Let’s be brutally honest. At this point, nearly two decades in, there are still no—I repeat, no—significant legal use cases for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, the supposed genesis of this revolution, was conjured in 2008. In tech years, that’s practically prehistoric—barely younger than the iPhone, positively ancient compared to Apple Pay. For 17 agonizing years, crypto advocates have shrieked from the rooftops that blockchain tokens will imminently displace conventional finance with widespread legal use cases. “Any day now,” they crow. Yet “any day” stubbornly refuses to arrive.

This isn’t for lack of trying. El Salvador, in a fit of national delusion, made a catastrophic push to ram Bitcoin down its citizens’ throats, making taxes payable in it, subsidizing digital wallets, and strong-arming businesses into accepting it. The result? A complete, unmitigated bust. The dream of El Salvador as a crypto-investment paradise has imploded, leaving it to pivot, bizarrely, into the Gulag business.

The rise of cryptocurrency has spawned a deeply corrupting political machine in Washington that poses a grave threat to American democracy. Through an army of well-funded lobbyists, dark money PACs, and captured politicians, the crypto industry has metastasized from a fringe technology movement into a corrosive force eating away at our democratic institutions. Digital assets, hawked to a public with utopian promises of obsolete central banking, ubiquitous financial inclusion, and individual monetary supremacy, have revealed their putrid reality: gambling and grift tailor-made for our post-truth, social media-addled era. We are witnessing, with horrifying clarity, how our democratic institutions are being captured by a new generation of grifters, con artists, and criminals. And one of them is our president.

And what of the supposed “blockchain” technology that underpins all this, separate from the speculative tokens? Financial services companies have had 15 long years to explore any alleged legal, non-token “blockchain” uses. From a regulatory perspective, there’s nothing stopping them. Companies like JP Morgan, Citibank, NASDAQ, The Clearing House, and DTCC have dutifully experimented with it. The verdict? If there’s no speculative token attached, it’s just a clunky, inefficient database. This kind of “blockchain” or “tokenization” software is demonstrably less efficient than simple existing systems, offering zero practical upside. So-called “blockchain use cases” are a phantom, a marketing gimmick, and certainly not something that requires bespoke laws or warrants a single second of Congress’s time. Blockchain is a dead-end technology.

To the inevitable, tired refrain from crypto lobbyists to “not stifle innovation,” the only sane Democratic response must be a derisive, “What innovation? Can you point to it? Is this ‘innovation’ in the room with us right now?” After 17 years of broken promises and spectacular implosions, the “innovation” crypto offers is primarily in the fields of unregistered securities, industrial-scale money laundering, and new, more efficient ways to fleece the desperate and the gullible. From the perspective of Democratic values—which should champion social responsibility, economic equity, and institutional integrity—the crypto movement’s unfettered, laissez-faire savagery is anathema. Regulations exist for good reasons: to ensure markets are fair, transparent, and accountable, and to protect investors from the rampant fraud and manipulation that are crypto’s lifeblood.

Strict enforcement of existing securities regulation frameworks—specifically the Securities Act of 1933 and Securities Exchange Act of 1934—would effectively terminate the cryptocurrency industry’s operations within the United States. The overwhelming majority of crypto offerings and exchanges currently operating would be deemed non-compliant with these foundational statutes, and their business models would be rendered unprofitable and unviable. This is not a ban per se, but the outcome would essentially be the same. Rather than equivocate on this outcome, politicians should embrace this conclusion. The cryptocurrency market’s primary function of facilitating speculative trading of digital tokens with no underlying economic claims or productive value represents neither capital formation nor efficient market allocation. Such pure speculation, divorced from fundamental economic activity, provides no meaningful contribution to aggregate welfare or economic productivity. If society wishes to facilitate zero-sum gambling, we have properly regulated venues for such activities—they’re called casinos. The distinction between legitimate capital markets and speculative gambling must be maintained and strengthened.

