The story could have ended there. Bitcoin existed, worked, and proved that a currency could live without a state or a central bank. The cypherpunks had won their technical bet. But in 2015, a twenty-year-old Russian-Canadian, Vitalik Buterin, turns up with his faraway look and his messianic speeches. He doesn’t just want an alternative currency. He wants to turn the blockchain into a world computer.

The idea is grandiose. Ethereum promises smart contracts that execute themselves, a Web3 where code is law, a world without middlemen. Buterin, a prophet in a black T-shirt, sometimes dressed as a bear, a T-Rex or in pyjamas, imagines the decentralised utopia. But here is the raw truth: give humans a revolutionary tool and they rarely use it to build paradise. They build casinos. And what was meant to be a mirror of our aspirations becomes a hall of mirrors where everything is distorted.

The first media reflection of that distortion: digital art turned into a lottery.

2021: the world discovers you can sell a JPEG for $69M. Beeple, a run-of-the-mill digital artist the day before, becomes a millionaire overnight at Christie’s. His pixelated collage, “Everydays”, is suddenly worth 2 to 3 times more than a Rembrandt. Yes, really. Planet crypto loses its head. The Bored Apes arrive straight away. Badly drawn monkeys, generated by algorithm, trading at $300k apiece. Justin Bieber buys one for $1.3M. Six months later, it is worth peanuts. Paris Hilton shows hers off on Jimmy Fallon. Snoop Dogg collects them. So does Stephen Curry. The whole world watches these celebrities brandish their digital monkeys like war trophies.

The same year, several paintings also sell for record prices, but let’s keep some perspective. Fragonard’s exceptional Philosophe lisant (The Reading Philosopher) sells for less than €8M in France, while a Botticelli portrait goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s for $76M, making it the second most expensive portrait in the history of painting. $16M less than Pak’s NFT The Merge. Also in 2021, Diego y yo, Frida Kahlo’s most expensive painting, sells for $35M in New York. Half the price of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days. As for NFT collections, CryptoPunk #5822 will sell for $24M (8,000 ETH), the price of a Basquiat sold the same year.

What was supposed to authenticate digital art becomes the biggest speculative bubble in cultural history. $41bn of volume in 2021²⁰. The following year, collapse: 97% of volume by value evaporates²¹. The promised virtual museums? Vacant lots. The creative revolution? Copy-pastes sold for a fortune. In this crypto hall of mirrors, a badly drawn monkey is worth more than a Picasso. The reflection has nothing real left in it. Any more than the business model of The Sandbox, whose parent company has just cut 50% of its staff²², for lack of… well, everything. Any more than we have heard any news of the famous metaverse of the company formerly known as Facebook… Meta. As for Sorare, the French start-up that raised $670M, it is still counting its losses (in French).

Still, at the time, the craze is such that every blockchain wants its own museum, its gallery, its collectors. Solana launches its Degenerate Apes, Tezos pushes Hic et Nunc, Flow bets on NBA Top Shot. Every blockchain becomes an auction room without an auctioneer. Rug pulls multiply: creators vanish with the till, leaving buyers with links to images that no longer exist. The crypto ecosystem has just built its first floor: art turned into a slot machine.

After art hijacked into a speculative asset, enter the joke turned currency. Dogecoin claims nothing. Created in 2013 to mock Bitcoin, it is literally a Shiba Inu dog lifted from an internet meme. No whitepaper, no vision, just a joke that owns it. Elon Musk enters the stage. One tweet, “Dogecoin to the moon”, and the market cap explodes. Another, “Working with Doge devs”, a new peak. He stops tweeting, it collapses. May 2021: the joke dog is worth $88bn. More than General Motors. For a currency that does nothing, promises nothing, innovates in nothing. The joke would still end up as the name of Musk’s government department, 4 years later, after he had racked up market manipulations.

Success breeds clones. Shiba Inu on Ethereum, SafeMoon on Binance Smart Chain, thousands of meme tokens born every day. Some go x1000 in 24h before dropping back to zero the next day. The creators cash in, the latecomers weep. The Ponzi in its purest form, somewhere between Warholian fortune and Duchamp-style brazen fraud, with the transparency of the blockchain. Everyone watches the scam in real time. Nobody stops playing.

