The Visions and Narratives of Crypto

The crypto industry stands at a pivotal juncture. While governments and corporations embrace Bitcoin and stablecoins, the broader crypto landscape oscillates between skeuomorphic narratives of a world on the blockchain and the pitfalls of financial degeneration, creating a narrative impasse within the industry.

The following builds upon previous efforts to define the visions of bitcoin, Ethereum and other crypto assets, exploring the evolution of crypto narratives. We aim to clarify the perceived divergence between bitcoin and the “rest of crypto”, analyze separate visions for Bitcoin and Ethereum, guessing a potential way forward. The terms "vision" and "narrative" will be used interchangeably, as their meanings largely overlap.

Bitcoin as its own category

To describe the ever-evolving nature of narratives that take hold of Bitcoin Nic Carter and Hasu have defined the following categories of bitcoin vision in 2019:

1. E-cash proof of concept
2. Cheap p2p payments network
3. Censorship-resistant digital gold
4. Private and anonymous darknet currency
5. Reserve currency for the cryptocurrency industry
6. Programmable shared database
7. Uncorrelated financial asset

If you want to understand them in detail, we refer you to the original article. In order to keep within the defined visions or narratives, the following tries to expand on the framework to this day.

Bitcoin’s changing tides from 2009 to 2018

We identify three major visions that stand out today: (7.) un/correlated financial asset, (6.) programmable shared database, and (3.) censorship-resistant digital gold (aka credibly neutral asset). The vision of (5.) reserve currency for the cryptocurrency industry faces challenges due to the significant decoupling of the broader crypto market from bitcoin. While price performance shows some correlation at times, their underlying missions diverge.

As early as 2020, we observed a stark contrast between Bitcoin and Ethereum, along with the array of startups and onchain projects that emerged after the 2017 ICO mania. Bitcoin appears to be a complete product, deriving its resilience from trust and governance minimization. In contrast, the rest of the crypto ecosystem largely sacrifices this minimalism for a wider range of complex use cases.

One could argue that Bitcoin is a finished product, whereas Ethereum and other Layer 1 solutions, with their diverse application landscapes, are still works in progress. In this sense, Bitcoin's success is more about narrative-market fit than product-market fit. Bitcoin maximalists view ambitions beyond trust-minimalism as impure, and pragmatists consider them overly experimental.

Nevertheless, a faction of Bitcoin builders continue to foster the vision of (6.) programmable shared database, evident in Ordinals and Layer 2 developments that began to proliferate in 2023. These advancements largely emulate innovations already achieved outside the Bitcoin ecosystem, with NFTs and DeFi gaining traction on Ethereum in 2020 and 2021.

In conclusion, Bitcoin distinguishes itself from the rest of crypto because its adoption relies primarily on narrative acceptance rather than technological innovation. It is grounded in monetary and financial defensiveness, rather than novel financial and commercial applications that often lend themselves to the so-called degeneracy seen in much of the broader crypto space.

Is Bitcoin still a reserve currency of the crypto industry? Given that most people in “the rest of crypto” seem to be underexposed to Bitcoin, and there are no truly trustless methods to use Bitcoin in DeFi, we'd assume that it’s diminishing as a trend, separating Bitcoin from the rest of crypto and defining it as a category of its own.

How have Bitcoin narratives evolved since 2018?

Let’s unpack the three narratives dominating 2025 and their origins.

Uncorrelated Financial Asset (or Permissionless Leverage)

Michael Saylor, bursting onto the scene in early 2021, ushered in the era of Bitcoin as permissionless access to leverage. Though quickly overshadowed by the NFT craze, (3,3) ponzinomics and the 2021 general crypto market surge, this marked the original inception of bitcoin's financialization.

The post-FTX depression briefly interrupted, but did not halt, Bitcoin's ascent as a new asset class. This culminated in the spot ETF launch and the subsequent proliferation of the Microstrategy treasury playbook. A pro-crypto US administration further accelerated market enthusiasm.

