From Underground Experiment to Global Phenomenon: How Crypto Went Mainstream

Bitcoin started as a weird email to a cryptography mailing list. Today, crypto is discussed by presidents, central banks, regulators, asset managers, fintechs, and public companies.

That doesn’t mean the industry is “finished” or fully accepted. It means something more important:

Crypto crossed the line from subculture to infrastructure debate.

It is now too big, too global, and too relevant to ignore. This final article in Block 1 is the story of how that happened.

 

1) Phase one: the underground years (2008–2013)

Crypto began as a cypherpunk-built response to a very old problem: how to move value online without trusting a central intermediary.

The early years were defined by:

• the Bitcoin whitepaper,
• hobbyist mining,
• tiny forums,
• and early exchanges held together with duct tape and optimism.

At this stage, crypto was mostly:

• technical,
• ideological,
• and niche.

It attracted developers, libertarians, privacy advocates, and internet-native tinkerers — not institutions.

The mainstream barely noticed.

2) Phase two: price discovery and the first public waves (2013–2017)

As exchanges improved and media coverage expanded, crypto became visible to the public mostly through one thing: price.

Bitcoin rallies (and crashes) pulled in new users, and “crypto” slowly shifted from an engineering topic to a financial headline. At the same time, Ethereum expanded the category by introducing smart contracts, which made it possible to build tokens, apps, and entirely new markets on-chain.

This is the phase where crypto stopped being “just Bitcoin” and became an ecosystem:

• exchanges
• wallets
• altcoins
• token markets
• early DeFi/NFT foundations

The user base broadened, but crypto was still mostly outside traditional finance.

3) 2017 was a turning point: Wall Street starts building rails (CME futures)

One of the clearest “mainstreaming” signals came when regulated financial markets started offering crypto exposure.

In late 2017, CME Group announced Bitcoin futures, and later confirmed the launch date for the contract. This mattered far beyond trading desks: it meant a major regulated derivatives venue was creating standardized infrastructure for Bitcoin price exposure and risk management. CME’s own press releases from October and December 2017 frame this shift explicitly.

Why this was huge:

• institutions got a regulated instrument,
• Bitcoin moved deeper into traditional market structure,
• and “crypto exposure” became easier to discuss in professional finance.

Crypto didn’t become mainstream overnight—but it became much harder for traditional finance to dismiss.

4) Consumer fintech adoption: PayPal brings crypto to ordinary users (2020)

Crypto’s next big leap wasn’t only institutional. It was consumer-facing.

In October 2020, PayPal announced that U.S. users would be able to buy, hold, and sell cryptocurrencies directly in PayPal, with the company also signaling plans to increase crypto’s utility in payments. For crypto adoption, this was a major legitimacy moment: one of the world’s best-known fintech/payment platforms was treating digital assets as a real product category.

What changed:

• crypto became available in a familiar app,
• onboarding became easier for non-technical users,
• and the “this is only for traders and hackers” narrative weakened.

Mainstream adoption often looks like this: not a new protocol, just a better distribution channel.

5) Sovereign adoption: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender (2021)

In June 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender after its Congress approved the law, with implementation following in September 2021. Reuters covered the passage and rollout timeline, and IMF documents later referenced the legal-tender adoption and the policy risks it created.

Whether you see El Salvador as visionary, political theater, or a real-world experiment, it marked a major milestone:

Crypto had moved from startup products into national policy.

That was a profound shift in the conversation. After El Salvador, crypto was no longer just:

• a market topic,
• or a tech topic,
• but a sovereign policy topic.

And yes, later changes and IMF-linked policy adjustments also showed how hard long-term national crypto integration can be in practice.

6) Regulation grows up: MiCA and the move toward rulebooks (EU)

For years, crypto regulation was mostly fragmented:

• guidance here,
• enforcement there,
• lots of grey zones.

The EU changed that with MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation), a unified framework for crypto-asset issuers and service providers. The law is published in EUR-Lex (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), and ESMA’s MiCA page tracks implementation work and the transition into the new regime.

This is one of the strongest signs of mainstreaming:

• regulators stop treating crypto as a temporary anomaly,
• and start building permanent frameworks around it.

Crypto becomes “real” in policy terms when governments stop asking if it exists and start deciding how to supervise it.

7) The U.S. spot Bitcoin ETP approvals (2024): crypto enters the core investment wrapper

Another major milestone came on January 10, 2024, when the U.S. SEC approved rule changes allowing the listing and trading of multiple spot Bitcoin ETPs (commonly called spot Bitcoin ETFs in everyday conversation). The SEC published both the approval order and Chair Gensler’s statement on the same date.

This was years in the making, and it mattered because it put Bitcoin exposure into one of the most familiar wrappers in global investing: the exchange-traded product.

That changes access dramatically for:

• advisors,
• brokerage users,
• retirement investors,
• and institutions with mandate constraints.

It doesn’t mean “crypto won.” It means crypto became easier to access through mainstream financial infrastructure.

8) Why crypto went mainstream even after the crashes

This is the part many people miss.

Crypto did not go mainstream because it was smooth or scandal-free. It went mainstream because, despite everything:

• people kept using it,
• developers kept building,
• and institutions kept finding use cases.

Different groups adopted crypto for different reasons:

Traders

24/7 global markets and volatility.

Developers

Open financial and ownership infrastructure.

Users in weak banking environments

Faster transfers, stablecoins, and alternatives to local rails.

Institutions

Portfolio exposure, custody products, trading, and settlement infrastructure.

Governments and regulators

Because the market got too large to ignore.

In other words, crypto mainstreamed not as one product—but as a stack: asset, network, payment rail, developer platform, and policy issue.

9) What “mainstream” actually means now

Mainstream doesn’t mean universal acceptance.

It means crypto now has:

• regulated products,
• legal frameworks,
• consumer distribution,
• institutional access,
• and global political relevance.

At the same time, crypto still has:

• volatility,
• fraud risk,
• technical risk,
• and unresolved debates about decentralization vs regulation.

So the mature view is not “crypto replaced everything.”

It’s this: Crypto became a permanent part of the financial and internet architecture conversation.

That’s already a massive historical outcome for something that started as a pseudonymous whitepaper.

The simple takeaway

Crypto went mainstream in layers:

• first as an idea,
• then as a market,
• then as an app ecosystem,
• then as infrastructure,
• and finally as regulation and policy.

It is no longer an underground experiment.

It is now a global phenomenon — messy, controversial, and still evolving—but undeniably part of how the modern financial internet is being built.