So Bitcoin therefore ends up being more useful to ordinary Russian citizens under sanctions than it does for oligarchical, globe-spanning wealth; the exchanges hold a similar role to the banks and can be brought to heel, but at a small scale you can self-bank. There's always a leak in the system because of this, even if you brought down the hammer on every exchange. Destroy Bitcoin and it'll just mushroom up again in some other form.
Crypto is game-theoretically useful even to elites who suspect they're under threat of being frozen out; they might not be able to keep 100% of what they have, but even 0.1% of vast riches is enough to sustain a comfortable life for some time. And if they lobby to keep exchanges open, they have the possibility of keeping more. This explains why there hasn't been a strong global consensus on crypto yet.
Maybe at that point there would be two worlds of crypto: you can trade it on the above-the-board exchanges, but can’t move those coins out onto the blockchain in any meaningful amounts. Or you can have it on the blockchain, but you can’t convert it to USD/EUR in any meaningful amounts unless you find a private buyer.
In fact these separate worlds already exist — it’s not like most Coinbase users ever interact with the actual chains, they just trade inside Coinbase’s SQL database. But a lot of the appeal of crypto is about theoretical possibilities, and government regulation can put a real damper on that enthusiasm.