Whether a fringe Pascal’s wager or a high-conviction treasury allocation, Bitcoin has been normalized as part of a diversified financial portfolio. While 1-2% allocation to Bitcoin has been seen as investment eccentricity in the past, it has now become a supercharged, levered and correlated asset, bought in size to compensate for portfolio misallocations in the past.

The degree of Bitcoin being uncorrelated is dubious because Bitcoin outperforms only in a broad risk-on environment (and underperforms in a risk-off environment, like 2022). Perhaps quirky would be a more apt description than uncorrelated.

Saylor’s strategy is how we think, Bitcoin went from being uncorrelated asset to permissionless leverage. This may not be the future envisioned by early bitcoiners but it's safe to assume that Bitcoin, wrapped in equity-like instruments, is a major adoption vector.

Censorship-Resistant Digital Gold (Credibly Neutral Asset)

There are some who argue bitcoin is more akin to gold. Finfluencer Ray Dalio is one of the proponents of Bitcoin’s vision as digital gold. Despite Saylor riding the wave of permissionless leverage, the philosophy that Dalio markets is that of a commodity anchoring a new monetary system.

We can argue to what extent today’s accumulation of Bitcoin is more driven by permissionless leverage access rather than the true belief in bitcoin as a safe haven. They are different and the same at the same time¹*. A telltale sign is the old “not your keys, not your coins”. In our mind, a few moments from the recent past crystalized the digital gold vision. One was the fall of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, and Bitcoin’s subsequent rally. The other was the Liberation Day, and Bitcoin’s remarkable strength relative to other asset classes, like equities.

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¹Virtue is not a scalable adoption driver while greed is. What can be on the individual level interpreted as greed can, at scale, translate into a simply better monetary system. Permissionless leverage is the means to an end of the new monetary system.

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The censorship-resistant digital gold is the purest interpretation of Bitcoin’s technological innovation, as the p2p payment narrative fades. The Store of Value (SoV) element is often touted by more philosophically-leaning investors, though it likely takes a back seat to Bitcoin's raw financialization.

Nevertheless, a strong belief persists that every country will hold its own Bitcoin reserve, aligning with bitcoin’s technological promise of once facilitating the world’s monetary order. That being said, with Bitcoin accumulating implicit leverage, one could argue that it makes it a less appealing asset for central banks to hold.

Programmable shared database

Perhaps a vision more aligned with the rest of the crypto, as it suggests that Bitcoin could be extended beyond its technological purity. The more generalized database approach was re-ignited in January 2023 by Ordinals trading activity, which lent itself to a more widespread idea of Bitcoin’s programmable shared database extension. This led to a small craze in Bitcoin L2s development.

In 2024 we could probably count 50-100 L2s (perhaps fewer today) but with different levels of adjacency to Bitcoin. We would assume that the overarching mission is to deliver permissionless Bitcoin finance, and the degree to which this is successful will be for the reader to judge. This vision, albeit auxiliary to the previous two, is still alive.

Ethereum: Roundtripping The World Computer?

Some might argue that there’s no second best, but based on market capitalization Ethereum ranks number two. As with bitcoin, we are expanding a previous work done on Visions of Ether, which anchors our narratives as follows:

1. Bitcoin 2.0
2. dApps/World Computer
3. DAOs
4. Crypto-crowdfunding (ICOs & STOs)
5. Utility Tokens & Collectibles
6. Open Finance (Onchain Finance/DeFi)
7. Radical Markets

Ethereum's narrative is more complex and nuanced than Bitcoin's, owing to its greater potential malleability. To simplify, we've mainly focused on categories defined in November 2018 (and added a new one at the end).

The Radical Markets vision has largely faded from crypto consciousness. The Bitcoin 2.0 vision has been rebranded to ultrasound money, which has not materialized beyond a podcast slogan. Over the years, Ethereum has shifted its focus from abstract technological utopia to the specifics of on-chain finance or DeFi (what was termed Open Finance in 2018).

