The rough week continues not only for crypto, but for the markets as whole this week. But underlying this volatility is something that doesn't get talked about enough - the "great decoupling" that is happening on multiple levels.
Many crypto coins - especially older projects are still traded under BTC/ETH pairings, especially on DEXs where fiat onramps don't exist. In a lot of ways Bitcoin served as the "reserve currency" for the crypto industry itself, which allowed it to gain dominance in the space because no matter what coin you wanted to buy, you had to go through BTC, similar to how the dollar had functioned in global trade. They used to call Bitcoin the "king" for a reason - that's what it was, at least until fairly recently.
ETH, in its earlier days, attempted to "unseat" BTC by providing pairings of their own. As someone that joined ETH in their ICO, I was part of this attempt to do this by offering an alternative to otherwise what would become a monopoly in the Web3 space. The idea of ETH overthrowing the king was called the "flippening" - which hasn't quite happened, yet.
But after the big run in 2020, everything changed. Everyone wanted to get in on the hype and massive amounts of fiat (mostly dollars) started to pour in, taking prices of each currency to new heights. Talks about decentralized exchanges got pushed to the sidelines and more centralized exchanges offering fiat conversions flooded into the scene. Bitcoin became "captured" by banks and Wall Street through fiat contracts, while ETH converted their entire system into proof-of-stake during the big "merge".
Self-custody? What's that? "Not your wallet, not your coins" - there's a few that still use that phrase but it became the minority voice and even to this day, I doubt that most people out there even knows what that means. The era of DeFi was largely over - replaced by futures, custodial wallets, and fiat agreements that were largely still controlled by traditional contracts rather than smart contracts.
So the truth is that the competition in crypto that has existed for the last 5-10 years was largely a race towards who could become the next "reserve currency", rather than actually making the tech useful for anything outside of itself. The signs are not subtle - it's baked into the way Web3 markets itself, the discussions, how bankers talk about it, what gets pushed into the media/social media - never about utility, but about who gets to wear the crown.
Quite a silly, regressive battle to have in 2026, if we consider ourselves to be living in a modern world, but it is what it is. There's kind of an inherent entitlement and laziness built into these types of races because in the end, the goal is to simply be the dominant currency that everyone uses (even if they don't want to) and sit pretty collecting taxes (i.e. fees), while the rest of the world does all the real work. The folks that had those sorts of aspirations are the ones that ended up getting attracted to the recent versions of BTC/ETH and ultimately ended up representing the industry as a whole.
The public, on the other hand, was not impressed. Unpopular to say around these parts but I believe the markets were correct in rejecting this version of Web3 because it literally offers nothing to anyone in its current state. "Store of Value" just sounds like a dream of some guy sitting on a pile of gold doing nothing, getting fat and lazy while telling everyone "have fun being poor". If that's the dream people were going for, it is actually a good thing to let that dream die.
Now the thing that makes this even more chaotic is that we live in an era where the dollar itself is actually weakening significantly - the world is moving its funds out of USD, which means that even stablecoins (usually pegged to the dollar) may be in trouble of collapsing, too. There's a weird synergy between BTC/ETH/Dollar pairings that emerged in the last few years that blurred the lines between the three of them, united under the idea of being "the reserve". They have similar aspirations and similar goals, but all hate each other because they're obstacles to their goal of becoming the next "king".
Wars are usually fought by entities that are more similar than different, after all. But now we might be asking ourselves - maybe all of them were wrong? Like real wars, coin wars were very expensive and largely pointless, too. People are fighting over stupid memes and useless coins that literally don't do anything other than giving false hope and people egos. If you wanted regressive, just go to IRL and you can find plenty. Crypto was supposed to be better than that. That's why many of us are still here.
So, the good news is that there are still a few places left that are at least trying. But it's hard when the kings and queens of this place are running the place into the ground. Maybe we need a few more crashes before people finally wake up - true believers like myself will still be here even if Bitcoin goes to 0. Sure, it's the first, but there are plenty of others to take its place if it's not up to the task. Just let us know when it's ready to step aside. 👑