The Mutant Crypto Powerwave
Posted November 27, 2025
Chris Campbell
Something bizarre is happening in crypto right now.
Prices look awful. Retail is exhausted. ETH has bled below levels that make the entire market feel cursed.
And yet—beneath the noise—the largest structural shift in global finance in 50 years is accelerating.
Not in headlines. Not in politics. Not on CNBC. But in market plumbing.
Tom Lee calls it the “tokenization supercycle.”
I call it the “Mutant Crypto Powerwave”...
Or the moment when old-world financial assets fuse with machine-speed blockchain rails and become something fundamentally different.
Let’s see why this is happening.
If you’re a long-time sufferer of Altucher Confidential, some of this will feel like familiar ground.
I might be partial here, but I think the revisit is justified.
The Mutant Crypto Powerwave
For years, the crypto industry has been holding its breath, awaiting its “killer app”... its “ChatGPT moment”... its hallowed bridge from ideology to global utility…
Most of crypto was underwhelmed to discover that the first wave turned out to be an ugly mutant baby: the tokenized dollar.
(Blegh!)
The irony is fat, yes, but perhaps the surprise should be a size 0…
Why? Because history’s biggest breakout technologies never start with pure ideology or pure earth-shattering innovation.
They start with fused forms, half-familiar and half-new.
Chimeric mutants.
And not, I’ll add, because the new is “weak,” but because the old is what people understand. The best marketers in history understood this well.
“It’s a Radio With Pictures”
For example, people didn’t adopt the “automobile.” They didn’t even know what that was. But they did happily adopt (what they literally called) the “horseless carriage.”
And, of course, Edison didn’t sell electricity. He sold a forever-candle with an on/off button.
Early TVs were not marketed as televisions, but (again, literally) “radios with pictures.”
And “E-mail”? It was framed as a paper letter bolted to a global thingamabob network called the “internet.”
In short, the pure vision never arrives first; the transitional form does.
Stablecoins simply followed the pattern: an old-world unit of account fused to a new-world settlement engine, awkward to purists but instantly intuitive to billions.
And like every chimera before it, this is the thing that quietly rewires the world.
Why Stablecoins Matter (Redux)
Stablecoins give USD:
- 24/7 settlement
- instant clearing
- global reach
- programmable features
- composability with all of DeFi
And once the dollar went on-chain, a simple rule kicked in: Everything else will follow.
Here’s why. If you’re managing billions and you can hold:
- a bond that trades 5 days a week, 6.5 hours a day
or
- a tokenized version that trades globally, instantly, 24/7
…it’s not a choice.
Eventually, you buy the thingamabob.
Liquidity isn’t a preference. It’s a requirement.
Tokenized versions are simply a superior instrument from an operational standpoint.
If two assets represent the same economic exposure, but one is more liquid and globally executable… institutions migrate to the more liquid form every time.
It’s why PDFs replaced fax machines, emails replaced paper mail, electronic trading replaced phone orders, streaming killed DVDs, and cloud replaced local services.
This is why tokenization depends less on retail hype and more on institutional math.
And, guess what?
Ethereum is (Still) Boring Enough to Win
Reports of Ethereum’s death as of late are greatly exaggerated. ETH is still in the lead.
Why? Because it’s the only chain that checks all the boxes institutions care about:
- neutral and decentralized
- global developer base
- most liquidity
- consistent uptime
- institutional custody support
- scalable L2 ecosystem
- regulatory acceptance
- deep composability
When banks tokenize equities, bonds, or money markets, they need predictability—not experimental tech.
Ethereum is boring enough to win.
Tokenization Unlocks Products That Don’t Even Exist Yet
This is the part most people gloss over.
On-chain assets don’t just copy Wall Street—they upgrade it. They give it mutant powerwave energy.
Programmable treasuries: Automated rebalancing, instant collateralization, composable yield.
Factorized equities: Buy the “Tesla Optimus” component of Tesla directly.
Geographic Revenue Tokens: Own the Austin revenue stream of your favorite Mexican joint or the Singapore revenue of a famous coffee shop as independent tokens.
Permissionless Index Construction: Build your own “micro-index” in seconds—e.g., “Japanese robotics companies with rising buybacks in the last 90 days.”
Talent Income Futures: Invest directly in a musician’s future streaming revenue or an athlete’s next-year bonus pool—streamed and tracked by the minute.
What else? Anything else.
The Real Flippening
Everyone talks about the flippening as being ETH > BTC in market cap.
The real flippening right now is:
Retail → Institutions.
Retail is out. Institutions are stepping in.
Tokenized assets are onboarding. Banks are building. Regulators are normalizing crypto rails.
And one thing people don’t get:
Bitcoin (and hyperbitcoinization) is the threat. Tokenization is the compromise.
A Mass-Mutation
2026 won’t feel like a speculative mania. It’ll feel like the beginning of a mass-mutation.
From:
- 5-day markets → 24/7
- paper assets → programmable assets
- custodians → smart contracts
- brokers → wallets
- siloed liquidity → global pools
- legacy USD → tokenized USD
I’ll leave you with this…
- Crypto will mutate the world we already know.
- The best settlement layer will win the lion’s share.
- And best settlement layers don’t stay cheap for long.