The global financial crisis was a chance to reforge the architecture of money. Instead, the world chose anesthesia: quantitative easing, bailouts, inflations of valuation. The system was not corrected, only enlarged — its fragilities preserved, its distortions multiplied. Early decentralized networks, imagined as humanity's alternative, were coopted before they matured. Institutions captured them, custodians constrained them, speculation corrupted them. The promise of sovereignty was folded back into the very hierarchies it sought to dissolve