The Crypto Speed Run: From Cypherpunks to Homesteaders
How crypto turns believers into cynics, cynics into realists, and realists into people who just want to touch dirt.
Most people who start working in crypto full-time last less than five years.
The irony is not lost on me, as my main wallet (zyori.eth) is exactly 4 years and 321 days old. I find myself staring down my own expiration date, with feelings to match.
There are a number of vectors that lead to this burnout, but it follows a distinct pattern that plays out time and time again for builders in this strange industry.
Most people get into cryptocurrency based on a philosophy. Blockchain folks generally believe in a better world, and they often think decentralized technology will be the key to ushering it in. In the early days, it was a highly philosophical movement. Crypto was complicated and hard to use for many years. It was almost designed to only appeal to tech-savvy users who could actually understand what was going on under the hood.
There was no easy path for the layman or the newcomer.
But a foundation was created for an ecosystem that attracted similarly philosophical and intellectual individuals. This was the bedrock of Bitcoin, and eventually Ethereum. Early on there was a bit of a feedback loop: these networks were built by smart individuals, which attracted a new generation of builders and innovators that wanted to evangelize blockchain.
This went on for years with hardcore enthusiasts trading tokens back and forth. There wasn’t much else to do besides buy, hold, and talk.
It wasn’t until Ethereum entered the ICO era in 2017 that things got truly explosive. Unlike past violent price movements, this one was connected to utility. Projects were using Initial Coin Offerings in place of Kickstarter to fundraise for their ideas: some crazy, and others genuinely compelling.
There was a massive hunger for this. Thousands of people were sitting on tokens with nothing to do with them, eager to get in on the ground floor of the next wave of applications that would supposedly take over the internet. Dapps, or “decentralized apps,” were thought to be the new App Store, and the allure of owning a piece of that infrastructure was enormous.
So token holders did what token holders do best.
Speculate.
ICO prices went through the roof. A handful were real projects with real founders and good ideas that would eventually be brought to fruition. But the vast majority were vaporware with no intention of building anything, sold purely to capture value from an audience that was all too trusting.
This dynamic poisoned the well. As the speculative prices of fresh tokens on Ethereum left a few with life-changing money but the majority with empty bags, some serious emotional damage occurred.
For the winners of this era, their egos were permanently inflated. They were crowned the definitive top 1% of the industry, with on-chain history to show for it; the ones able to raise millions and hold massive treasuries to see their dreams through. Many of these so-called founders would go on to squander it anyway, but at the time, their legacy seemed cemented forever.
For the losers, their psychology was permanently altered. They got a small taste of the 30x casino, crapped out, and watched their friends leave them behind. This is the dangerous cohort that still makes up much of the industry today, forever chasing losses from that first major extraction event.
“Just one more runner,” many said back in the day, hoping to beat variance just one more time, while others, deep in the confines of the gambler’s fallacy, simply mutter: “I’m due.”
We just saw the ultimate late-game manifestation of this with the OpenClaw founder. He built a legitimate, open-source AI agent, and the community immediately tokenized it without his permission. When the inevitable pump-and-dump crashed, the horde actually turned on him, furious that he wouldn’t pump their bags for a token he never asked for.
It is the purest distillation of the rabid entitlement that plagues this space.
The Ethereum ecosystem nearly died after the ICO era. The token plummeted from a peak of $1,100 down below $100. Even the truest believers lost faith. It was quite possibly the biggest shakeout Ethereum will ever see.
But Ethereum remained the home of most blockchain builders. The concept of a “world computer” is inherently appealing to developers who have spent most of their lives focused on digital infrastructure.
A common fallacy among blockchain builders, however, is the belief that their users will share their philosophy and use their products for good. They assume that in a world without shackles, people will choose to be their best selves, even when they are not required to.
But this ain’t Star Trek.
Instead the opposite always seems to happen. The majority of users just Zerg it, milk it, and maximally extract before moving on to the next one. Worse yet, many of those same users will feign conviction, claiming they believe this is the “project of the future” right up until they sell the moment it suits them the most, lock in their own gains at the system’s expense, and then turn around to accuse the founders of building a bad product.
