For the first time in my life I feel a trace of shame when I tell someone I’m involved in crypto.
Not because the charts look bad at the moment or because the market cap is bleeding, but because the narrative that once carried us has thinned out into something I can no longer defend with the same conviction.
It feels like we lost the moral high ground without even noticing the exact moment it slipped through our fingers.
What used to be a discussion about sovereignty, censorship resistance and the re-architecture of trust has been flattened into a theatre of extraction, where the loudest voices no longer articulate vision but liquidity.
The worst part is that we are now also entangled in the web of the most corrupt forces from the fiat world, and many, very many OGs and well known names in crypto are partners or donors to these corrupt structures.
Well, again:
the unsettling part is not the volatility, it is the erosion of meaning.
I built my certainty on the assumption that beneath the noise there would always remain an incorruptible core, an idea strong enough to outlive every cycle of excess.
Lately I find myself searching for that center and encountering only simulations of it.
This is not about price and not about market cap.
It is about the original promise, the culture that once felt like a frontier of thought, the possibility space that made this more than an industry.
Back then we were not selling assets, we were negotiating with the future.
Now too often it feels like we are merely optimizing the present for exit liquidity.
Maybe the real crisis is epistemic.
We no longer agree on what this is supposed to be, and without a shared telos every technological breakthrough turns into just another instrument for short term gain.
A system that was meant to minimize the need for trust has produced an environment in which trust and transparency in the idea itself are becoming scarce, almost non existent.
I am still here, but the certainty has dissolved into something more difficult and more honest.
Because if this space is to mean anything again, it will not be through higher valuations but through a rediscovery of purpose that cannot be tokenized.