From the price and mindshare perspective, peak Ethereum was in 2021. The aspiration of pet rock flippening peaked then.

But in 2025 we can say that over the last 4 years, Ethereum went from competing with Bitcoin to (relatively) losing popularity to Solana, at least when it comes to attracting new entrants into the market. Even today, it is following the footsteps of Bitcoin to become permissionless access to leverage via Saylor’s treasury company strategy. Is Ethereum simply reduced to being second best?

Aside from that, DeFi and tokenization of Real World Assets (RWA) seem like Ethereum’s narrative opportunity, while the revival of the world computer seems to be in the works by the Ethereum Foundation.

1. Bitcoin 2.0 (Ultrasound Money)

With the transition to PoS and EIP-1559, the Ethereum community saw an opportunity to achieve a deflationary token. Instead of having a fixed supply like Bitcoin, it would have a decreasing supply over time (due to fee burn), and achieve a greater monetary premium than Bitcoin’s. The cherry on top for the flippening.

For a while following the Merge in 2022, ETH was indeed deflationary. But it changed abruptly in April 2024 with the Dencun upgrade, which effectively resulted in cheaper settlement on Ethereum for the rollups. Since then, the net issuance of ETH has grown unabated.

For Ethereum to revive the ultrasound money narrative, it needs the number of rollups to grow (which has happened) and the transaction activity on rollups to increase (which hasn’t happened to a sufficient extent yet). In other words, it needs to become a backbone for the world computer composed of rollups and have more demand for its block (blob) space.

2. dApps/World Computer

The original vision for Ethereum, the World Computer, started fracturing in 2021 with the proliferation of rollups. As the execution layer moved to L2s, Ethereum’s role became increasingly murky. It was clear that transacting on mainnet is cost-prohibitive for most users. The world computer (execution) became the world database (data availability and settlement). The world computer didn’t generate enough fees selling its blockspace to rollups.

As founders and everyone else realised that the token’s monetary premium is associated with the fees of the execution layer, we saw a lot of L2s launching. Eventually, leading DeFi apps started launching their own chains, for it was in their best interest to own a custom execution environment if they were to serve their users well, and also collect most of the money for themselves.

While not a world computer itself any longer, Ethereum is now positioning itself as the underpinning infrastructure layer for the world computer (composed of L2s). To achieve that, it needs to reduce protocol complexity and increase performance by scaling both vertically and horizontally. Cyber Fund has called Ethereum a root chain for the world computer.

3. DAOs

The DAO has become a more loose term and means many things (and nothing at the same time). It is hard to say if it has become what it was originally designed for. Perhaps people were compelled to vote in 2021 when riding the price high, but as the novelty wore off and prices declined, DAOs remained poorly defined organisations with at times punitive legal implications for its participants.

Some DAOs, like Aave, have done better than the others. In some cases, DAOs became tools for founders to pursue their own, often dubious, goals under the disguise of community governance. DAOs have been largely diminished to buzzwords. Perhaps it is a necessary stage before these onchain organizations mature, but for now, they’re around as a crypto evergreen.

4. Crypto-crowdfunding (ICOs & STOs)

The permissionless capital formation is still one of the most impactful features that crypto, and Ethereum by extension, offers. It’s so broad that it encompasses all the old and new visions of Ethereum – open finance, collectibles, and the world computer. From buying the constitution in 2021 to funding science a few years later, and holding one of the largest ICOs in history in June this year, Ethereum has always done it.

STOs (security token offerings) never really took off because of poorly defined terms in most jurisdictions. We think STOs today fall under the RWA category with varying degrees of access and claims on the underlying asset. We will expand on the RWAs later in the article.

5. Utility tokens & collectibles

Somebody quipped that futility tokens would be a more apt name than utility tokens. We can conclude that ERC-20 utility tokens have two primary utilities:

• Number going up;
• Staking so that the number doesn’t go down.