Crypto is a rabidly libertarian project, fueled by the economic desolation and precarity wrought by 30 years of rising inequality, and now synthesized with the financialization of populist rage. It masquerades as a champion of individual freedom and decentralization, but in reality, it actively undermines the institutions and social contracts that are the very bedrock of personal liberties in liberal democracies. By aggressively promoting a system that prioritizes unregulated, anonymous transactions, crypto advocates deliberately foster an environment ripe for industrial-scale exploitation and catastrophic instability. This is a monstrous deception when peddled as a path to financial liberation. The grim truth is that it concentrates wealth and power into the grasping hands of a new technocratic elite, leaving the vast majority cannon fodder for market volatility and sophisticated financial manipulation. The promise of crypto as a great equalizer is a cruel mirage, obscuring a far more insidious engine of economic disparity and social atomization.

In the wake of FTX’s collapse and Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction, the industry has only intensified its influence peddling, raising hundreds of millions through Super PACs to push legislation that would grant it legitimacy while avoiding meaningful oversight. Key Senate races have become battlegrounds, with industry groups specifically targeting independent voices like Senators Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren who have consistently stood against special interests.

The political targeting and subsequent defeat of Senator Sherrod Brown, orchestrated by the crypto industry, should serve as a stark wake-up call regarding the sector’s burgeoning political force. Deploying $40 million, these industry advocates successfully unseated the Senate Banking Committee Chair, a 30-year stalwart champion of consumer protection and financial regulation. This substantial investment supported his Republican challenger, an avowed crypto advocate, and this outcome not only contributed to a shift in Senate control but also powerfully demonstrated the crypto sector’s rapidly escalating political influence.

The campaign against Brown exemplified the industry’s clear-cut strategy: identifying and targeting critics for removal while vigorously backing pro-crypto candidates. The campaign against Brown was a textbook example of the industry’s thuggish, binary worldview: politicians are either useful idiots to be lavishly funded or obstacles to be ruthlessly eliminated. The message to every other public servant was brutally clear: cross the crypto cartel, and they will come for your seat.

The primary allure of cryptocurrency, its supposed democratizing potential, is a bald-faced lie. The narrative that circumventing traditional banking will democratize finance is logically incoherent. Crypto assets are a zero-sum speculative casino—meaning that for anyone to make money, someone else must lose an equal amount—not a new form of money or a store of value. There is no fundamental economic value to crypto assets outside this unregulated gambling den. Cryptocurrency’s inherent illiberality is most starkly revealed in its gleeful facilitation of an unregulated shadow market where nefarious actors thrive in open defiance of the rule of law. This anarchic cesspool, eagerly sheltered by opportunistic Gulf autocracies and tax havens, is a breeding ground for money laundering, tax evasion, “pig butchering” scams, and the financing of global criminal enterprises. Crypto is the tool of the autocrat, the strongman, the kleptocrat, and the criminal.

Then there are stablecoins—crypto’s grimy back-alley for moving money, primarily to offshore casinos and other shadowy enterprises. We already possess robust, legal mechanisms for money transmission that don’t punch gaping holes in KYC/AML compliance or conjure new, unregulated money market funds teetering on the brink of a run. If our current payment systems need an upgrade, it should come through transparent reform, not by legitimizing shady offshore money transmitters with documented ties to organized crime, hostile foreign powers, or enriching the Trump family.

The adoption and promotion of cryptocurrency inherently endorse fiscal policies that guarantee economic instability. Cryptocurrencies are, by their very nature, engineered for extreme, stomach-churning volatility. This is the polar opposite of the economic stability Democrats should be fighting for. The capricious, casino-like nature of crypto markets foments widespread financial precarity, especially for economically vulnerable populations lured by the siren song of impossible returns. Thus, the promise of financial liberation morphs insidiously into the specter of economic ruin, all cynically disguised as populist engagement.

It’s no accident that crypto has become a cultural lodestar for Silicon Valley libertarians, Barstool conservatives, the MAGA mob, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. For years, Fox News and the like have been hawking gold coins, snake-oil diet pills, and financial doomerism as a perpetual grift machine. Crypto is merely the latest, shiniest iteration of these scams. Donald Trump launching his own memecoin while his sons establish shady crypto ventures trading on their father’s name and office? Shocking, said no one ever. All these ideologies revel in anti-establishment, anti-state, and anti-democratic nihilism, and crypto is the perfect conduit for channeling that populist rage and those ill-gotten dollars into a speculative inferno. The crypto bubble inflates and sustains itself on a brew of conspiracy theory, financial doomerism, widespread financial illiteracy, and a seemingly endless supply of fresh marks for the social media grift economy.

