The doxxed floodface was the first sacrifice
The doxxed ansem wallet whether its that-bad-or-not is the second
The third is loading
☯️😈
This insistence that time has frozen denies the dynamism in markets and people. But I didnt except anything different from the merchant of miserable takes
The state of crypto is pretty clear now
• The 2021 theses are dead (NFTs, creators, DAO)
• The 2017 theses are alive and thriving (loans, payments, and prediction markets)
• But with one difference. *Crypto is thriving off centralization, not decentralization*
Take a recent example: the Binance hack. Over 5 billion dollars hacked because an employee used a work computer to take a fake job interview. Surely this is a sign of the massive honeypot risks of centralization?
Surely this is the signal that crypto’s ultimate utility is *decentralization*?
You might think so. But look at the reactions to the hack, and you’ll see a new kind of relief in crypto. A relief that nobody felt when decentralized protocols were getting hacked.
A relief that everyone affected was *centralized.*
Because @binance is centralized, it could contain the hack and reimburse users. Because @Ripple, @tether, and @circle are centralized, they could press a button and freeze tokens.
This is not necessarily a case for *full* centralization. @aave, which is probably the most decentralized major consumer product, still was able to freeze all markets in ten minutes because it was centralized *enough.*
Now go back to the 2017 use cases: loans, payments, and prediction markets. These are all thriving now, in a way they couldn’t ten years ago, *from* centralization.
• Loans: @aave is able to freeze markets to prevent bad credit. @Visa is letting stablecoin issuers get access to credit.
• Payments: @stripe is developing its own blockchain that will let anyone remit payment at any time, anywhere (compliant) in the world, for cheap. Onrampers like @coinbase, @moonpay, @fun, and, yes, @StripeCrypto all give a gateway for people to turn cash into crypto to use in onchain products.
• Prediction Markets: @Kalshi and @Polymarket both use off-chain order matching and centralized market creation to bolster user experience in a way that wasn’t possible a decade ago.
2017 won, but it won under 2026 terms: crypto has grown up into an enterprise solution above all.
Like it or not, centralization is here to stay.
