Bitcoin was launched with a radical promise: a currency with the scarcity of gold and the convenience of the dollar, beyond the reach of governments and free from inflation. Nearly two decades later, that vision has not materialised. The dollar still dominates trade, finance and reserves, and gold remains the benchmark for long-term value. Yet crypto has not faded away. As World Finance’s special report on crypto’s second life argues, it has found a second life as crypto infrastructure, a parallel layer of financial plumbing that thrives where traditional systems are slow, weak or politically blocked.
Why the currency dream faded
Economists judge money by three functions: a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Crypto struggles on all three. Transactions can be slow, costly and occasionally fail, and the energy demands are substantial. A 2025 Digiconomist report estimated bitcoin’s annual electricity use at 204.44 TWh, enough to rank it 23rd among countries. As a store of value, it is undermined by extreme volatility; research by Baur and Dimpfl in Empirical Economics found bitcoin’s volatility is almost ten times that of major exchange rates. And very few goods or contracts are actually priced in crypto, with the market itself quoted in US dollars.
The decentralised ideal has also proved elusive. Hyun Song Shin, economic adviser and head of research at the Bank for International Settlements, has described crypto as a backlash against the failures of conventional finance after 2008, yet noted that its growth has depended on centralised intermediaries such as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, and that protocols are often controlled by founders and a small group of venture backers. The collapse of FTX, after which Sam Bankman-Fried was jailed over the alleged diversion of about $8bn in customer deposits to Alameda Research, showed how dangerous that concentration can be.
Payments at the edges of the global economy
Where crypto has gained real traction is at the margins, among sanctioned states and in economies with capital controls. The starkest recent example comes from the Strait of Hormuz. Amid the fallout from US and Israeli military action against Iran, Iranian officials and industry figures discussed charging tankers a toll of $1 per barrel, payable in bitcoin. Hamid Hosseini, spokesperson for Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union, said vessels would be given only seconds to pay, making the funds harder to trace or seize. For a large tanker, that works out at roughly $2m per passage.
Iran’s wider crypto ecosystem was reportedly valued at more than $7.78bn last year, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps among prominent users. Washington has responded. A US Treasury campaign announced in May, dubbed Economic Fury, froze nearly $500m in regime-linked crypto and targeted Tehran’s shadow banking networks.
Russia offers a second case. Cut off from SWIFT and mainstream correspondent banking after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it is set to legalise crypto payments in foreign trade from 1 July 2026, allowing exporters to accept bitcoin and stablecoins. Crypto-facilitated trade, mostly oil exports to China and India, reached roughly 1trn rubles ($11bn) in 2025. Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin of the Royal United Services Institute describes crypto settlement as a state-tolerated, and sometimes state-enabled, payment rail for military procurement.
Stablecoins and the rise of crypto infrastructure
The most important part of this story, however, is not bitcoin but stablecoins. Worth about $320bn, roughly 11.5% of the total crypto market of around $2.58trn, these tokens are typically issued by a single company and backed mainly by cash and short-term US government debt. According to the IMF, the combined market value of the two largest has tripled since 2023 to $260bn, while trading volumes rose 90% to $23trn in 2024.
Their appeal is speed. Cross-border transfers through banks and SWIFT can take one to five days; blockchain settlement can finish in seconds or minutes. In Argentina, households and businesses hold USDT to shield savings from peso devaluation. Freelancers and exporters in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia accept stablecoins to avoid correspondent banking delays. Similar patterns have appeared in Turkey and Nigeria, and earlier in Venezuela, where bitcoin users reportedly rose from 450 to 85,000 between 2014 and 2016 as hyperinflation took hold.
The irony is striking. Rather than displacing the dollar, dollar-backed stablecoins extend its reach, creating new demand for US Treasuries and giving people in unstable economies easier access to the greenback. That outcome directly contradicts Bitcoin’s founding aim of removing trusted third parties, and it raises concerns for central banks elsewhere that may lose some control over domestic liquidity.
Central banks and banks move in
Governments that once dismissed crypto are now borrowing its underlying technology. The Bahamas launched its sand dollar in October 2020 and Nigeria its eNaira in October 2021, with Jamaica’s JAM-DEX following in 2022. Today, 41 central bank digital currency projects are at the pilot stage, including China’s e-CNY, India’s digital rupee, Brazil’s Drex, Russia’s digital ruble and the digital euro. Financial inclusion is a major motive, particularly in places with many unbanked citizens.
Commercial banks are experimenting too. The Bank of England is working with private lenders on distributed ledger technology, five US banks are moving to an Ethereum-based tokenised deposit system, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority is piloting cross-bank tokenised deposit transfers with HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of China. Standard Chartered also runs real-time treasury operations on its own blockchain in Singapore. These projects take the efficiency of crypto infrastructure while keeping regulated institutions firmly in charge.
A tool built for a fragmenting world
The IMF has said that tokenisation and stablecoins are here to stay, though how widely they will be adopted remains uncertain. The broader backdrop favours them. Sanctions, export controls, tariffs and technological decoupling are pushing the global economy into regional blocs, increasing the incentive for alternative trade and settlement channels. Blockchain networks, often siloed and subject to divergent national rules, fit that fragmenting landscape and may even reinforce it.
Conclusion
Crypto will not replace sovereign currencies or become universal money. Its lasting role is more modest but still significant: a set of financial adaptation tools that work around political and institutional constraints. For investors and policymakers, the lesson is to watch the pipes rather than the price charts. The revolution Bitcoin promised never fully arrived, but crypto infrastructure has quietly become part of how money moves.