Paradoxically, the Trump administration may also be a gift to critics, as exemplified by the shameless TRUMP memecoin launch on the eve of his inauguration. Nothing could better crystallize cryptocurrency’s true nature than a president eagerly slapping his “brand” on a worthless token, nakedly designed to extract money from his most devoted followers. For those encountering cryptocurrency for the first time through this lens, the industry’s protestations about “financial freedom” and “technological innovation” ring especially hollow. When a sitting president is willing to so blatantly leverage his office for a quick crypto cash grab, it becomes impossible to maintain the pretense that this technology serves any purpose beyond enabling sophisticated grift. The TRUMP token stands as a perfect crystallization of everything wrong with cryptocurrency—and now it’s incredibly easy to paint the entire industry with a broad brush given the very visible examples of predation at the highest levels of government.

From a broad perspective, the crypto movement is a machine that takes gambling on one side and outputs Republican campaign contributions and radicalized young men on the other. Its rise is intrinsically tied to an emergent strain of libertarian populism that corrosively eats away at democratic institutions. Operating outside any meaningful regulatory oversight, the crypto market champions a virulent ideology of radical individualism that pulverizes collective social norms and responsibilities. This financialization of populist rage is a clear and present danger, sowing discord and societal fragmentation. Crypto evangelists frame their crusade in explicitly adversarial terms against ‘the establishment’—vilifying centralized banking and, by extension, the democratic governance structures that provide vital oversight. This narrative breeds distrust and disillusionment with the very institutions essential for a functioning society. It is a childish, puerile anti-system politics, hell-bent on destruction, incapable of building or reforming—the absolute antithesis of what the Democratic Party should stand for.

Even more disconcertingly, the demographic most susceptible to these narratives is composed of those already battered and disenfranchised by existing economic systems. Crypto-evangelists prey on these vulnerabilities, pitching crypto as a panacea. But as any serious inquiry shows, this “liberation” is a cruel hoax: crypto is predatory inclusion, cloaking itself in the language of empowerment to more efficiently bleed a vulnerable populace dry. These individuals are ensnared in speculative mania, gambling addiction, and rampant scams, deepening their financial precarity.

Apologists will whine that opposing cryptocurrency stifles innovation and economic freedom. This is preposterous. It fails to distinguish between genuine financial innovation and vacuous speculative bubbles built on dead-end technology. True financial innovation solves real-world problems, boosts economic efficiency, and promotes inclusive growth—benchmarks cryptocurrency has spectacularly failed to meet for over a decade.

In 2020, I wrote what became a widely-circulated critique of cryptocurrency and its implications for our financial system. As a technologist who deeply believes in the potential of technology to strengthen democratic institutions, I took no pleasure in forecasting the corrosive potential of crypto assets. Unfortunately, the intervening years have borne out many of my predictions with shocking prescience.

In the years since publishing that critique, I’ve had the privilege of engaging with financial authorities and policymakers worldwide—from central banks and regulatory bodies to national governments and think tanks. My work has included coordinating joint letters to legislative bodies across three continents, authoring a book on the subject, and giving interviews at most global media outlets. I’ve done as much as humanly possible for one person to do to raise awareness of the risks posed by crypto assets because as a millennial who lived through the financial crisis I feel a twisted sense of civic responsibility to at least attempt to stave off the dark future I see unfolding.

However, I must admit that despite extensive efforts to sound the alarm, the response has been stubborn resistance in the face of an overwhelming ambient culture of techno-solutionism that pervades modern life. Our democratic institutions remain paralyzed in the face of crypto’s mounting threats. The ascension of the Trump administration has only accelerated this regulatory abdication and the threat of crypto. I won’t sugar-coat it, we are living through a challenging era and things may get much worse before they get better.

