Maybe I'm getting old but I remember when the whole point of crypto was to not need a bank, to stop asking permission to use your own money. No more 3-5 business day transfers, no more overdraft fees, no more manager deciding if your wire looks sus today. That was the pitch and why I got in.
But it seems somewhere along the way we lost the plot. Now half this space loses its mind every time a bank CEO says something mildly positive. Jamie Dimon calls Bitcoin a fraud for a decade, threatens to fire his own traders for touching it, lobbies against every piece of crypto-friendly legislation he can - then pivots to tokenization has a future and suddenly he's a visionary. These are the people who tried to bury this thing. They didn't have a change of heart, they just realized they can't kill it so now they want a cut.
And we're letting them in. ETFs put a custodian between you and your Bitcoin. Stablecoins increasingly need bank partners to exist. Most "crypto products" just reroute your money back through the same legacy pipes with a blockchain receipt stapled to it. We're rebuilding the exact system we were supposed to escape.
Real adoption to me is pretty simple - when did you last actually need your bank for something? Not out of habit, genuine necessity. Because I look at my own situation and honestly can't give a good answer anymore. Been using Nexo for a couple years, tried Ledn too for a bit - the money just sits there working instead of rotting in a checking account, and when I needed a bigger chunk of cash last year I just borrowed against my BTC instead of selling it. Didn't have to explain myself to anyone, no approval process, done in minutes. That's closer to the original idea than anything Jamie Dimon has to say about it.
Anyway, not trying to be preachy about it, just find it strange that the milestone we celebrate is a banker's approval rather than making bankers irrelevant. That was always the goal wasn't it?