Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea’s regime afloat

The only obvious mainstream "success" to come out of crypto is stable coins (Tether/Bitfinex is something like the 5th or 6th largest buyer of US treasuries ...and amusingly keeps all the yield from them). Ironically, this use case also happens to be one that doesn't really require a decentralised ledger (would work equally well with a few cross-border validators, ala DNS root server approach) and lends itself very well to tradfi involvement (since you need pegging to fiat).

For me crypto today looks like ~1998/~2000 ish internet. Big, powerful traditional entities have fully woken up to it and will now take it over and ensure whatever useful use cases exist will be controlled by them with profits also accruing to them. The speculative, lawless days of the crypto wild west (fuelled by oceans of QE & stimmy money); and promises of a satoshi enabled future are well and truly over.

In terms of ushering in a new decentralised monetary order, it has failed completely.