What originated as an obscure libertarian experiment has metastasized into an existential threat to financial stability and a political machine for far right extremists. The parallel shadow system constructed around crypto assets has reproduced precisely the systemic vulnerabilities that post-2008 reforms sought to eliminate. We have watched in real time as major crypto institutions imploded, retail investors lost their savings, and sophisticated financial instruments emerged to conceal rather than manage risk. And yet governments across the western world have done next to nothing to address these issues. After years of persistent advocacy, I recognize that the next phase of this crucial policy debate requires new voices and broader perspectives. People who are smarter and more eloquent than me. The challenges posed by cryptocurrency demand an expanded coalition of experts spanning technology, economics, law enforcement, national security, and public policy.

By opposing crypto, Democrats aren’t fighting progress. The immense resources and talent currently being squandered on crypto could be redirected to technologies addressing actual societal challenges: climate change, healthcare, sustainable energy. A firm stance against cryptocurrency is a vote for technological advancement aligned with public interest and long-term societal well-being, not short-term speculative orgies for a parasitic few.

The insidious claim that “crypto is here to stay”—often paired with the equally lazy “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”—is a thought-terminating cliché designed to excuse regulatory inaction. It’s akin to asserting that because malaria persists, we should abandon all efforts to treat patients or control its spread. While global eradication of a malign influence like crypto may be unrealistic, the United States has a clear duty to aggressively mitigate its harms to our citizens and financial system. Passivity or, worse, capitulation to its supposed inevitability, is not a responsible policy.

Let’s call crypto what it is: a mechanism to exploit the precariat, a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, from the financially illiterate to the operators of digital casinos. Public policy on crypto must be rooted in an unshakeable recognition of its fundamental incompatibility with stable capital markets, social justice, economic stability, and democratic governance. The environmental devastation of crypto mining, the grotesque perpetuation of wealth inequality, and the systematic undermining of governmental oversight all point to a future of socio-economic anarchy—a dystopia diametrically opposed to democratic ideals. Crypto populism, alongside the rise of authoritarians like Putin, Orbán, and Trump, must be opposed with every fiber of our being.

Democrats must abandon any lingering illusions that they are engaged in genteel political discourse or friendly competition. They are in a war. And to win a war, one must cut off the enemy’s supply chain. That means confronting and constraining cryptocurrency, which has emerged as a major pipeline of dark money fueling the Republican Party’s authoritarian agenda.

The Democratic Party’s mandate should be clear: to rigidly reject the rise of authoritarianism through crypto’s encroachment upon our society and starve its capacity to fuel the political forces arrayed against us. Democrats must develop clear, emotionally resonant messaging on cryptocurrency that connects with everyday voters, especially low-information and disengaged voters. Rather than getting bogged down in technical or legal details, the focus should be on crafting simple, memorable slogans (that could fit on a hat) that tap into common-sense skepticism about crypto schemes. There are three core ideas:

1. Cryptocurrency is a useless, speculative, and harmful technology for legitimate finance that causes widespread individual financial ruin and poses systemic economic risks.
2. Cryptocurrency is inherently linked to pervasive fraud and criminality, operating outside or actively undermining necessary regulatory and legal frameworks.
3. Cryptocurrency is a corrosive political force that undermines democratic institutions, fuels right-wing extremism, and threatens monetary sovereignty.

The messaging strategy should emphasize relatable analogies (comparing crypto to casino gambling, magic beans, or Monopoly money), establish clear villains (tech plutocrats, crypto insiders) and victims (regular Americans), and make strong emotional appeals around fairness and financial security. The goal is to bypass complex policy debates in favor of intuitive, kitchen-table economic arguments that feel true to people’s lived experience. This means using simple language free of jargon, offering straightforward solutions like “ban it” or “shut it down,” and maintaining a clear moral stance that cryptocurrency is fundamentally deceptive and harmful to Main Street. By focusing on these basic storytelling elements—simple language, clear stakes, emotional resonance, and calls to action—Democrats can build a messaging framework that energizes voters while advancing substantive policy goals.