Crypto wants to be an asset class, but what – and whom – is it actually for?

With a spectacular jump at the end of August, Bitcoin has climbed above $80,000 in one of its strongest rallies in years.

A key driver, according to Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, has been the so-called debasement trade: the bet that governments around the world –primarily in the US – will water down their currencies. As investors position for a weaker dollar amid worries about US debt and government borrowing, Bitcoin has become the digital alternative to gold.

Another point driving crypto adoption has been the great effort that has been spent to establish it as an asset class. Bitcoin exchange-traded products hold roughly 7% of the total supply, according to WisdomTree data from January 2026, and public companies and governments hold a further 8% between them.

For private investors, there is a portfolio argument as well. According to WisdomTree research, a 1% Bitcoin allocation would have lifted the Sharpe ratio (a measure of return per unit of risk) of a portfolio of 60% global equities and 40% bonds from 0.52 to 0.59 over the decade to the end of 2025. The improvement kept growing with the allocation, reaching 0.94 at 10%, although portfolio volatility rose from 8.76% to 11.30% along the way.

Anecdotally, many of the experts I talk to have casually held a Bitcoin position at some point – but never more than 1% – for diversification. Françoise Collet, chief investment officer of Europe at DNCA, said it "can make sense to have a small allocation".

Finally, I suppose, there is fear of missing out. If you think cryptocurrency will spread wider and people will start using it every day, there is money to be made by backing it now, almost as an infrastructure play. But is this really how it's used?

I feel recent events in US and British politics have shown the true face and meaning of this technology. It’s the face of Donald Trump, Ben Delo and Nigel Farage.

Delo made headlines this month as he gave £36m – the largest single donation in British political history, matched only by fellow entrepreneur Christopher Harborne's own £36m – to a startup called Reform UK.

Delo would probably not mind the description: in his own Telegraph column announcing the donation, he called Reform UK "a startup, founded in 2018", comparing it to Ocado and Octopus Energy on their way to becoming British success stories.

Delo’s fortune comes from BitMEX, the crypto exchange he co-founded in 2014. In 2022, he pleaded guilty for wilfully failing to run an anti-money-laundering programme on the exchange. Prosecutors said BitMEX had become “in effect, a money laundering platform” and that it helped US-based customers disguise their whereabouts so they could keep trading despite an official ban.

Because of the plea deal, those wider claims were never tested at trial and in March 2025, days before a $100m fine against BitMEX fell due, Trump pardoned Delo, his co-founders and the exchange itself, wiping the debt clean.

Trump himself has reported over $1bn in crypto-related income since returning to office, blurring the line between his personal fortune and an industry his administration now regulates.

The US treasury's financial crime unit, FinCEN, identified more than $200m in BitMEX transactions tied to unregistered money services and darknet markets, where drugs and counterfeit goods change hands.

The more you dig, the murkier it gets, and other examples of crypto's less flattering uses aren't hard to find. Take Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder, also pardoned by Trump for financial crimes of his own, whose exchange received a $2bn investment from an Abu Dhabi fund routed through a stablecoin issued by Trump's and his family’s crypto venture.

A true altruist, Delo said he's gifted the £36m for democracy’s sake.

“I want a fair fight and a level playing field," he wrote in the Telegraph, casting his donation as a stand against a Labour Party bankrolled by trade unions.

Defenders of Bitcoin will say that there is a distinction to be made between Bitcoin itself and other cryptocurrencies: that the protocol itself is secure, decentralised and no more implicated in Delo's or Zhao's conduct than gold is implicated in a bullion robbery.

That's fair on the technology but not on the money. BitMEX didn't trade alternative coins – it pioneered Bitcoin derivatives specifically. Bitcoin's security made it easier to move that money across borders with minimal scrutiny. The protocol may be sound and still be the preferred vehicle for crypto’s main use case of moving money without a trace.

I may go on, but instead, let me ask you: does it still matter to you that crypto may increase the Sharpe ratio of your portfolio?