2026 could be even worse.
For me, 2025 was one of the worst years, if not the worst year, for crypto and also globally on a socio political level.
I do not agree with Giorgia Meloni on everything, but on this point she is right. She joked that 2025 was tough and that 2026 will be even worse.
We start the year with a pardoned Changpeng Zhao, with #Binance acting as if rules do not apply to them, and with the Trump administration presenting corruption and lies as truth and even as something good. #Trump pardoning Zhao is not a rumour. It was reported by Reuters, and it also appears on the US Justice Department clemency list.
This is a frontal attack on freedom and democracy. It is the systematic destruction of values, accountability, and trust.
And here is the part people keep missing. Crypto is not just code. Crypto is a coordination layer for money, risk, and settlement.
That means crypto needs boring foundations: predictable rule of law, credible enforcement, and stable institutions. When politics turns into theatre where loyalty beats facts, the entire risk engine breaks. You cannot price risk when rules are optional.
You cannot build when enforcement is selective. You cannot claim adoption when the public assumes the whole thing is rigged.
A pardon like that signals something extremely specific to markets. If you are big enough, connected enough, or useful enough, consequences are negotiable. That does not create freedom. It creates a two tier system where insiders get immunity and everyone else gets the bill.
Now zoom out. 2025 harmed crypto at the trust layer.
Price discovery depends on credibility. Exchanges are supposed to be infrastructure, not political beneficiaries. When the biggest exchange behaves like it is untouchable, and when political power visibly protects that world, people stop believing in fairness. Liquidity does not vanish overnight, it becomes paranoid.
It fragments across venues. It demands higher premiums. It becomes shorter term, more extractive, more predatory.
This is where scams thrive. Not because people are stupid. Because uncertainty makes people desperate, and desperation makes people easy to manipulate. When society is flooded with propaganda and fear, scammers do not need genius. They just need timing.
The Trump administration side of this is not just about one pardon. It is about the broader pattern: control. They want control of institutions, control of the narrative, control of who gets punished and who gets protected. In that world, truth is not discovered, it is declared. Law is not equal, it is wielded. And money flows toward whoever can buy proximity.
You can see the transatlantic version of this in the latest fight over speech and tech governance. Reuters reported US visa bans against European figures tied to the EU Digital Services Act, with the US framing it as a censorship issue while slowly becoming an authoritarian communist state itself. That is not a side story. That is the core battlefield: who controls information, and who gets to define reality.
Once that game is on, crypto becomes a tool in the toolbox.
Sometimes it gets sold as liberation. Sometimes it gets framed as criminal infrastructure. Sometimes it gets selectively embraced because it is useful for donors, for influence, for capital flows, for punishing enemies, or for rewarding friends. That is what weaponisation looks like. Not a ban. Not an endorsement. A constant shape shift depending on what fills the pockets and what secures power.
And yes, Elon Musk matters in this ecosystem, not as a cartoon villain, but as an amplifier of the same logic: power without accountability, narrative over verification, vibes over institutions.
When the public square is run like a dopamine casino, politics becomes performance and the most aggressive liars gain an unfair advantage. That spills into crypto instantly, because crypto already has a memetic bloodstream.
If politics becomes a meme war, crypto becomes the financial front line of that meme war.
The real comparison that hurts is this. Functional systems are boring. They rely on procedures, checks, slow compromise, and consequences. When those mechanisms weaken, you do not get freedom. You get impunity. You get predators. You get corruption that calls itself patriotism. You get moral panic about outsiders while insiders loot quietly.
That is why the world feels upside down. Because it is. The loudest “law and order” crowd keeps producing disorder, then uses the disorder as justification for more power. It is a self feeding loop.
Crypto will react, but not in the romantic way people imagine. It will react with higher risk premiums. With more capital seeking safer jurisdictions. With builders focusing on resilience and censorship resistance. With users demanding proof instead of promises. With an even harsher split between regulated, institution friendly crypto and adversarial crypto.
The painful truth is simple.
Crypto cannot mature in a world where the most powerful actors are above the rules and where politics is built on systematic lying. Crypto needs stability to become infrastructure. The clowns are burning that stability down, and then they will blame everyone else for the smoke.
Dark years can absolutely be ahead.
Not because technology is failing, but because trust and truth is being murdered in public, on purpose, by people who want total control and do not care what they destroy as long as it feeds their own wallet.
