Comment read online, which I completely share.
Cryptocurrencies are suffering because the crypto community has sold out. The price of Bitcoin now depends almost entirely on financial institutions, billionaires, and Donald Trump.
On Thursday and Friday (April 3-4, 2025), while stock markets around the world were collapsing due to tariffs announced by Donald Trump, the cryptocurrency market was an island of calm. There is logic in this - cryptocurrencies are not physical assets, cannot be taxed, and are not owned by any government. Their most important property was and remains that they are decentralized.
On Monday, the entire crypto market collapsed because none of the listed advantages of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been true for a long time. Some partially, others completely. In the last ten years, and especially the last five, the crypto community has sold out. In exchange for higher prices of digital assets, it gave up the most important elements around which cryptocurrencies were created.
The idealistically inclined cryptographers who created Bitcoin have long been trampled by the business wing of the crypto community, which had no intention of fighting for independence from the financial system. Their only goal was for the price to go up. This was evident as early as 2017, during the first serious rise in the value of Bitcoin. In the following years, especially since 2020, any news related to institutional investors in the crypto market was received with optimism and applause.
Ironically, they are precisely the reason for the collapse on Monday. Hedge funds and other large institutional investors had to sell part of their cryptocurrency portfolio to cover their losses in the stock markets. From then on, the value of cryptocurrencies returned to a high level of correlation with major indices and collapsed further. Tariffs may not matter for cryptocurrencies, but they do matter for their largest investors.
The trust in the big banks and hedge funds from Wall Street, which Bitcoin was initially supposed to fight against because they are part of a corrupt and dishonest financial system, is on one side. On the other side is the attitude towards the state, specifically the USA. Once, crypto enthusiasts wanted to be an alternative to governments. Now they hope the state will pump the price of Bitcoin.
That’s why it reached record levels above $100,000 in the weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as President of the USA. That’s why some of the wealthiest figures in the crypto industry, like the Winklevoss twins, Chris Larsen, Marc Andreessen, and Mark Cuban donated to Trump’s campaign - due to his promise that he would decapitate federal financial regulators and especially due to the hope that he would pump the price of Bitcoin and other selected cryptocurrencies through a state crypto reserve.
The very phrase "state crypto reserve" recently sounded like an oxymoron. It turned out that it is not, but it also turned out that Trump is lying. Instead of buying up vast amounts of cryptocurrencies and pumping their price, his administration created the so-called "reserve" by transferring all the cryptocurrencies the state already owns, mainly from confiscations, into it. In other words, it moved them from one pocket to another. The disappointment from this little trick of Trump was the reason the price of Bitcoin fell by over 20% from its peak even before the USA declared a trade war on the rest of the world.
The business wing of the crypto community has simply erased the entire identity of Bitcoin, which initially promised to be an alternative to the global financial system. Instead, the price of both Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is driven by a small number of institutional players and billionaires, who practically undermine the decentralized architecture of the software itself. The price of Bitcoin may recover, it is highly likely to even set a new record in the future. The revolutionary side of cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, is definitely dead.