectly, as I claim here), and I think that is why I avoided the sector’s cyclical layoffs.

I am excited to never think about crypto very much again.