Crypto wanted to get rid of banks. Now they are banks.

When Bitcoin launched in 2008, the whole idea was to get rid of banks and intermediaries. In 2026, they’ve learned the lesson I learnt years ago. That’s how the world works. You need intermediaries.

The whole idea of bitcoin is that money can move from person to person, ownership could be established cryptographically and the cumbersome institutions sitting between us and our money could eventually become irrelevant.

Two decades later, crypto is rapidly becoming part of mainstream finance, but the price of admission appears to be accepting many of the institutions and rules it was supposed to replace. Crypto companies want licences from regulators, bank accounts from banks, access to payment systems, institutional investors, mainstream distribution and governments that recognise digital assets as legitimate financial instruments.

In other words, crypto wanted to disintermediate finance but has failed.

You can see this rather neatly in several stories crossing my desk this week.

Robinhood has just expanded its UK offering so that customers can trade more than 50 cryptocurrencies alongside stocks, options and ISAs, with the crypto service provided through FCA-registered Bitstamp UK.

Think about what that means for a moment.

Crypto is no longer something you access through a strange exchange with an incomprehensible name and a headquarters somewhere you have never heard of. It increasingly sits alongside conventional investments inside the same app.

That is normalisation except crypto isn't quite normal yet because, while consumers are increasingly being encouraged to trade digital assets, the companies providing digital-asset services can still struggle to obtain something rather more mundane: a bank account.

British parliamentarians are now challenging major banks over their treatment of crypto firms, warning that difficulties obtaining banking services could become one of the biggest barriers to developing the UK's crypto industry.

Banks are being asked to explain their policies and whether they are assessing crypto companies individually or simply deciding that anything involving crypto belongs in the too-difficult or too-risky box.

There is an obvious contradiction here. Britain wants to encourage fintech, digital assets, tokenisation and innovation, while the financial institutions controlling access to the traditional monetary system remain wary of some of the companies trying to build those markets.

The crypto industry understandably calls this de-risking. The banks would probably call it risk management and this is where Europe becomes interesting.

The European Union has taken a rather different approach with MiCA (the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation). Instead of endlessly debating whether crypto should be inside or outside the financial system, Europe has effectively drawn a line around the market and said that, if you want to operate inside it, these are the standards you need to meet.

The consequences are becoming clear. One recent analysis identified 1,343 crypto service providers across the European Economic Area, of which only 281 had obtained MiCA authorisation by the July 2026 deadline, leaving 1,062 without authorisation. More importantly, the analysis found that the unauthorised population contained a substantially higher proportion of businesses carrying high or severe risk ratings.

That makes the European approach look less like an attack on crypto and more like the institutionalisation of crypto. The Wild West is being fenced, roads are being built, sheriffs are arriving and anyone wanting to continue doing business is being asked to identify themselves.

There will undoubtedly be casualties, and some perfectly respectable businesses will complain that regulation is expensive, bureaucratic and designed for large incumbents rather than innovative start-ups. They may have a point. Regulation always creates barriers to entry because compliance costs money, which tends to favour larger companies with deeper pockets.

Nevertheless, the question regulators inevitably ask is what happens if you don't build those barriers.

Which brings us to America.

Trump Media & Technology Group has just reported a quarterly net loss of more than $238 million, compared with $20 million a year earlier, with unrealised losses on cryptocurrency holdings contributing significantly to the result.

Whatever your politics, it is an interesting illustration of what happens when companies that were not originally cryptocurrency businesses begin placing digital assets onto their balance sheets. Crypto moves from being something they sell to customers into something capable of materially affecting their own financial performance.

Far more uncomfortable are the questions surrounding World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-linked crypto venture.

The New York Times has reported that Guren “Bobby” Zhou was behind Aqua 1, which bought $100 million of World Liberty Financial's WLFI tokens. Zhou was reportedly under investigation in Britain on suspicion of money laundering, although he has not been charged and no conclusion of wrongdoing should be inferred from an investigation.

Whatever ultimately emerges from that particular case, it illustrates the issue that banks and regulators have been wrestling with for years. Digital assets can move enormous amounts of value across borders, companies and jurisdictions extraordinarily quickly, while establishing the ultimate source of funds, beneficial ownership and purpose of a transaction may be considerably more complicated.

And suddenly the five stories connect:

• Robinhood says crypto is becoming mainstream;
• British crypto firms say banks need to treat them as mainstream;
• Europe says they can be mainstream, provided they become regulated like mainstream financial institutions;
• the Trump Media losses demonstrate that crypto's volatility still carries very conventional financial consequences; but
• the questions surrounding the World Liberty investment demonstrate why knowing your customer and knowing your customer's money are not irrelevant because someone put the transaction on a blockchain.

That is where crypto is in 2026.

The interesting debate is no longer whether crypto survives. It has survived. Nor is the debate whether banks will use blockchain, tokens and digital assets, because increasingly they already area. The argument now concerns what happens when an industry created outside the financial establishment becomes part of the financial establishment.

That transition inevitably involves regulation, compliance, capital, governance, identity, transparency and accountability. It also means crypto businesses complaining about regulators, regulators worrying about crypto businesses, banks worrying about both of them and politicians asking why everyone cannot just get along.

Which is remarkably familiar.

Maybe that is the ultimate irony. Crypto spent years trying to reinvent finance and, having succeeded in becoming important enough to matter, it is now acquiring many of the characteristics of the financial system it wanted to replace.

Welcome to banking.

 

Stories related to these thoughts include this week's headlines:

Robinhood UK Users Can Now Trade More Than 50 Cryptos

UK parliamentarians question banks over refusal to provide services to crypto firms

The European Union is about to exclude more than 1000 companies from the cryptocurrency markets

Trump’s media and crypto firm just posted a $238 million quarterly loss - here’s where those losses came from

Trump Crypto Took $100 Million From a Businessman With Red Flags