Okay so full disclosure — I was the person at the party in 2021 telling anyone who’d listen to buy Ethereum. Not my proudest moment. A few of them actually did it. One of them still hasn’t forgiven me.
So when people ask me now if crypto is still worth investing in, I feel that question in my chest a little. Because it’s not really a theoretical question for most people asking it. They either lost money, or they know someone who did, or they’re sitting on the sidelines feeling vaguely stupid watching prices creep back up. None of those situations feel great.
Here’s where I actually land on it after a few years of watching this thing closely.
The 2022 crash wasn’t just a “market correction.” I want to be clear about that because a lot of crypto content glosses over it with charts showing long-term upward trends, which, yeah, technically true, but also kind of dishonest. Terra Luna didn’t correct. It evaporated — like $40 billion gone in roughly 72 hours, and a lot of that was regular people who had been told it was a safe, stable way to earn yield. Then FTX collapsed and Sam Bankman-Fried went from being on magazine covers to being on trial. People lost savings. People lost retirement money. I know someone personally who lost about $60,000. He doesn’t talk about it.
Any conversation about whether crypto is worth it in 2025 that doesn’t start with that context is trying to sell you something.
That said — and I genuinely wrestled with how to say this without sounding like a shill — the technology did not collapse with the prices. Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake and overnight became roughly 99% less energy intensive. That was a massive engineering achievement that got weirdly little mainstream coverage. Layer 2 networks made actual transactions fast and cheap enough to be usable. Bitcoin ETFs got approved in the US in early 2024, which meant pension funds and institutional investors could get exposure without touching a wallet or an exchange — and they did, in significant numbers.
None of that guarantees prices go up. But it does mean the infrastructure got more serious while everyone was distracted by the carnage.
In countries with unstable currencies — Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey — stablecoin adoption went up during the same years crypto was supposedly dying in the West. For people there it was less about speculation and more about just… not watching their savings lose 40% of their value in a month. That use case doesn’t get talked about enough.
So who should actually be putting money in right now? My honest take:
If you have credit card debt, no emergency fund, or you’re looking at crypto because you feel like you missed the last run and want to catch the next one — don’t. That’s not investing, that’s gambling with a financial narrative layered on top. The market genuinely does not care about your feelings or your timeline.
If you’re financially stable, already investing in boring stuff like index funds, and you have money you could lose entirely without it affecting your life — then a small allocation makes sense to me. Small meaning somewhere around 2-5% of your portfolio. Not because I think you’ll get rich, but because the asymmetric upside is real and the downside is capped by how much you put in. That math works if you’re not overexposed.
What I’d actually tell a friend: if you’re going in, go in on Bitcoin or Ethereum, hold it somewhere you control the keys, and ignore the price for a year. If you’re constantly checking the price, you put in too much.
Is it “worth it?” I don’t know. Worth it compared to what? Compared to index funds, crypto is more volatile, harder to understand, less regulated, and historically more likely to cause you stress. Compared to doing nothing while inflation slowly eats your savings, having some exposure to assets that have genuinely outperformed over 10-year windows isn’t crazy.
The people I’ve seen do well with crypto weren’t geniuses. They weren’t early insiders. They just put in an amount they were comfortable losing, didn’t panic-sell in 2022, and didn’t let it consume their brain. Boring story. Doesn’t make for a good tweet.
The people I’ve seen get wrecked did the opposite of all of that.
That’s basically the whole thing, honestly.