WordPress, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain

So yeh. When I started writing about blockchain and WordPress in 2021, Bitcoin was old enough to vote (if it were a person), and WordPress was approaching its 20th birthday. These technologies grew up as contemporaries, both emerging from ideals about openness, decentralization, and democratizing access.

This is the first piece in a three-part series exploring cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies’ potential impact on WordPress and the broader open web.

The Context: Crypto Winter and Recovery

Bitcoin’s genesis block launched in 2009, six years after WordPress’s initial release. The cryptocurrency market experienced a significant cycle in 2017-2018, often called “crypto winter,” marked by dramatic price fluctuations and failed projects.

The sector faced serious setbacks: people went to prison for securities fraud, high-profile projects failed spectacularly, and Bitcoin’s price dropped from $20,000 to under $4,000. It was a mess.

However, by 2021, institutions from corporations to traditional finance had acknowledged that cryptocurrencies weren’t going away. The market had matured. Regulatory frameworks were emerging. Serious people were taking it seriously.

Why This Matters for the Open Web

The web in 2021 faced several pressing challenges:

Declining revenues for publishers – Traditional ad models were broken
Conflicts between tech platforms and governments – Who controls the internet?
Election interference through disinformation – Trust in digital content was collapsing
Deepfake technology advancement – Synthetic media was getting frighteningly good

These problems created opportunities for blockchain-based solutions to address trust, transparency, and economic model failures.

If you care about the open web—and if you’re in the WordPress community, you probably do—these are your problems too.

The Elephant in the Room: Environmental Impact

Before going further, I need to acknowledge the serious concerns about Bitcoin’s energy consumption and cryptocurrency mining’s environmental impact. This deserves both discussion and action.

The “proof of work” consensus mechanism used by Bitcoin requires massive computational power. Critics rightly point out that this energy consumption is problematic, especially when much of it comes from fossil fuels.

This isn’t a problem you can handwave away. Any serious engagement with blockchain technology needs to grapple with its environmental consequences.

Beyond the Headlines

Most cryptocurrency coverage focuses on price movements and speculation. That’s boring. And it misses the point.

The interesting questions are:

What does decentralized consensus actually enable?
How do programmable money and smart contracts change what’s possible?
What happens when digital scarcity becomes provable?
How do trustless systems compare to trust-based ones?

These are architectural questions, not financial ones.

A Call to Engagement

I encourage the WordPress community to:

Study blockchain technologies beyond headlines – Read white papers, explore the underlying code
Engage with crypto communities – Understand what problems they’re trying to solve
Experiment thoughtfully – Try building something, even if it’s small
Prepare for disruption – Whether you embrace it or not, blockchain will impact the web

The WordPress ecosystem represents roughly $600 billion in economic value. The question isn’t whether blockchain will affect WordPress, but how—and whether the WordPress community will shape that disruption or be shaped by it.

What’s Coming

The rest of this series will explore:

Practical blockchain projects that WordPress users can use today
Digital wallets and DeFi and how they’ll disrupt WordPress economics
NFTs and Web3 technologies that will reshape content ownership and monetization

Looking Back from 2025

Writing this in August 2021, I was cautiously optimistic about blockchain’s potential while acknowledging its serious problems. Four years later, some predictions proved accurate, others didn’t.

Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake (September 2022), dramatically reducing its energy consumption. NFTs had their moment of hype and subsequent crash. DeFi matured from experimental to functional (though still risky). Major institutions did enter the space, though perhaps not in the ways we expected.

The fundamental question—how do decentralized systems compare to centralized ones?—remains as relevant in 2025 as it was in 2021.

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Published: August 4, 2021

Source: Originally published on Velocitize, part of a three-part series exploring blockchain and WordPress.

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