Zac Williamson - Aztec Network, Blockchain began as a rebellion against institutional power, but gradually retreated into safer terrain: speculation settlement, and regulatory-friendly finance. This talk argues that the field’s real failure wasn’t technical, it was canonical – splitting its founding myth into “number go up” finance and an underpowered vision of social coordination that never fully materialized. With privacy-preserving cryptography now real, crypto stands at a reckoning: becoming the institutional technology it promised to be or be remembered as a failed rebellion that optimized complacency and called it progress.