Digital assets traded on decentralised networks. The combined value of all cryptocurrencies was less than $20bn at the start of Donald Trump's first term in 2017; by mid-2025 it exceeded $3trn. Bitcoin, the largest single cryptocurrency, was launched in 2009 and embraced by an anti-authoritarian movement with utopian goals about revolutionising finance and defending individuals against expropriation and inflation.
Jurisdictions including the European Union, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates have given digital assets regulatory clarity in recent years without the rampant conflicts of interest seen in America. Nearly three-quarters of crypto holders live outside the West, and much of the early adoption of tokenised assets is happening in the developing world, where banking access is limited.
American crypto regulation has swung sharply between administrations. Under Joe Biden, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), led by Gary Gensler, took the view that many cryptocurrencies were securities and sued large trading platforms including Coinbase, Binance and Crypto.com.
Under Donald Trump's second term the regulatory climate reversed. Paul Atkins, Trump's SEC chairman, spent eight years as co-chairman of a crypto industry group before his appointment. Brian Quintenz, Trump's nominee to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), was previously head of crypto policy at Andreessen Horowitz. Hester Peirce, who runs the SEC's new crypto task-force, is known in the industry as "crypto mom". More than a dozen enforcement actions against crypto firms were halted after Trump's inauguration, including cases against Coinbase, Crypto.com, Ripple Labs and Kraken.
The SEC has also paused its defence of climate-change disclosure rules in court, and is likely to axe requirements for disclosure about the use of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The category of "accredited investor", which limits who can invest in private-market assets, has existed in some form since 1982. It currently requires an investor to have at least $1m in assets, or to have had a gross annual income of $200,000 or more for two years. Under Mark Uyeda's brief acting chairmanship, the SEC loosened enforcement of these rules. Apollo and Blackstone are eyeing America's enormous stock of individual-retirement-account and 401k-plan savings; access would require the Department of Labour to reassure pension-plan managers that private-market assets meet their fiduciary standards.
The crypto industry favours having most cryptocurrencies classified as commodities, regulated by the CFTC rather than the SEC. The CFTC is far smaller: it requested a budget of $399m and 725 staff for the 2025 financial year, compared with the SEC's $2.6bn and 5,073 staff.
Venture-capital funds invested almost $5bn in crypto firms in the first three months of 2025, the highest sum in almost three years.
The amount of real-world assets traded on blockchains—including private credit, US Treasury bonds and commodities—almost tripled in the 18 months to mid-2025, reaching $25bn. Tokens representing real-world traditional financial assets grew roughly 300% in the 20 months to late 2025. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are large issuers of tokenised money-market funds; BlackRock's, the largest, is worth over $2bn. Larry Fink, BlackRock's boss, has said he expects tokenised funds to become "as familiar to investors as ETFs". A tokenised money-market fund can double as a form of payment, since its tokens are backed by safe assets and can be swapped seamlessly on blockchains while offering yields far above bank savings rates. JPMorgan Chase announced plans for a stablecoin-like product called JPMorgan Deposit Token (JPMD). Robinhood launched over 200 new tokens for European investors on June 30th 2025, enabling them to trade American stocks and ETFs outside ordinary trading hours.
Holders of stock tokens typically do not own the underlying securities; they own a derivative that tracks the asset's value. They do not gain voting rights, and if the token issuer goes bankrupt, customers compete with other creditors for possession of the underlying assets. Linqto, a fintech startup that offered shares in private firms through special-purpose vehicles, filed for bankruptcy in July 2025, leaving buyers unclear whether they owned the assets they believed they possessed. The SEC has emphasised that "tokenised securities are still securities" and that disclosure rules will be enforced regardless of crypto packaging.
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to the value of another asset, typically American dollars. In 2022 the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin collapsed, demonstrating the fragility of coins not fully backed by reserves. Payments firms have begun embracing them: Mastercard has said it will allow customers and merchants to pay and settle transactions in stablecoins; Stripe launched stablecoin financial accounts in 101 countries and bought Bridge, a stablecoin platform. Three years after scrapping its Diem project, Meta has considered re-entering the stablecoin market. World Liberty Financial's USD1, launched in March 2025, quickly became one of the world's largest dollar-pegged stablecoins after MGX, an Abu Dhabi government investment firm, used it to invest $2bn in Binance. A bipartisan bill to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins failed to pass the Senate on May 8th 2025, partly because Democrats were concerned it would benefit the Trump family's crypto interests. The GENIUS Act, a revised version, was signed into law by Donald Trump on July 18th 2025. It confirms that stablecoins are not securities and requires them to be fully backed by safe, liquid assets; it allows Treasuries maturing in 93 days or fewer to be used as collateral. The act forbids stablecoin issuers from paying interest—a sop to banks worried about losing deposits—but the prohibition does not apply to platforms such as Coinbase and PayPal, which offer backdoor rewards through rebates. Tether, the biggest issuer, has been fined for misrepresenting its reserves, which have never been fully audited by an independent entity; Circle, another issuer, had 8% of its reserves jeopardised by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. The European Central Bank has been laying the groundwork for a digital euro since November 2023, partly to challenge the dominance of Visa and Mastercard. Retail giants, including Amazon and Walmart, have reportedly considered launching their own stablecoins, which could function like gift cards and cut out credit-card firms such as Mastercard and Visa, which take a margin of about 2% on sales they facilitate in America. Tether, the biggest stablecoin issuer, says it holds more Treasuries than all German investors combined. Total stablecoin issuance stood at over $280bn by late 2025, some 60% more than a year earlier; Citigroup expects it to reach $1.6trn by 2030, while Standard Chartered forecasts $2trn within three years. Stablecoins are involved in less than 1% of financial transactions worldwide. Scott Bessent, America's treasury secretary, has promoted stablecoins as a way to drive up demand for American debt and pull down borrowing costs—though JPMorgan Chase estimates that only 6% of stablecoin demand comes from overseas investors.
