Crypto Is Long Overdue a Rebrand

• Rebranding a product or even an entire industry can help transform it.
• Crypto’s identity crisis stems from public focus on speculation and scandal, not utility.
• Rebranding crypto as FinTech could drive mainstream adoption and highlight real-world benefits.

Tech giants Meta (formerly Facebook), Instagram (once a simple photo-sharing app), and Apple (previously Apple Computers Inc), have all demonstrated the transformative potential of a rebrand.

These companies unlocked new capabilities by shifting public perceptions, reshaping their identities to match those evolving visions.

Now, the crypto industry is overdue for a similar rebrand to shed any negative connotations and embrace what it really is below the hood. FinTech.

Crypto’s Identity Crisis

Crypto’s current perception falls into two categories. One group sees crypto as a tradable speculative asset offering the potential to get rich quickly.

The other associates crypto with Ponzi schemes and scams, which are ideal for money laundering. The FTX and Terra-Luna scandals didn’t help.

Only an educated minority sees crypto as it is meant to be seen, a powerful class of financial technology that makes peer-to-peer value exchange faster, more efficient, and less expensive. Crypto is financial technology.

Just as email is communication tech.

Just as the internet is information tech.

Just as the automobile is transportation tech.

Unfortunately, crypto’s identity crisis is a result of its noisy public perception, which drowns out the legitimately revolutionary and disruptive nature of its underlying technology.

The crypto label may actually be holding back mainstream adoption, and not just from retail, but from governments, TradFi, the supply chain, and more.

Peeking Behind the Crypto Curtain

Remove all the noise and euphoria, the scandals, the politics, and what we discover under the hood are the core technological foundations and benefits that have always been there.

There are reduced cross-border transaction fees – an existential threat to the predatory world of overseas remittance services, which profit off some of Earth’s poorest and most hardworking people.

This includes settlement times faster than most banks and international financial infrastructure are capable of.

Crypto also means programmable money features (smart contracts) capable of things that FinTech professionals a decade ago could only have dreamed about.

Dollar-pegged stablecoins are the ideal bridge knitting the traditional and digital financial worlds together, and they don’t even offer price speculation.

Crypto can already negate slow international wires, limited banking hours and settlement windows, and complex compliance requirements for international trade.

For the masses to enjoy these benefits, the crypto rebrand must shift the focus away from trading and towards real-world utility.

“I think the biggest business winners of 2025 are going to be dollar-denominated stablecoins,” predicted Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital, on a recent episode of the “All In Pod” podcast .

“In 2024, two critical things happened. The first is that stablecoins essentially became uncoupled from crypto volatility, and it started to be used for wholesale useful functions in running businesses. Independent of crypto volatility, what you saw were stablecoin usage just rising up and to the right,” Palihapitiya said.

“The second, and this data is still just trickling in, but it’s an incredible stat; stablecoin usage at the end of the second quarter of 2024 was about 1.1 billion transactions that summed to $8.5 trillion of transaction volume. If you compare that to Visa over the same period, it was more than double Visa’s transaction volume,” Palihapitiya added.

When Perception Becomes Reality

Any shift in perception to alter reality will involve looking at past success cases and embracing the learnings. We could look at how credit cards evolved from novelty to necessity, how cash made way for digital payments, and how mobile banking became the norm.

We could study companies who already see crypto as a FinTech solution, like PayPal, who let users buy, sell, hold, and spend crypto.

PayPal lets merchants accept it as a payment method, and it made history by launching its own dollar-backed stablecoin, $PYUSD.

If PayPal can see crypto as FinTech, so can the masses.

The rebrand will require widespread changes to accepted industry terms and language. For example, “Digital payment infrastructure” could replace “crypto.”

“Smart contracts” could be replaced by “programmable financial services,” and we could say goodbye to “blockchain” and hello to “real-time settlement technology.”

These are just speculative linguistic adjustments, but already the sentiment feels different, more credible and reliable.

Nothing Changes, Yet Everything Changes

Crypto will allow many things to happen faster, cheaper, and more effectively. It’s time we started treating it as FinTech for people and businesses, not just something to trade.

The irony, or paradox, is that nothing will really change except the sentiment. But changing the sentiment will change the public’s perception of the industry.

The first step, however, is for the millions of people involved in this space to let go of the old ways, see the old technology through new eyes, and start embracing the FinTech identity.