Back in 2021, we were aping into dog coins at 3 AM based on Elon’s tweets, flipping JPEGs for Lambos, and thinking Vitalik was a god. It was dumb. It was chaotic. It was beautiful. But at least it was our chaos.
Fast-forward to 2025, and the game has not calmed down, it just got co-opted. Now it is not random Telegram devs ruggeding us; it is suits, senators, and Trump dropping loyalty tokens like he is launching an ICO for the Constitution. We did not kill the system. The system bought a Ledger and rugged us all.
Let us break it down before we mint another regret.
2021: The Wild West of DeFi Degens
Retail ruled the jungle. Everyone had a MetaMask, a dream, and absolutely no risk management. You bought $SHIB, held $DOGE, and pretended you understood how impermanent loss worked. It was a bull run powered by memes, hopium, and the collective belief that “numbers go up” was a valid economic theory.
Sure, there were rug pulls, flash loan attacks, and random protocol nukes, but they were "honest" scams. The kind that said, “Hey bro, I might disappear tomorrow,” and we still sent $ETH.
2025: The New Meta is Macro (and Manipulation)
Now we have got ETFs, BlackRock yield farms, and presidential tokens. Trump literally dropped his own coin. Biden still does not know the difference between a wallet and a waffle iron. And yet somehow this is called “maturity”?
Spoiler: We did not get decentralization, we got tokenized control.
Institutions aped in, sure. But they did not join the party. They bought the DJ booth, kicked us out of the booth, and then blamed us for the music being trash. Now the market pumps when Powell coughs and dumps when a senator sneezes near Bitcoin.
Narrative Shift: From Wagmi to We Are Already Screwed
Back in ’21, we had dreams: DAOs ruling the world, NFTs for everything, yield farming our way to freedom. Fast-forward, and we have got KYC’d DeFi, AML NFTs, and “community governance” run by five wallets, all VC.
Even Ethereum’s roadmap feels like a dystopian IKEA manual. And the only thing Solana does faster than transactions is onboarding politicians with token allocations.
Oh, and if you thought decentralization was still a thing, good luck using any dApp without connecting your entire life to a compliance oracle that knows what you ate last Tuesday.
Trading in 2025: It Is Not About Charts, It Is About Chaos Theory
TA? Dead. On-chain data? Cool, but irrelevant when the market moves on campaign rallies. Want to long Bitcoin? Better check who is ahead in the Ohio polls. Want to ape into memecoins? Make sure it is not secretly funded by a lobbyist PAC.
This is not crypto anymore. It is Game of Thrones with gas fees.
My Final Conclusion
Crypto did not grow up. It sold out. And the joke is on us because we thought the problem was central banks, not central narratives.
The moon is still real. It is just tokenized, geopolitically regulated, and only accessible if you pass AML-KYC with facial recognition and a campaign donation.
If you are reading this, follow me already. You are gonna need help figuring out which chain your Social Security checks are on next cycle.
And the rest of you? Follow me on Publish0x and Medium for more. I might not save you, but I will make you laugh while they drain your bags.
Also, don’t be a pleb and sign up for Binance using my link and start stacking smarter. Because if we are all gonna get rugged, we might as well earn a referral bonus on the way down.