Nine of the top 20 countries on the Chainalysis global cryptocurrency-adoption index are Asian, including India (first globally for the third consecutive year, with an estimated $338bn in crypto inflows between mid-2024 and 2025), Pakistan (third) and Vietnam. Trading for profit remains popular, but the region's dominance mainly reflects a shift towards using crypto as financial infrastructure rather than a speculative plaything. Remittances are a key application: around 24m people from South-East Asia work abroad, and the average cost of sending $200 home was 6.5% in 2025. In the Philippines remittances are 9% of GDP. Between January and July 2025 global stablecoin transfer volumes topped $4trn.
Businesses are adopting stablecoins for cross-border payments to avoid the fees, delays and compliance checks imposed by correspondent banks. Monthly business-to-business stablecoin volumes surged from under $100m at the start of 2023 to over $6bn by mid-2025, according to Artemis, a crypto analytics firm. Asia has more than 210m gig-economy workers—roughly half the global total—many of whom receive payments in stablecoins. Pakistan, with around 2m freelancers and $38bn in annual remittances, has many workers who opt to receive payments in stablecoins, convertible to local currency for a fee of 1-3%, roughly half what traditional channels charge. Visa is testing a system that sends payments directly to recipients' stablecoin wallets.
Hong Kong's stablecoin legislation came into effect on August 1st 2025. It requires issuers to have capital of at least HK$25m ($3.2m), to back their coins with a pool of safe, liquid assets worth at least as much as the coins' face value, and to collect customer information, submit to audits and comply with anti-money-laundering regulations. Tether, the company behind the world's most popular stablecoin, started life in Hong Kong. The territory's regulators allowed some firms, including a subsidiary of JD.com and Standard Chartered, to experiment with stablecoins in a regulatory sandbox in 2024, focusing on supply-chain financing and cross-border payments rather than crypto trading. The first firms to win stablecoin licences in Hong Kong are expected to peg to the Hong Kong dollar—itself tied to the American dollar since the 1980s—rather than the yuan, in part because yuan-denominated assets are scarce outside mainland China. If stablecoins take off in Hong Kong, they would raise demand for dollar assets to back them, obliging the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to buy American dollars to maintain the peg.
Despite mainland China's ban on cryptocurrency trading since 2021, a paper by Marco Reuter of the IMF estimates that in 2024 China bought $18.6bn of stablecoins from the rest of the world and sold $3.6bn.
Stablecoins have become the most popular cryptocurrency for cocaine laundering. Chainalysis estimates that in 2024 some $41bn of crypto linked to illegal activities changed hands around the world. Chinese laundering groups operating in the Americas can repay drug gangs with cryptocurrency rather than cash. In Brazil, stablecoins are easily converted into cash by doleiros (black-market money-changers), and drug gangs also use them to pay suppliers. USD Tether is singled out by Brazilian police as one of the biggest problems in financial crime.
The American Bankers Association has noted that if banks lost about 10% of their $19trn in retail deposits—their cheapest form of funding—to stablecoins and tokenised money-market funds, their average funding cost would rise from 2.03% to 2.27%.
Venezuela has become a haven for digital finance amid monetary chaos. Mobile-phone applications such as Binance and Airtm let users exchange currencies at rates set by an active market. Businesses often use these platforms to rid themselves of bolívars immediately, before the currency's value slides again. Between 1950 and 1980 Venezuela had the lowest inflation rate in the world; by 2025 Bank of America forecast 530% inflation, and a total of 14 zeros had been removed from Venezuelan banknotes since 2007. The regime arrested people associated with Monitor Dólar, a website publishing black-market rates, but the digital markets remain beyond its control.
In September 2025 British police seized 61,000 bitcoin from Qian Zhimin, a 47-year-old Chinese citizen, in what they called the largest seizure of cryptocurrency anywhere. At then-current prices the stash was worth more than $7bn. Ms Qian had used 1.1bn yuan from a Ponzi scheme run by her company, Tianjin Blue Sky Grid Electronic Technology, to buy the bitcoin. The scheme, dismantled by Chinese police in 2017, had taken deposits totalling over 40bn yuan ($5.6bn) from nearly 130,000 people. Fake documents allowed her to flee to Britain; an attempted purchase of lavish property using the bitcoin triggered the investigation, which involved "unprecedented co-operation" between London and Chinese police. Bitcoin's appreciation since the purchase meant the seized stash was worth about $1bn more than the total sum investors had put into her firm.