Every builder knows, intellectually, that users just follow incentives. But it is hard to fully compartmentalize that when you are staring at raw, selfish behavior day after day.
Most founders can only stomach that cycle once or twice. Even those with genuinely successful, revenue-generating projects still face these exact dynamics, eventually getting locked into an “us versus them” relationship with their own community.
The game theory there is fucked.
Being at odds with the users you’re building for, the same ones that buy your products and keep the lights on, you’re going to have a bad time.
You start to realize there is a reason the stock market is only open on weekdays, as the toxicity of “always on” for multiple years sets in. You see that there is a reason every public company is required to share quarterly reports verified with real data, and why the executives running those corporations don’t engage in the Twitter town square.
You see that albeit imperfect, many of the traditional guardrails exist for a reason.
“We need transparency,” many early crypto builders thought. “That’s what is wrong with the world, it is all black boxes, and the people on the outside cannot see in to get the value.”
There is truth to that. But a certain kind of maturity is required to look into a system, see exactly how the sausage is made, and still be willing to eat it. Unfortunately, that is where we have lost many great builders.
Time and again, I have seen projects punished for their transparency. They share live data and internal reports hoping to earn trust and loyalty. But what actually happens is that two-bit journalists looking for easy headlines and low-brow community members looking for someone to lash out at will leverage that information in the worst possible ways.
And sadly, that negativity is infectious. It spreads and changes perceptions, as people read headlines more than they read corrections. Misinformation with grabby headlines is extra effective when most people don’t understand the technology under the hood anyway.
We saw this with Axie Infinity. For a long time, they shared a live dashboard of daily active users. When the numbers were stable and climbing, it was a tremendous asset that communicated real-time honesty. People watched the growth unfold instead of waiting on quarterly earnings.
The problem came when the numbers started declining. Any 10% dip in daily active users would trigger another article about the end times and how Axie had peaked. It is a prime example of founders being punished for doing the right thing.
The obvious result: the founders removed the public dashboard and started sharing reports only when it suited them, leaving most users in the dark. It is easy to understand why and hard to blame them for simply following incentives. But moves like that are a net loss. They make the system objectively worse for users and push information upward, keeping it in the hands of the elite.
Information is power.
The crypto diehards are often desperate to burn the old system down, but the problem is none of them know how to build it back better. And after half a decade in the industry, most builders start to realize the traditional system isn’t as broken as they thought.
It turns out that in a maximally free financial world, where anyone can send money to anyone at any time, with no rules and no regulations, the result is markets that are easily manipulated, shorted, leveraged, and dumped.
You end up in a scenario where retail consumers lose, and players with the economies of scale win. Same as it always has been.
The last great moment where the industry thought crypto might be “saved” was when President Trump took office. Everyone was excited about a paradigm shift in policy that would finally allow Americans to use crypto the way it was intended.
It was mostly smoke and mirrors. The Trump family quickly proved they don’t care about the ethos of crypto any more than traditional finance does. They saw an unregulated minefield and moved to capitalize. The Trump token that launched the weekend of his inauguration was one of the greatest extraction events in the history of the industry, closely followed by the Melania token. It sealed the deal in showing the administration was never pro-crypto.
They were pro-capital, like they always have been, willing to say whatever it took to line their own pockets.
I find myself tired; genuinely envious of people working at laundromats and storage centers who can clock in, clock out, and not think about the ripple effects of financial game theory day in and day out.
That is the Crypto Speed Run.
Five years in the financial hyperbolic time chamber, you come out stronger, with more knowledge about economics and human incentives than you ever thought possible.
But you also come out marred. Fundamentally disappointed by the current state of humanity. Ready to step away from the screens, live on a farm, and build something self-sustaining that others can’t speculate on.
The number of crypto bulls who have turned into homesteaders in my network is impressive. It makes complete sense. Crypto strips away all the regulatory layers and reveals humans at their absolute, unvarnished, player-versus-player potential.
Once you realize the default move for most people is to betray rather than ally, it’s hard to get excited another digital ecosystem. You just want to touch dirt, build a raised garden bed, take care of a milk cow, and step away from the game entirely.
We set out to build a trustless future, but unfortunately that led to a world where no one could be trusted.