decentralizationmatters

Over the past few years, crypto has grown louder, richer, and more visible than ever. Billions flow through protocols daily. Total value locked across major networks reaches figures that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. Yet beneath the surface, an uncomfortable question keeps resurfacing: what exactly did all of this growth accomplish?
Evgeny Gaevoy’s recent remarks cut straight into that tension. Not because they were dramatic, but because they described what many long-time participants quietly feel. Crypto, once driven by a desire to build systems outside existing power structures, now often feels obsessed with price charts, leverage, and short-term upside. The early cypherpunk impulse—privacy, self-sovereignty, censorship resistance—hasn’t disappeared, but it has been crowded out by a louder, simpler story: number go up.
Nowhere is this shift clearer than in the rise of stablecoins. They are frequently described as crypto’s killer application, and in practical terms, they work remarkably well. They move fast, settle globally, and are deeply embedded in trading and payments. But Gaevoy’s criticism isn’t about efficiency—it’s about direction. Stablecoins don’t weaken the dominance of the U.S. dollar. They reinforce it. Instead of creating an independent monetary system, the industry has largely chosen to wrap the existing one in blockchain rails.
That choice has consequences. When crypto infrastructure revolves around dollar-pegged assets, it becomes increasingly aligned with the very financial system it once aimed to route around. Compliance becomes central. Integration with banks and institutions becomes a priority. Innovation shifts from questioning the structure of money to optimizing settlement speed for the same unit of account. The system may become more efficient, but it becomes less transformative.
This is where the relationship with Wall Street becomes uncomfortable. Institutional adoption is often framed as validation—as proof that crypto “won.” But full integration comes with trade-offs. Wall Street doesn’t adopt technologies to decentralize power; it adopts them to improve capital efficiency, reduce friction, and protect incumbents. When crypto bends itself entirely toward those goals, it risks losing the very properties that made it distinct.
Even Ethereum, often cited as proof of decentralized success, illustrates the gap between capital and usage. With well over a hundred billion dollars flowing through its ecosystem, the network is unquestionably valuable in financial terms. Yet outside of trading, speculation, and infrastructure used by insiders, everyday decentralized applications remain niche. Most users are not living on-chain. They are not relying on decentralized systems for social coordination, identity, or daily economic life. The capital is there. The behavior isn’t.
This isn’t a failure of engineering. It’s a failure of incentives. When success is measured primarily by TVL, token price, or yield, builders optimize for those outcomes. Protocols become increasingly complex, financialized, and abstracted away from normal human use. The result is an ecosystem that is impressive to professionals but alien to everyone else.
Reconnecting with crypto’s cypherpunk roots doesn’t mean rejecting markets or pretending price doesn’t matter. It means remembering why decentralization mattered in the first place. It was never about creating better casinos. It was about reducing reliance on centralized intermediaries, protecting individual autonomy, and enabling systems that could function without permission.
That vision is harder to pursue than financial integration. It doesn’t always generate explosive growth charts. It often conflicts with regulation, convenience, and institutional comfort. But without it, crypto risks becoming just another financial layer—faster, more global, but philosophically hollow.
The industry is at a crossroads. One path leads to deeper entanglement with traditional finance, measured by inflows and approval from established power centers. The other path is quieter and more difficult: building tools that people actually use because they solve real coordination problems in a decentralized way.
The question isn’t whether crypto can coexist with Wall Street. It already does. The real question is whether it still remembers that it was supposed to be more than that.

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