To its advocates, cryptocurrency is, at its heart, a libertarian project to free mankind from the shackles of government — most of all its power to debase a “fiat” currency by printing more of it. Do Kwon, the South Korean creator of the stablecoin TerraUSD, regularly equated fiat currency to “state violence”.

So when inflation took off, crypto’s supporters were triumphant. Bitcoin’s value “is telling us that the central banks are bankrupt, that we are at the end of the fiat money regime”, venture capitalist and bitcoin investor Peter Thiel declared in April.