Alongside art and jokes, speculation goes after its core target: finance itself, which probably recognises its own patterns there. The first pioneering protocols are born on Ethereum. Uniswap lets you trade without a middleman. Aave lets you lend and borrow. Compound lets you earn interest. MakerDAO creates the first algorithmic stablecoins. They promise to “democratise finance”. In reality? After several years of abstract uses, it all looks like shadow banking on steroids. Yield farming becomes the new sport: depositing tokens in a protocol that lends them to another one, which uses them as collateral to borrow elsewhere. Pyramids of debt on pyramids of leverage. Some protocols promise 10,000% annual returns, paid in tokens created out of thin air. The mirror has become a hall of mirrors where each reflection amplifies the distortion of the one before.

Then flash loans push the absurdity to its peak. Borrow millions, manipulate prices, repay everything within the same transaction. In February 2020, a trader borrows 10,000 ETH, manipulates the oracles and pockets $350k. Eight seconds flat. Not illegal. Just a massive nutter. A successful one. When it isn’t bordering on outright insider trading. (in French) Then come the clones: PancakeSwap, TraderJoe, JustSwap... To every blockchain its DeFi casino, where copycats multiply faster than regulators can keep up.

This logic of greed soon spills over: if you can tokenise art and finance, why not everything else? 2021-2022 sees the birth of universal tokenisation. Tokens for property with RealT (in French), for carbon with Toucan Protocol, for personal data, future harvests, music rights, even tweets. The pattern is always the same: take an existing asset, create a token supposed to represent it, promise liquidity and fractional ownership. In practice? A legal nightmare nobody wants to look at, for things nobody really needed. The most grotesque example remains governance tokens. Uniswap hands out UNI, Compound hands out COMP. Supposedly to “decentralise”. In reality? The founders and VCs keep the majority. The token? A casino chip dressed up as a voting right. And yet the utility could exist. Tokenising SACEM, France’s music royalties collecting society, to share out authors’ royalties more fairly, or the land registry, to simplify property transactions, would be perfect uses. As would certifying that tickets are genuine, as Billy does. But that’s less fun.

And 2020-2021 marks the real turning point, when the institutions pile in. Jump Trading, Jane Street, Alameda Research. Not so much out of ideology: they couldn’t care less about decentralisation. But a market open 24/7, with no rules, and retail investors on hand to serve as liquidity? Christmas came early. The hedge funds bring their usual weapons: high-frequency trading, manipulation of illiquid markets, sandwich attacks. They see a transaction coming, buy just before, sell just after. Retail foots the bill without even noticing. Cynically, they also bring what the market is crying out for: deep liquidity, professional market making.

In their wake, the VCs smell a windfall. Andreessen Horowitz raises $4.5bn for its crypto fund. Marc Andreessen, who in 2013 dismissed Bitcoin as money for criminals, becomes an evangelist. Sequoia, Paradigm, they all change their tune. They invest at rock-bottom prices, create the hype, sell on to the public at x100. Classic private equity, but without the guardrails. The same people who wanted to kill Bitcoin are now funding it. Not out of conversion. Out of greed.

This speculation machine runs flat out until it reaches its climax. November 2022. Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto’s golden boy, turns out to be a common fraudster. In shorts and socks in the Bahamas, hair all over the place, he played the philanthropist genius. The Democrats’ second-biggest donor, the darling of Congress, he explained how to regulate crypto intelligently. FTX collapses in 48h. $8bn of customer money evaporates, used to cover the losses of Alameda, his hedge fund that bet on shitcoins with depositors’ money.

After a very, very cold crypto winter, what is left of the institutions arrives in force. Goldman Sachs opens a crypto trading desk. JP Morgan develops its JPM Coin. BlackRock prepares its ETFs. The banks Satoshi wanted to bypass become the new masters of the game.

Ethereum remains an extraordinary tool. Major innovations are born on it: privacy protocols, decentralised identity, borderless coordination. But the best has been crushed by the worst. Because the worst pays more, faster, no questions asked. Bitcoin wanted to kill debt and inflation. Ethereum promised the world computer. We got $300k monkeys and algorithmic Ponzis.