In all seriousness, the actual utility of tokens is to access enhanced financial returns (whether in native yield or else) through staking. As an example, you can get a higher yield on USDe if you stake Ethena’s token; Pendle has a similar mechanism with vePENDLE. It is not dissimilar from some of the CEX tokens, like BNB, that you stake for exclusive access to pre-TGE opportunities. Therefore, token utility turns into gated access through staking, but to this day, staking rarely underwrites risk (with some exceptions like Aave’s stkAAVE).

While the original Visions of Ether article grouped utility tokens with collectibles, it became clear early on that they took their own different paths. Especially in 2021, NFTs went mainstream as celebrities and brands adopted them. While utility tokens didn’t have comparable success, they didn’t crash as much as NFTs either, and perhaps fared better to this day.

NFTs have been lagging since the 2021 mania by any objective measure. We suspect it is largely because the non-fungible cultural artifacts were replaced by fungible cultural artifacts—memecoins. Recently, collectibles and content were introduced as fungible ERC20 coins too, in order to cater to traders.

There’s a small group of people with an unwavering belief that ownership of NFTs and tokenized creator content enables monetization of culture. Despite the lack of buy-in from the broader population over the last few years, the onchain creator culture has never disappeared completely.

Perhaps this niche will grow as an ETH-driven wealth effect. It remains to be seen how this use case scales to a wider audience. In 2021, it fell on its own sword as NFT floor prices became unattainable for new entrants into the culture. In 2025, the on-chain culture is fractional coins.

6. Open finance (Onchain finance/DeFi)

In summer 2020, Ethereum's dominant narrative hailed ETH as the anchor of a new financial system. This hubris led to DeFi yield ponzi schemes, stress-testing the concept. After the subsequent disillusionment, some DeFi protocols have emerged as key onchain liquidity hubs, gaining traction and revenue.

The TVL has largely served to justify Ethereum's existence amidst faster, cheaper and more popular chains for trading like Solana. While the majority of trading volume (both in spot and perpetuals) is no longer on Ethereum, Aave’s money market is at an time highs with over $35B in TVL, which is similar to value of customer deposits held at the largest fintechs like Revolut.

Until the US Election in 2024, it looked like DeFi would remain a proven but small niche of capital markets. In 2025, with the policy changes underway, DeFi concepts and tokenization are beginning to underpin the regular fintech banking experience, and centralized crypto exchanges have turned into neobanks.

7. Radical Markets

This brief narrative, though no longer relevant, subtly highlighted Ethereum's socialist leanings compared to Bitcoin's more libertarian stance. While some of its concepts, like the Harberger tax, are intriguing, they are largely absent from current narratives and are instead being implemented in areas such as ENS domain allocation or Gitcoin grants (through quadratic funding).

8. RWA and Stablecoins

This is a standalone narrative we took the liberty of adding since for some time stablecoins have been heralded as the only, or the most prominent, PMF of crypto (dating it back to Bridge acquisition by Stripe). Some would argue that stablecoins are part of the Open Finance thesis, but, for the most part, these are exogenous assets issued by centralized entities, whose main users (populations of countries with limited access to dollars) differ from onchain natives who use DeFi every day.

The early adopters of stablecoins have been the crypto traders, then the populations of developing economies (Southeast Asia and Latam), and now, finally, it seems to be the nation states and finance middlemen as they realize the equivalence between stablecoins and the eurodollar system (the stablecoins being a wrapped version of US debt).

While founders (and Blackrock too) have attempted to tokenize the world - from stocks to luxury watches to uranium to real estate - perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of tokenization will not be the niche assets as we have always thought, but the largest and the most liquid ones (treasuries and dollars). Those that seemingly need tokenization the least.

With Ethereum boasting relative decentralization and maturity to other L1s, its hope is to become the default choice for the largest asset issuers in the world. For the fact that a lot of these tokenized products will require KYC or custody of some sort, they don’t really belong to the Open Finance category, but exist on a spectrum.

