What If You Stop Seeing The Forest Because Of All The Trees?
Article743 words
Essay arguing crypto is not dead but ill: tokens are equity without rights, insiders extract via engineered tokenomics, OTC dumps and backroom MM deals, and gambling is the main consumer product. Calls for longer floats, honest unlocks and enforced vesting.
Key claims
Most tokens are equity with all the dilution and none of the rights
Hyperliquid and Bitcoin are the names that earned the right to be a serious asset class
Fix requires longer floats, honest unlock schedules and enforced vesting
What If You Stop Seeing The Forest Because Of All The Trees?
Crypto obviously isn’t dead. But it’s ill. And believing hard, doesn’t mean you’re right. A few thoughts from a crypto-native mind.
As some of you know or at least noticed, i was offline for a few months.
While I don’t want to go into the details of why i had to take this health break, I really believe that it was a net positive in the end.
The distance helped me to get more clarity on so many things. A clarity that at some point I lost, because I was too deep down the rabbit hole.
Or, as we say in (swiss)german: « I stopped seeing the forest because of all the trees ».
What this means?
If you’re into something too deep, things start to feel normal that aren’t. You start to believe things that you otherwise wouldn’t. You tell yourself that things are okay, even if they aren’t.
In my case, this applied on many levels. From lifestyle and work/life balance to how i’d think about money and investments. And most importantly, how I’d look at some of our industry’s dynamics.
More specifically:
- It’s not normal (or okay) that most tokens = equity with all the dilution, none of the rights.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that tokens are being sold to retail as « generational wealth » oppurtunities while tokenomics are engineered to make VCs and insiders money (see Celestia).
- It’s not normal (or okay) that founders dump their allos OTC for millions before TGE.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that backroom MM deals (see Movement) and insider trading are the standard.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that pretty much the only consumer product we shipped is gambling.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that 17 years in, the front door (aka UX for normies) still doesn’t work.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that 99.9% of stuff launched ends up on the graveyard.
- It’s not normal (or okay) that we let industrialized crime (from scammer KOLs to North Korea) run this industry.
Yet, if you’re into it all too deep and live in an echo chamber that sells you a new generational-wealth dream every morning, cultivates your FOMO, and keeps you online at 3am chasing it, you stop seeing those things.
The space is often extractive, sometimes toxic, and still far from mature.
Keeping your clarity, and a life worth living, while not losing all your money inside all of that is genuinely difficult.
I know, because I lost the thread for a while, and there is a great deal in life that matters more than the next 100x.
Yet, crypto is not dead.
We’ve built real things (stablecoins, tokenization, etc) and Hyperliquid proves that replacing companies with protocols, that keeping user-protocol-token alignment, that real revenue and real value accrual mechanisms, and fading VC extraction, are all very much possible.
But crypto is ill.
And we can only fix it if we work together.
Longer floats and honest unlock schedules. Token designs with enforced vesting and real value accrual instead of narrative and dilution.
Builders shipping for users instead of farmers. Funds underwriting alignment instead of extraction.
Commentators holding a line on what they amplify.
Regulators writing real rules instead of letting arbitrage run the table.
None of it is technically hard. It is just collectively inconvenient, which is exactly why it takes the whole industry wanting it.
The work of this next era is to turn our fundraising-loophole tokens into a serious asset class that deserves the capital it attracts, beyond the few names, like Bitcoin or Hyperliquid, that already earned the right.
So let me close this with the part I most want the younger version of me to hear:
Crypto is one of the few arenas left where someone with no pedigree, no connections, and no permission can show up and build something real.
For our generation, locked out of so many traditional ladders, that is not nothing.
It is a genuine shot at stepping outside the matrix, and I would never tell anyone not to take it.
But not all that glitters is gold.
It is far harder to make it here than the timeline makes it look, and if you go too deep down the rabbit hole it gets very hard to keep a clear view, because believing hard is not the same as being right.