Crypto Promised Trustless Money, Why Did Users End Up Trusting So Many Intermediaries?

When Bitcoin launched , it was supposed to remove a familiar problem from money, and that was the need to trust another institution to keep the system honest. Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 Bitcoin paper was explicit about the goal in an era where online payments normally depended on financial institutions acting as trusted third parties. Bitcoin proposed replacing that model with cryptographic proof, a distributed network, and economic incentives, but almost two decades later, much of crypto looks surprisingly familiar. People buy crypto through exchanges, they hold stablecoins issued by companies, and use custodians to protect assets.

Source: DeFi Planet