Crypto : Comment est-on passés de l’euphorie à la haine ?

On February 8, 2026, during the Super Bowl, the atmosphere in American living rooms shifted from festive to hostile the moment a Coinbase advertisement appeared. Unlike the 2022 "Crypto Bowl" where companies like FTX and Coinbase were embraced with total euphoria, this 60-second spot—costing $16 million—was met with groans and insults. This moment serves as a stark symbol of a profound shift: the world has moved from crypto-euphoria to outright rejection. The luster of digital assets has faded, and for much of the population, the previous interest has turned into a visceral disgust. The numbers tell a grim story. Since its peak of $126,000 in October 2025, Bitcoin has plummeted by 50%. Ethereum has dropped by roughly 65%, and Solana is hovering near a 75% loss from its all-time high. The promised revolution of an "unstoppable digital order" backed by the American government has failed to materialize. Instead of a steady climb toward a million dollars, the ecosystem is facing an anatomy of collapse that few saw coming. The gravity of the situation became clear in late 2025. After Bitcoin reached its $125,000 peak, a simple threat of trade tariffs triggered a panic. In a single day, $19 billion in positions were liquidated—the largest wipeout in the history of the ecosystem—causing Bitcoin to drop 15% in 24 hours. Five months later, the price sits around $67,000 with no rebound in sight. The American ETFs, once sold as an ultimate institutional safety net that would prevent prices from falling below the "Smart Money" entry point, have failed. In early 2026, these ETFs saw net outflows of $3 billion. With an average institutional purchase price of $84,000, most new entrants are now "underwater." Even MicroStrategy, led by Michael Saylor, faces latent losses of $5.7 billion, with its stock down 80% as the company dilutes shareholders without generating real revenue. The tragedy extends beyond Bitcoin into the "altcoin" market. Between 2021 and 2025, over 11.5 million tokens died, with 85% of those failures occurring in 2025 alone. The "political meme coin" craze was particularly devastating. Tokens associated with Donald and Melania Trump collapsed by 95% to 99%. Retail investors lost a staggering $4.3 billion in these schemes, while insiders walked away with $600 million. This era wasn't an "alt-season"; it was a "crime season." Several factors contributed to this downfall. Macroeconomically, the trap closed as the U.S. national debt exploded and interest rates remained high. With 10-year Treasury bonds offering a 4% return for near-zero risk, the high-risk environment of crypto—plagued by hacks, scams, and regulatory hurdles—lost its appeal. Politically, crypto’s alignment with the Trump administration backfired. Rather than remaining a neutral, universal technology, crypto became a polarizing political label, alienating a large portion of the public. Furthermore, the "institutional adoption" turned out to be a hostile takeover. Wall Street didn't adopt crypto’s philosophy; it consumed it. Coinbase now trades traditional stocks, and BlackRock views crypto merely as a "store" to sell its own products. The market has lost its subversive soul, becoming a mere derivative of traditional finance. The "easy money" engine is also dying. The model has become predatory, functioning as a "musical chairs" game where wealthy actors extract yield from desperate retail investors. While meme coins were originally a rebellion against venture capital "dumping," the sector is now dominated by professional launchers and high-frequency bots. Without the promise of quick wealth, new users and liquidity have vanished, leaving the "casino" to burn. Morally, the industry reached a nadir in 2024 and 2025 with the explosion of offensive or useless tokens. On platforms like Pump.fun, 98.6% of the 12 million tokens launched were effectively scams. The normalization of "rug pulls" and the complicity of influencers have destroyed the industry's moral compass. Simultaneously, the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has sucked the oxygen out of the room. In 2025, AI attracted $160 billion in U.S. venture capital, while crypto struggled to raise $7.9 billion. Capital and talent are fleeing. The number of active crypto developers dropped 40% in one year as engineers pivoted to building AI models. Even Bitcoin miners are dismantling their infrastructure; companies like Bitfarms and Mara are shifting their power capacity to support AI data centers for Google and Microsoft. Perhaps the greatest ideological defeat is the failure of the "digital gold" narrative. During a period of high inflation and geopolitical instability—conditions Bitcoin was built for—central banks and states bought physical gold, not Bitcoin. Gold rose 65% in 2025 while Bitcoin ended the year in the red. Bitcoin proved it is a risk asset dependent on liquidity, not a sovereign reserve of value. However, this may not be the end of crypto, but a violent mutation. This collapse mirrors the 2000 Dotcom bubble. While thousands of companies vanished, giants like Amazon and Microsoft survived the purge. Today, despite the ruins of the "crypto casino," the underlying infrastructure remains. Tether is generating billions in profit, stablecoin capitalization is at record highs, and hundreds of public companies hold Bitcoin. The industry is splitting into two worlds: a morally bankrupt gambling den and a growing financial infrastructure integrating with the traditional economy. Crypto isn't dead; it is undergoing a painful rebirth, moving from a rebellious fringe technology to a permanent, albeit different, fixture of the global financial landscape.