Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place

Reading Mode Wider policy Crypto in 2026: Oh, This is the Bad Place Open your favourite Doom News App any morning in 2026 over your morning coffee, and the only honest phrase that should come out of your mouth is, "Oh, this is the Bad Place." Because the world has gone truly mad. The president of the United States is running a memecoin out of the White House, and the top two hundred and twenty holders were flown to his golf club for a private dinner with the seating chart arranged by purchase volume. A federally licensed commodity exchange is taking retail bets on whether the U.S. military will assassinate a foreign head of state, and reporting suggests the heaviest order flow is coming from accounts sitting inside the kill chain. A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. Each one, taken alone, would have been a bleak, dystopian fever dream ripped from the pages of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. Together they now appear as the new normal, and the vocabulary we use to do policy analysis is going to have to update to match the interesting times, in the proverbial sense, that we now inhabit.