Are We Losing the Plot?

We're more into a decade of crypto now, and you can feel it – it seems there has been suddenly but all at once a recent vibe shift among the industry. Something's changed. The original bet, crypto at its core, was on open, censorship resistant, decentralized, permissionless infrastructure. That raw energy, that fight for a different kind of internet – it feels quieter now. The reality settling in is that these core values... are simply opposite of the fast narratives and desire of the builder communities. It feels like the fundamentals, essential as they are, often come across as a burden, not an opportunity, especially when the pressure to scale hits.

And let's be honest, privacy is hard. Decentralization is costly. Going full permissionless, fully open source? That impacts moats, makes businesses less defensible. But the constant refrain is: for crypto to win, we have to scale. This, at least for me, has led a bit to some sort of a crisis. I came here for those values, for that fight.

The Convenience Trap: We Want the Ideals, But We Click 'Accept'

Here’s the tricky part: most of the core values... [are] something we might desire, but don’t require until we actively need it. You don’t really think about your chat encryption day-to-day, until they leak. You don’t obsess over fund safety, until they get stolen. Data privacy isn’t top of mind, until you get hacked. Day to day most of those values are good to have but not as important for our day to day life... time and time we have all gave up a little bit for a bit more convenience.

We accept those cookie popups instantly because they block what we want to read. We often just don’t think enough about it. Yes, there are those folks truly fighting the good fight, and we should be grateful. But in reality most of the time we are online to fulfill some latent need... and we don’t want to think twice. The very principles we cherished held back onboarding. It’s easy here to blame the user. Not your keys not your coins. Do your own research. Don’t trust verify. But in all honesty we rarely have time for it. That’s why convenience through abstraction wins.

The Platform Rise: Building Walls Where We Dreamed of Avenues

This user reality paved the road for where we seem to be heading. This is why chain abstraction, wallet abstraction, gasfee abstraction, etc. matter so much. People want things to be easy, fun. They don't want to think twice. We are shifting from open protocols further to platform like businesses. We know platforms from Web2; they're incredibly successful value and attention-capture machines. Platforms have walls and moats; protocols intended to replace them with avenues. It’s like choosing between building a walled city or letting Paris sprawl until the walls got replaced with ring roads and avenues. Both have their logic, but they're different beasts.

It feels like L2s and many integrated apps are leaning towards the walled infinite garden model. They offer smoother on-ramps, slicker experiences. My idealistic dream was a decoupling from infrastructure and interface, but I mistakenly thought that’s going to be a lot easier. Now, we are getting to a point where the interface again is the sole experience. And it is user-friendly, often delightful. But these platforms, while built on protocols, often recreate old school platform dynamics – concentrating control points (like sequencers), guiding users through preferred pathways, creating soft lock-ins. The abstraction is powerful, but often hiding more than just complexity.

Protocol Cosplay: When Decentralization Feels Like Theater

Thinking back, was the initial protocol push always pure conviction? Or was it sometimes, perhaps most likely, a way to protect yourself against potential regulatory pitfalls? This, I feel, has led to a world where some teams (don't take it personally) effectively cosplayed as protocols. They adopted the language, perhaps for regulatory cover or community buy-in, only to pivot to platforms when the momentum shifted.

And honestly, at last a lot of decentralization is a lot of cosplay anyway (sadly). How truly decentralized is a system if ownership or validation is concentrated? It can feel like more decentralization theater for optics than for purpose. I am not a fan here of sufficiently decentralized as some end goal. I don’t think anyone who wants to get rich or powerful has been really willingly give away power for free. Centralization offers speed and focus; you don't need messy community consensus.

The Unfunded Mandate: Who’s Minding the Pipes?

But underneath the shiny platform interfaces are the protocols – the essential plumbing, the foundational layers we build upon. (En-dash to highlight this text is a collaboration with a LLM obviously). Protocols are the underlying piping systems, inherently harder to engage with directly unless you have the technical chops. And they carry a persistent, difficult truth: the ongoing effort required for maintenance of this infrastructure is often not yet calculated in, and sadly not seen as exciting and high pay work itself. Decisions about upkeep, upgrades, or replacements – the unglamorous necessities – become points of friction rather than shared responsibility.

No infrastructure comes for free. The thrill is in building the new; maintenance is the long, unsexy, expensive haul. We may acknowledge maintenance is a public duty... but in general not the sexy job to do. This is especially true for protocols, which are harder to monetize directly than the platforms they enable. Progress can stall. Incentives get skewed: it can’t be that the best jobs rely on it, but the jobs that provide it are second nature. We simply haven't solved funding these digital public goods sustainably.

Ethereum as Bedrock, Life Happening Upstairs?

So, where does this leave a foundational layer like Ethereum? Its past narrative was unbundling for scale, sparking huge innovation. Now, with so much activity migrating, Some see it as safe haven, the place of last resort. Like that good old neutral Swiss bank account – maybe not for daily use, but the ultimate security layer. It's battle-tested, meaningfully decentralized, maintained. It has a hardness.

But the danger is, as users get comfy on the polished platforms upstairs, the bedrock basement gets forgotten. You care about the faucets or your heavy rain shower head... only when its blocked you care about the pipes in the wall. But so far you probably haven't spend a second about the sewage system overall at all. The more it fades into the background, the easier it is for the online noise machine to dismiss its relevance. (Don’t trust everything what you read on a social feed might be a good reminder. At least that’s what I tell myself.)

Beyond Tokens: Still Searching for the Real Business Model (and Soul?)

We still haven't truly cracked scalable business models beyond VC fuel and maybe some niche value capture. My hunch is that we over index on tokens. They've been one answer, but it's clear tokens come with their own down and upside. The short attention spans led to a meme-ification of the entire financial markets. Perceived value often feels completely detached from actual value. We turbocharged trading gamification, creating a whole new class of savvy traders and gamblers disconnected of the projects associated with tokens itself.

Sometimes this really makes me think that in general we have not yet found yet an actual business model for the internet itself, beyond access, ads, and rent-seeking. Is crypto just finding new ways to do the same?

My hope is that the real potential, the path back to the core promise, lies deeper. That verifiable compute and zero knowledge proof will be the key, combined with smart contracts on a permissionless, censorship resistant and widely decentralized chain (the world computer in my mind). These feel like they could enable genuine agency, privacy, and economic freedom in ways platforms alone might not. Agency is the ability to exit with everything all at once. Agency is power and control over data (including financial assets) and identity. For me the promise of crypto was always permissionless access and full agency.

Freedom or Just Better Cages? The Choice We're Making.

By now, we have a sound proof of concept of web3, onchain, or crypto (nomenclature is continuously evolving), though it's often still cumbersome. Think we are just getting to the smart phone era but Steve Jobs hasn’t been on stage yet. We've learned things that thought were easy turned out to be hard and take longer. Growth brought complexity, not only simplicity.

The platform shift makes pragmatic sense. The "protocol cosplay" reveals uncomfortable truths. But for me, crypto is still a tool for economic freedom. A tool for agency. As we build with these powerful new tools – ZKPs, verifiable compute – the fundamental question lingers, sharpens even: Are we consciously using them to build towards that original, difficult vision of freedom? Or are we defaulting, seduced by convenience and familiar models, into just building more sophisticated, user-friendly cages? Same soup, different day.

Text generated based on notes from my notebook with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25