Bitcoin (BTC) was built on a radical promise: money that works without trusted intermediaries. Yet 17 years after the first block challenged the post-crisis banking order, a growing body of research and market evidence suggests the crypto economy is rebuilding the very gatekeepers it set out to remove—only now under more technical labels such as stablecoin issuers, custodians, auditors, or DeFi ‘block builders’.
That is the central argument highlighted in a recent report from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), which assesses blockchain’s original ambition against how today’s… Read more






