Every cycle of innovation comes with an obituary.

People wrote off the internet when Pets.com collapsed. They wrote off ecommerce when Amazon stock fell 90 percent. They wrote off direct-to-consumer when legacy retail 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 about how “Crypto is Dead?” However, each time, the obituary misses the point. Crypto isn’t dying. It’s evolving. It is being absorbed into the very financial systems it set out to disrupt, and it’s changing the world.

BlackRock ETFs. Visa settlement. Stripe and Circle building their own chains. Mexico moving billions in remittances over stablecoins.

And so many more transformations happening right in front of us. The crypto dream is not dead. In fact, it’s just the start of a new and massively bullish era 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 ETF IBIT already holds over $90 billion in AUM (Aug 2025).

• USDT sits around $165 billion in circulation, USDC 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 not experiments anymore. They are production systems at scale.

Purists might argue that only “pure DeFi” counts.

But once incremental improvements to legacy finance add up to transformational change.

And 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 on-chain.

Crypto never promised purity. It promised progress.

Stablecoins are the new Visa rails

And if Bitcoin ETFs normalized crypto as an investable asset, stablecoins are now normalizing it as a payment rail. Visa and Mastercard are fast adoption crypto rails, as they know if they don’t they’ll be left in the dust. Credit to them.

Stripe reintroduced stablecoin payments, letting merchants accept USDC, and now they’re even launching their own chain, Tempo, to bring all their partners onchain (more thoughts on that another time).

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 world. Stablecoins compress those costs and settle instantly, which unlocks an entirely new design space for payments.

Stablecoins aren’t just a crypto story anymore. They are a global financial story.

As Myosin’s Stablecoins: The Future of Finance report shows, stablecoins already power about $33T in annual transaction volume, rivaling Visa’s $13T.

They are used for remittances, business treasury, humanitarian aid, and more. They are no longer a Trojan horse. They are already running as global infrastructure.

Everyone gets a blockchain?

Crypto is being adopted at such a rapid pace, that we’ve recently seen multiple big players in the payments and stablecoin space launch blockchains from Circle, issuer of $USDC, to Stripe, the only viable traditional competitor slash partner to the payments processor duopoly that is Visa and Mastercard.

What is interesting about Circle’s new blockchain, Arc, is that unlike traditional blockchains such as Ethereum, which uses $ETH, all transactions on Arc settle on and natively use $USDC.

This subtle shift is transformational, in that brands can now issue their own stablecoins. Starbucks Bucks can trade one-to-one with Amazon Bucks. Airline miles could finally become programmable, tradable currencies. In other words, every company can print its own money, while using USDC to settle.

Stripe is now taking a similar path. Their blockchain, reportedly called Tempo, is another Ethereum-compatible chain designed for payments. Unlike Arc, which centers $USDC at the protocol level, Tempo focuses on Stripe’s massive merchant base.

It is built to handle refunds, disputes, and merchant protections onchain. It is the payment processor mindset translated into blockchain infrastructure.

Arc and Tempo both point in the same direction: stablecoin-native chains purpose-built for commerce.

Here’s my hot take. In the long run, every stablecoin focused blockchain, currently built as Layer 1s, will choose to migrate and built on top of Ethereum as secondary blockchains known as Layer 2s. Developers want composability. Regulators are warming to Ethereum.

But most importantly, while everyone wants to control and permission their own ecosystems for maximum control and profit maximization, at scale vendors, companies, developers and beyond need truly Open and Permissionless blockchains to establish TRUE credible neutrality.

Otherwise, what stops a company that upsets the Stripe leadership team from being blacklisted and cut off from all of their financial infrastructure.

Today, Arc and Tempo look like standalone chains today, but in the long term it is more likely than not that they will eventually come home and integrate into the Ethereum eco as Layer 2s.

The geopolitical powerplay

By the way, Visa and Mastercard aren’t going anywhere overnight. But their global dominance is under pressure. There is a massive incentive for non-American countries to reduce dependence on the U.S. duopoly. Especially in a world where American policy is increasingly imposed abroad.

Europe is already moving aggressively. The European Central Bank has warned that U.S. dollar stablecoins threaten Europe’s monetary autonomy. They fear deposits will shift abroad and weaken the euro.

In response, Europe is fast-tracking its own solutions. BaFin in Germany approved EURAU, the first euro-backed stablecoin issued by AllUnity, a joint venture of DWS, Galaxy Digital, and Flow Traders. Société Générale has launched regulated euro and dollar stablecoins under MiCA.

And guess where the EU is exploring deploying a digital euro? A public blockchain like Ethereum or Solana. Credible neutrality matters.

This is not just Europe. Emerging markets in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are already using USDT and USDC as savings and remittance vehicles. Mexico is the clearest example. Every year $65 billion flows from the U.S. into Mexico in remittances.

Bitso, the country’s dominant exchange, already processes around 10 percent of those remittances through stablecoins — $6.4 billion in 2024 alone. Over 90 percent of exchange volume across Latin America is now stablecoin-based.

As Myosin’s Road to LATAM Starts in Mexico report details, stablecoins aren’t beating Bitcoin in Mexico. They are the rail. Families use USDC to save rent money, freelancers use it to get paid, and businesses use it to settle invoices.

This is why Visa and Mastercard’s grip will loosen over time. It might start with one or two percent of flows moving off-card. Then ten percent. Then twenty. Slowly but surely, more direct rails will bypass the duopoly. Stablecoins are already the wedge.

So what does this mean for crypto marketing?

This next era of crypto is not only about rails. It is also about narrative, marketing, and go to market. 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 in the last decade.

But the winners won’t be the ones who only buy ads. They will be the ones who blend crypto-native mechanics with mainstream reach.

Airdrops, on-chain incentives, token-gated communities, KOL campaigns, Discord and Telegram activations can all work, when leveraged effectively. But now paired with billboards, brand films, and influencer marketing at scale for the masses.

Coinbase’s Onchain Summer campaign is an early example. Billboard creative tied to NFT minting. Onchain activations layered over traditional awareness channels. That is the playbook.

For marketers in this industry, 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 about ethos and culture. Winning teams will be bilingual.

The hotter take: crypto becomes invisible

Crypto isn’t dying. It is becoming invisible. Just like ecommerce is now just shopping, crypto will become just finance. Users won’t say they used a stablecoin.

They will say they paid.

They won’t say they invested in a wrapped Bitcoin ETF.

They will say they added exposure to their portfolio.

The technology fades into the background, powering everything without being the headline. The purist lane will always exist. Permissionless DeFi will remain the R&D lab, the cultural counterweight, the place where experiments push the frontier. TradFi rails rebuilt on stablecoins will be the mass market layer.

Both can coexist, and both worlds can win.

Long live crypto

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 each adoption cycle cements the technology deeper into the global economy.

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