The first applications for spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds were approved by America's regulators in January 2024. Donald Trump's election victory in November that year gave bitcoin another boost. BlackRock is custodian of the world's largest bitcoin ETF; one-third of the customers who bought into the fund as their first BlackRock product went on to invest in the firm's more classic ETFs. In October 2025 bitcoin's market value peaked at $2.5trn.
In March 2025 Trump established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a vehicle for bitcoin acquired mainly as a result of law-enforcement seizures. Some legislators, including Cynthia Lummis, a Republican senator, have supported the purchase of more bitcoin on the open market.
Strategy Inc, formerly MicroStrategy, has become the world's largest corporate owner of bitcoin, holding 650,000 coins—3% of the total stock—accumulated by borrowing since 2020. Founded by Michael Saylor, the firm owes $800m a year in dividends and debt-interest payments. By late 2025 its market capitalisation of $54bn was below the value of its holdings, raising the prospect of crypto fire-sales. Its convertible debt begins to mature in 2027.
The total stablecoin market has grown to more than $300bn. The European Systemic Risk Board fears that the failure of a large crypto-investment product could spill across conventional finance: "The overall volumes have now reached levels that make this scenario a genuine concern." Since stablecoins are mostly backed by American Treasuries, a shock could shake bond markets if issuers have to fire-sell assets to return cash to investors.
A slump in digital-asset prices and an $8bn fraud at FTX, a large cryptocurrency exchange, triggered a downturn known as "the crypto winter" starting in 2022. The crisis spread to the banking system: Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which did heavy business with crypto firms and investors, suffered runs that threatened the wider financial system in 2023.
A second, deeper crypto winter began in late 2025. Bitcoin fell from $124,000 in early October to around $70,000 by February 2026—a 45% plunge—and the total market value of all cryptocurrencies fell by more than $2trn. Measurable borrowing against crypto assets had doubled over the twelve months to September 2025, reaching $74bn and surpassing the late-2021 level. Starting on October 10th, around $19bn-worth of leveraged bets were quickly liquidated. Strategy Inc's share price dropped by almost 70% since July.
Crypto exchange-traded funds, which had been expected to support prices by broadening the pool of buyers, began pulling prices down. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), the fastest-growing ETF in history with assets worth almost $100bn by October, saw outflows of $3.5bn over 80 trading days—its first extended sell-off. Most capital invested in the fund had suffered losses.
Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum, said the industry had lost its rebellious streak: "We all basically became part of the system, and you know what the system does when you become part of it? They make it not cool." A Bank of America survey in September 2025 suggested the vast majority of fund managers had no allocation to crypto at all; digital assets accounted for just 0.4% of total portfolio value. The Czech central bank became the first to buy crypto, snapping up an experimental $1m-worth of bitcoin, but announced no plans to buy more.
The crypto industry has become a major force in American electoral politics through Fairshake, a network of affiliated super-PACs that spent over $130m in the 2024 election cycle. With $260m in receipts, Fairshake was the largest non-partisan super-PAC of any kind. Its biggest corporate donors are Ripple and Coinbase; its largest individual contributors are Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. Fairshake had $116m in cash on hand for the 2026 midterms.
Crypto has found a home among the countercultural, anti-elite politics of the new American right, supplanting banks as the foremost financial constituency of the Republican Party. The industry's largest political action committees boast hundreds of millions of dollars in cash ready to be deployed in the 2026 midterm elections. Where the interests of banks clash with those of crypto newcomers, the outcome is no longer certain to fall in banks' favour. America's biggest lenders have found themselves relying on Democratic senators and allied with trade unions and centre-left think-tanks in opposing crypto firms' advances.
Cryptojacking is the practice of remotely sneaking crypto-mining software onto other people's computers. A study published in 2022 by Sysdig, a security firm in San Francisco, estimates that every dollar in crypto thus generated costs victims an average of $53 in computing expenses. Scripts used for cryptojacking—including Crypto-Loot, Minr and XMRig—can be embedded in email attachments, free apps, online "malvertisements" and web browsers. Increasingly they are packaged as "fileless" code, which is harder to detect.
Monero is one of the relatively few cryptocurrencies that can be mined on personal devices, making laptops and mobile phones attractive targets. In January 2025 a password-spray attack allowed crypto-jacking software to be run on servers rented by USAID, at a cost of nearly $500,000. Google introduced a programme in 2023 to provide certain cloud-service victims credits worth up to $1m for cryptojacking losses incurred over any 12-month period.
On December 12th 2025 an American banking regulator approved new national bank-trust charters for five digital-finance firms, including Circle and Ripple. The designation does not qualify the institutions to take deposits or lend money, but it lets them provide custody for assets nationally rather than relying on a patchwork of state-level approvals. Banks had pressed regulators not to approve charters for crypto firms.
However, never daunted, I will cope with adversity in my traditional manner ... sulking and nausea.