In 2025, we can think of this vision as “crypto reduced to fintech”. Lately, we’ve seen that stablecoin issuers (Tether, Circle, Stripe) have opted to launch their own chains in order to capture most of the value and define user experience. Stablecoins for payments (cheaper, faster) is the single most important use case of crypto, and we’re seeing it accelerate real fast.

The Rest Of Crypto

As we have laid out a detailed evolution of the biggest and most mature assets - ETH and BTC - we can now have a less asset-centric look at the other narratives. Below, we’re diving into the narratives that have captured some attention for a cycle or two.

These could be related to specific assets, but are not exclusive to one. These visions have evolved in relation to Bitcoin and Ethereum as things never happen ina vacuum. Yet, they are recognizable trends that encompass the larger ecosystem of alts. (Is Ethereum an alt as well? Do majors exist? What are they?)

Web3

This is a more generalized version of the world computer that became a buzzword in 2021. The vision of Web3 hints at decentralized internet, somewhat overlapping with the NFT mania, and is best summarized in Chris Dixon’s abstract Read, Write, Own - as each of the words described three eras of the Web.

At the peak of Web3 narrative in 2021, the idea of ownership permeated everything - money, finance, social, gaming, content, and culture. As prices declined the following year, it appeared that ownership of money (and by extension finance) remains to be the foundational property.

Perhaps a too general description and narrative, Web3 meant everything and nothing at the same time. That is the case with many buzzwords. However, in 2025, nobody except for Polkadot, which itself became irrelevant, talks about Web3.

The Casino (Memecoins)

Perhaps a reaction to a redefined market structure post-2021 mania, crypto traders used to getting easy multiples needed to find a new avenue to extract capital from the new entrants, who were lacking in numbers. As the private to secondary market arbitrage vanished under the load of infinite VC token supply, memecoins gained traction.

As once bagholders used to believe in specific visions (e.g. world computer), now they only needed to “believe in something”. This roughly translates as believing in nothing other than the price action. A new narrative has been born to fit the old expectations of crypto participants to acquire generational wealth. What better way than to buy memes attached to coins with no evil VC supply overhang?

This leads to the perception that crypto's sole purpose is to serve as a means of accumulating wealth through speculative trading of memecoins. The significant revenue generated by memecoin creators substantiates this viewpoint. However, as memecoin mania reached its apex with the US President launching his own, this very act inadvertently led to a fracturing of this belief and opened doors for alternative narratives.

Faster And Cheaper Chains

Everybody loves a good comeback story. And while most investors were looking for Solana of the next cycle in early summer of 2023, little did they know that Solana would be the Solana of the following bullrun. From the ashes of the FTX meltdown to the new ATH in two years, Solana rose like a phoenix.

In their darkest moments, even the most stark Ethereum proponents gave in and jumped on the Solana bandwagon. Propped up by a fast & cheap memecoin dispenser, the chain was hailed as the commercial chain and led the way for new user acquisition. Catering to users is a top priority. Decentralization is a virtue not worth pursuing. Along this thinking, numerous general-purpose L1s launched: Aptos, Sui, Sei, Berachain. More are yet to come.

With Perps exchanges being the most lucrative business of crypto, it’s unsurprising that there’d be an L1 optimised specifically to that use case. dYdX, GMX, Drift, Kwenta, Aevo, Perpetual Protocol all tried to provide improvements over each other in terms of UX and execution, but few of them did it on their own custom execution environment. Even fewer had any durable success. Then came Hyperliquid.

Hyperliquid thus far is the only one that offers CEX-like execution capabilities thanks to its custom-built virtual machine and consensus mechanism, both optimised for a single use case of perps trading. But the price action of Hyperliquid was far more important to the story than any technical specifications of the protocol. Faster, cheaper L1 remains to be a kingmaker trade.

