A Decade in Crypto: How the Revolution Became the Casino—And Why That Might Be Progress

The Disillusionment Nobody Talks About

When Jill Gunter, co-founder of Espresso, entered Wall Street as a bond trader specializing in Latin American sovereign debt, she carried a conviction: blockchain technology could solve the financial system’s most fundamental flaws. A decade later, standing inside an industry she helped shape, she faces an uncomfortable truth—the revolution didn’t arrive as planned. Instead, what began as a mission to democratize finance has transformed into something that resembles, in many ways, Wall Street’s casino, just with a broader audience.

This narrative tension sits at the heart of crypto’s identity crisis. Was it inevitable? Necessary? Or a failure?

Three Problems a Technologist Thought Could Be Solved

The seeds of Gunter’s crypto commitment germinated from three concrete observations about traditional finance:

Monetary Mismanagement and Its Human Cost

During her trading career, she witnessed firsthand how political incompetence destroys currencies. Venezuela’s inflation exceeded 20,000%—a shock that wasn’t abstract economic theory but lived reality for entire populations watching their savings evaporate overnight. Argentina’s capital controls created similar devastation. These weren’t rare anomalies; they were systemic failures rooted in centralized monetary control. Bitcoin presented an alternative: an asset beyond any single actor’s reach, immune to devaluation by presidential decree.

Wall Street’s Structural Inequality

The 2008 financial crisis should have been a reset. When Dodd-Frank legislation passed, the industry promised reformation. Yet within years, a new generation of traders had emerged—young risk-takers who’d profited enormously from Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing stimulus, having taken over senior positions at market bottoms. The crisis became a teaching moment with the wrong lesson: bet big on company capital, win big on personal returns.

Gunter observed the Occupy Wall Street protesters daily on her commute and found herself increasingly aligned with their core complaint: ordinary people bore the costs of elite recklessness. But the movement lacked precision. The protesters demanded the “1%” be held accountable but hadn’t identified the mechanism. Gunter had identified it: access inequality. Wall Street possessed information, leverage, and investment opportunities that retail participants couldn’t reach. When the elite lost, the public paid.

Technical Infrastructure Rot

Post-trade operations at major firms should have been fully automated decades before the 2010s. Yet traders spent hours reconciling accounts, chasing bonds that hadn’t settled, verifying derivative positions—work that screamed for digitization. Even Barclays, four years after acquiring Lehman Brothers, couldn’t reconcile the exact asset-liability picture because database records remained contradictory and incomplete. The financial system’s backend was held together by manual processes and institutional memory.

Why Bitcoin Seemed Like the Answer

Bitcoin solved something novel: a decentralized database that required no clearing, settlement, or reconciliation. Anyone could verify transactions. No central authority controlled issuance. Ordinary people could own it before institutions could participate at scale—reversing the access inequality that defined Wall Street.

For someone like Gunter, Bitcoin wasn’t speculation; it was infrastructure.

Yet in 2014, critics asked the obvious question: “Isn’t this just for drug dealers?” With Silk Road as crypto’s primary use case, skepticism was rational. During those years, it genuinely seemed the technology might never escape its niche.

The Fantasy Cycle

Then came 2017. Suddenly everyone wanted to launch a blockchain project. “Blockchain + journalism.” “Blockchain enters dentistry.” Entrepreneurs weren’t attempting fraud—most genuinely believed in diverse applications. But they’d mistaken speculative enthusiasm for technological necessity.

The industry didn’t climb the “Slope of Enlightenment” promised by Gartner’s hype cycle framework. Instead, it oscillated between mania and collapse every three to four years. Why?

Blockchain is infrastructure, but crypto assets are risk-class commodities with extremely high beta sensitivity. Macro conditions that raise risk appetite trigger asset booms; trade wars and rising rates trigger capitulation. Regulatory shocks—Terra/Luna’s collapse, FTX’s implosion—destroyed capital and credibility faster than new builders could repair it.

Building in crypto became harder each cycle. Entrepreneurs faced unpredictable funding, unclear product-market fit, potential prosecution, and the spectacle of political leaders issuing token scams that torched whatever mainstream legitimacy the industry possessed.

The Uncomfortable Comparison

A widely-discussed tweet from an industry veteran admits what many think privately: “I thought I was joining a revolution. I was helping build a casino.”

The honesty is refreshing, if unsettling. Meme stocks, altcoin bull markets, decentralized perpetual exchanges—these didn’t reinvent Wall Street’s casino; they franchised it. Now anyone with an internet connection could leverage their life savings into a position.

But here’s where the narrative requires nuance: every revolution carries collateral damage. The Occupy Wall Street movement wanted to dismantle financial privilege. What crypto actually delivered was democratized financial risk—which isn’t the same as democratized financial returns.

The Unexpected Progress

Against her original objectives, Gunter’s assessment finds surprising alignment:

On Monetary Sovereignty: Bitcoin and sufficiently decentralized cryptocurrencies now exist as real alternatives to fiat currency. Assets can’t be seized or devalued by policy whim. Privacy coins add another layer. This represents genuine progress for financial autonomy.

On Access Inequality: The casino has been democratized—not eliminated, but democratized. Retail investors can now access instruments (early-stage tokens, leveraged perpetuals, emerging-market assets) that were previously gatekept. Was this the intended outcome? Not precisely. But outcomes rarely match intentions. Early retail participants in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and comparable assets accumulated wealth at scales previously impossible without Wall Street connections. The distribution of financial upside has measurably shifted.

On Infrastructure: The financial industry is adopting better technology. Robinhood uses blockchain infrastructure for EU stock trading. Stripe builds payment systems on crypto rails. Stablecoins entered mainstream markets. The obscure, manually-reconciled databases Gunter complained about are finally being upgraded.

The Real Question

The original mission wasn’t to make everyone rich. It was to build a level playing field. By that measure—imperfect as implementation has been—the decade delivered measurable change.

Everything you hoped for may have already arrived. It’s just not in the form you expected. The casino remains, but it has more players. The revolution wasn’t thwarted; it was implemented sideways, through channels the founders didn’t anticipate, with consequences they’re still calculating.

That’s either a triumph or a tragedy. Probably both.