The crypto industry it spawned has gone further still. Over the past nine years reporting on this sector, I’ve seen various trends rise and fall. Cryptokitties took 2018 by storm, yield farming was briefly all the rage, everyone got really into DOGE early on during the pandemic, and non-fungible tokens saw buy-in from Christie’s and Time Magazine. The crypto industry was the biggest political donor in the 2024 elections and has already made some of the 2026 midterm elections the most expensive in history. Most of these trends were contained to the crypto industry itself, but remain cultural touchpoints that the broader world — normies, if you will — at least heard of.
The flip side of this is, of course, the fact that the crypto industry keeps getting hacked for ever-increasing figures, and usually by North Korea. The most recent hack, which took place two days ago, saw Binance lose over $6 billion worth of assets, in the biggest crypto hack of all time. Each hack sees more and more funds lost. The irony of the Binance hack is that it was the centralized players — Tether, Circle, so on — who had the biggest role in limiting the losses. The two stablecoin issuers alone froze some $2.4 billion worth of stolen funds, while decentralized autonomous organizations and smaller platforms froze a few hundred million more.
