There's no shortage of icky parts of crypto. The whole idea from the outset was to enable an end-run around societal regulation of undesireables like money laundering, hiring hits, funding terrorism, human trafficking, tax evasion, and trading drugs & child pornography.

I don’t see what’s ironic about it. Those existing banking institutions may not prevail, but that’s irrelevant. The financial engineers behind crypto are not some different breed of human than those who work at Goldman Sachs. Their goal is nothing but financializing all interactions on the web. That is literally what web3 means.