A Decade in Crypto: From Wall Street Reform Dream to Mainstream Finance's Reimagined Battlefield

When Espresso co-founder Jill Gunter entered the crypto industry a decade ago, she carried a singular conviction: blockchain technology could solve what Wall Street couldn’t. Today, looking back at that journey, the reality feels more complex—and perhaps more consequential—than anyone anticipated.

The Problems That Started It All

Gunter’s crypto entry wasn’t idealistic naivety; it was rooted in concrete experience. During her time as a bond trader focused on Latin American sovereign debt, she witnessed firsthand how poor monetary governance destroyed lives. Venezuela’s hyperinflation spiraled above 20,000%, and capital controls in countries like Argentina and Venezuela wiped out generations of savings. When national leaders wield unchecked power over currency, ordinary citizens become victims of their autocratic decisions.

But the flaws extended beyond emerging markets. The 2008 financial crisis revealed Wall Street’s systemic cancer—reckless gambling by elites funded by public bailouts. Even as regulations like Dodd-Frank supposedly reformed the system, Gunter observed something troubling: the speculative culture never truly disappeared. Young traders who accumulated positions at market bottoms during quantitative easing became the new “bosses,” repeating the same high-leverage bets that nearly destroyed the economy. The message was clear—crisis or no crisis, Wall Street’s incentive structure remained unchanged.

Beyond corruption and inequality lay a third problem: financial infrastructure itself was broken. In 2012, as a junior trader reconciling accounts after market close, Gunter spent hours tracking bonds that should have settled weeks prior and confirming derivative positions. This was 2012—yet the financial system still relied on manual database updates across parties. Years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Barclays couldn’t fully clarify Lehman’s assets and liabilities because of conflicting database records. How could something so fundamental remain undigitized?

Bitcoin as Antidote

Bitcoin arrived as the answer Gunter had been seeking. As a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, it offered what fiat couldn’t: assets immune to monetary manipulation, protected from capital controls, and backed by transparent, decentralized consensus mechanisms. Its blockchain technology eliminated the need for clearing, settlement, and reconciliation—anyone could run and update the ledger directly.

The opportunity seemed historic. Unlike Wall Street’s exclusive access to early investments, Bitcoin gave the “99%” a decade to accumulate before institutional scale participation. It democratized access to a genuine alternative asset class while simultaneously introducing infrastructure that could replace banking’s opaque systems entirely.

Yet in 2014, skepticism was absolute. “Isn’t this just for drug dealers?” was the reflexive response. Without legitimate use cases beyond darknet markets like Silk Road, Bitcoin’s potential required imagination most people didn’t possess. Some days, Gunter wondered if the technology might never truly gain traction.

Then everything changed.

The Peak of Irrational Enthusiasm

By 2017, the industry had exploded—but not in the way Gunter hoped. Everyone wanted to build blockchain projects: “blockchain + journalism,” “blockchain in dentistry,” “blockchain for everything.” Most founders weren’t scammers; they genuinely believed in distributed ledger’s revolutionary potential. But this enthusiasm was intoxicating and irrational. The gap between what blockchain could actually solve and what people imagined it could do widened dramatically.

The industry swung wildly between mania and disillusionment every three to four years—never climbing toward genuine enlightenment as Gartner’s hype cycle suggested it would. The reason was structural: blockchain is technology, but crypto assets are a volatile asset class with beta levels that correlate heavily with macro markets. In zero-interest-rate environments, risk appetite soars and crypto booms. When trade wars hit or risk appetite evaporates, crypto is declared “dead.” Add catastrophic events like Terra/Luna and FTX—each destroying billions in capital—and the industry’s extreme volatility became inevitable.

Staying committed to building anything meaningful in this ecosystem is extraordinarily difficult. Entrepreneurs face unpredictable sentiment, unclear product-market fit, potential legal jeopardy, and watching the industry’s credibility get destroyed repeatedly by high-profile failures. After eight years, many builders admit they thought they were joining a revolution only to find they were constructing a casino. The feeling of contributing to the “casino-ization” of finance is legitimately soul-crushing.

The Uncomfortable Paradox

Yet here’s what Gunter won’t admit openly: the outcome might actually be progress, even if disguised as failure.

No anti-establishment movement succeeds perfectly. Every revolution carries costs and growing pains. Elizabeth Warren and Occupy Wall Street tried shutting down Wall Street’s casino through regulation. But instead, meme stocks, altcoin seasons, prediction markets, and decentralized perpetual contracts brought Wall Street’s gambling mechanisms to the masses. Is this democratization or amplification of vice?

Gunter suspects it’s neither—or both. The financial system’s real transformation requires making it more accessible, which inevitably makes it look more “casino-like.” If creating true level playing fields means ordinary people can take the same risks Wall Street elites always could, then yes, society becomes a bigger casino. But it also becomes fairer.

The Scoreboard

Measuring progress against original goals reveals surprising results:

Monetary governance: Bitcoin and decentralized cryptocurrencies now provide genuine alternatives to fiat currencies that can’t be seized or devalued. Privacy coins extend this protection further. This represents material progress for financial sovereignty.

Wall Street’s monopoly: The casino has been democratized—now retail participants can blow themselves up with high-leverage bets just as easily as institutions. But society is progressing toward less overregulation on how much risk ordinary people can assume. We’ve always permitted lottery tickets; Gunter argues that early Bitcoin and Ethereum investors received access to some of the decade’s best-performing investment opportunities. More balance emerged than traditional finance ever permitted.

Outdated infrastructure: Financial institutions finally treat technology seriously. Robinhood adopted blockchain for EU stock trading. Stripe is building payment systems on crypto infrastructure. Stablecoins became mainstream products.

The revolution Gunter sought arrived—just not wearing the clothes she expected. Everything the crypto industry longed for may already exist, transformed into unrecognizable shapes by market forces, regulatory pressure, and human nature itself. Whether that counts as victory or tragedy depends less on the outcome than on what you were willing to accept when you entered the fight.