Decentralized AI

Crypto markets have become proficient at observing global narratives and producing a tradable on-chain representation of the narrative. Decentralized AI vision formed in a matter of months after ChatGPT release in the Fall of 2022.

The first beneficiaries were compute networks (Akash, Render, and similar infra projects). A lot of private capital has been raised to decentralize AI model training, inference, and everything in between. It presented itself as an alternative to the dystopian vision of centralized AGI in the hands of Big Tech.

Another breath of life to AI vision came after the launch of the GOAT token in Fall of 2024. This had a much stronger application flavor to it because agents were at the center of it, and they were expected to be able to do everything. The X feed was filled with cheeky agents, and they felt more real, more closer than cold, decentralized infra ever was.

For a brief time, everyone believed that agents would have their own wallets, buy groceries, and successfully trade on-chain and make money. Even though that was premature last year, perhaps that is still to come. After all, AI seems to be the only durable trend outside of crypto that founders anchor to.

Prediction Markets / Futarchy

In 2008, The New York Times named futarchy as one of the buzzwords of the year. In 2024, it became inseparable from the US presidential elections. Polymarket became the information market that fed into traditional financial markets, and called election outcomes hours earlier than established news outlets. It felt like one of those moments when crypto goes mainstream (Bitcoin, NFTs, stablecoins) and for a brief moment, everyone recognizes the novelty.

It’s interesting that the form of futarchy that became popular in crypto had everything to do with trading and speculation, but nothing in terms of follow-through in decision-making (which was the original vision for futarchy as per its ideator, Robin Hanson).

Perhaps if DAOs had never become a thing, futarchy could have been implemented according to its original vision. Futarchy asks for the elimination of the roles of governors, while DAOs do the exact opposite. Following Polymarket’s success, more and more projects have appeared that seek to establish the futarchy for governance, both on Ethereum and Solana.

A Glimpse Of The Future

From the time the articles that inspired this piece have been written, crypto's total market cap has grown from $300B to around $4T. Still far from 100T that Kyle Samani promised around the same time. Yet it is a very different industry and an environment that we find ourselves in these days.

We live in a curious future, perhaps not exactly what the industry collectively envisioned back in 2018. But still somehow fitting within the visions defined then. Can we expect that the future holds, at least, another 10x as the visions turn into realities?

A change is usually not visible as it’s happening and can only be seen in retrospect. A rollercoaster ride of meretricious Ethereum Enterprise Alliance, ICOs, DeFi and NFT ponzis, FTX rise and fall, all the way to Blackrock tokenizing the world. Crypto is full of unexpected downfalls and comeback stories.

The biggest question we have is whether crypto becomes derivative to existing financial rails, swallowed by so-called tradfi, or does crypto swallow finance as once promised. So far, it seems like crypto has become overly dependent on what governments and traditional financial institutions say and do. Far from the original revolution. Is that the famous quip of mainstream adoption being indistinguishable from froth? Is this like the old Trojan horse story?

Are we entering, through Perezian lens, a critical juncture when crypto transitions from the Wild West of installation phase to more productive and value-dependent deployment phase? Or is this the false adoption moment that ends up in yet another disillusionment? Is crypto a revolution or is it a reformation?

As we saw, many of the narratives are intertwined or interdependent (Ethereum’s ultrasound money with the world computer, Bitcoin’s uncorrelated asset with digital gold). These are largely flexible memes rather than hardcoded visions. They evolve not in separation but by interacting with each other and a wider audience of holders and users, not immune but reactive to what happens in the outside world.

We like to refer to McLuhan, pointing out that “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening." To a large extent, we think that regarding new phenomena from an old fixed point of view is a road to nowhere.

Crypto is a novel way to generate and exchange information. While often financial in nature, it compels a change upon the world that, though perhaps not immediately obvious, will fundamentally alter how we conduct finance and commerce. The more we get to interact with Bitcoin and crypto at large, the more our interpretation of these visions evolves.

“Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.”

Narratives are fickle.