What is happening in the financial markets right now reminded me of why Bitcoin was created in the first place. Blue Owl Capital announced this week that it will sell $1.4 billion in loans to generate liquidity in one of its private credit funds. It sounds technical, but what really happened was that alarms went off everywhere.

The most serious analysts quickly connected the dots with something many of us would like to forget: August 2007. That was the month when two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed due to massive losses in mortgage-backed securities, and then BNP Paribas froze withdrawals in three of its funds. No one thought that was the beginning of what was to come. But it was. And now some are asking if we are seeing the first domino fall again.

Blue Owl’s decline has been brutal: about 14% in a week, and over 50% compared to a year ago. Blackstone, Apollo Global, and Ares Management also suffered significant hits. If you watched the 2008 crisis up close, this pattern feels familiar. Stress in credit markets, initial denial, then contagion in cascade.

Mohamed El-Erian, the former PIMCO CEO, put it plainly: is this our “canary in the coal mine” moment like in August 2007? He pointed out that there are real systemic risks here, though probably not reaching the magnitude of what we experienced in 2008. The problem is, no one knew that in 2007 either.

Now, here’s where Bitcoin comes in. In the short term, if things get tense, risk assets suffer. Bitcoin could fall along with everything else, as it did in March 2020 when it dropped nearly 70% in a few weeks. But then came the massive response from the Federal Reserve.

And here’s the interesting part: the story of 2008 suggests that if Blue Owl really is the first domino, what comes next could be massive. They injected trillions of dollars into the economy in 2007-2008. Bitcoin went from below $4,000 to over $65,000 roughly a year after that. Today, BTC is at $77,800, and the numbers suggest that if the 2008 crisis response pattern repeats, the implications could be profound.

What many forget is that Bitcoin was literally born because the 2008 crisis proved the financial system was fragile. Satoshi Nakamoto even embedded a headline from the London Times in the Genesis Block on January 3, 2009: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” That was no coincidence. Bitcoin was designed as a direct alternative to a system that had just failed.

From 2009 to today, Bitcoin has evolved. It went from an unknown cypherpunk experiment to an asset worth over $1 trillion that the biggest financial managers consider almost essential. Governments buy it, ETFs offer it to the public, and financial giants hold it on their balance sheets.

The question now is whether stress in private credit triggers another cycle like 2008. If Blue Owl turns out to be the canary El-Erian mentions, and if the financial system faces another significant crisis, then Bitcoin could return to its original role: the solution when the system fails. Although it is now a solution that has become part of the system itself. Time will tell if we are witnessing history repeating itself.