Author: Evgeny Gaevoy, Wintermute CEO
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Introduction: Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, inspired by the "Golden Path" from Dune, has written a rare philosophical manifesto for the crypto industry. He doesn't discuss prices or shout about alpha; instead, he directly names the issues: mass adoption of stablecoins, institutional entry, KYC chains—these are not victories, but merely more efficient shackles we've adopted.
This article was reposted simultaneously on two channels, representing the genuine sentiment of a group of crypto veterans: we've won the surface, but lost the soul.
Full Text Below:
I've been mulling over this article in my head for a long time. My stance has been wavering: Is cyberpunk feasible? Is libertarianism feasible? Is crypto itself feasible? What follows are my latest thoughts on the current philosophical state of the crypto industry.
I don't believe these ideas are necessarily linked to price movements, nor do I believe my writing has any power to move prices. If you're here for "alpha," you can close this now. This article is more like a manifesto, a questioning of "why we are here"—a line of inquiry that has been extremely scarce lately. The "p1" in the title means (perhaps) there will be more to follow.
The Golden Path
Dune has been in my top three books for most of my life. That ranking might have changed in recent years (the "Culture" series is now higher), but it profoundly shaped me, especially during my late teens and early twenties.
People often focus on the first three books of the series, but the one that truly left a mark on me was the fourth, God Emperor of Dune. It deeply influenced my thinking about progress, the value of diversity (not in the political sense), and the overall "how things should work." I'll be spoiling some of it here, apologies in advance.
The core idea of the series up to the fourth book is: the only viable path for human survival is outward diffusion and diversification. The "Golden Path" is a millennia-long plan—to impose order on humanity so that once it disappears, people would develop a complete aversion to stability itself, rejecting any centralization at a cellular level. In other words, to "teach humanity a lesson in its bones":
"The sheltered safety is equivalent to total death, no matter how long that death is postponed."
Seeking stability, organizational order, fighting chaos and entropy—this is human nature. Building empires is also human nature, whether in the form of nations or corporations. We know all empires decay, all companies die, but we try again and again, each time building bigger and stronger. And the bigger we build, the more catastrophic the collapse.
Worse, the ultimate empire could push humanity toward extinction—either through over-centralization making it unable to withstand external shocks, or through internal "evolution" abandoning the meaning of being a social existence. We cycle through history: from chaos to self-organization, from self-organization to empire, from empire to collapse.
The core revelation the "Golden Path" concept gave me is: during the integration phase, we should embrace diversity and reject empire—no matter how tempting stability (and the prosperity it promises) is.
Existing nation-states offer a lot of "sheltered safety." Existing corporate/financial machinery also offers a lot of "sheltered safety." In my view, both are slowly pushing us toward an inevitable collapse. To be clear: this is not an anti-capitalism and/or anti-progress stance. Quite the opposite, there is less and less real capitalism in this system, and more and more suffocating statism.
Broadly speaking, the potential future "Leviathans" have the following forms:
Anarcho-capitalism. Corporations win, governments lose. Whether it's the world of Tessier-Ashpool, CosaNostra Pizza company, or Weyland-Yutani, the prospects are extremely bleak for anyone not at the top of the machine.
Nationalism. Nation-states control everything, carving up the world. Whether we end up in a 1984 world or a somewhat milder form remains to be seen.
Fascism. The unholy alliance of corporation and state. This is the Galactic Empire period in Star Wars—rebellion is almost inevitable. As for which country might be heading down this path, I'll leave that to the reader's judgment.
So what's the other side? What doesn't offer "sheltered safety" but prioritizes individual sovereignty and independence? What strives to exist beyond national borders, utterly ignoring closed financial systems? What sees "insecurity" as a feature, not a bug? I'm glad you asked—the word you're looking for is: crypto.
The Paths Ahead
I've been in this "industry" for nearly nine years. I've never remembered the sense of being lost being so thick, so lacking in things to look forward to.
On the surface, we seem to have gotten most of what we wanted: "institutional adoption," technology is actually being used. But something has been lost—not just in the price, but in its "soul," in the question of "what are we actually doing." Meanwhile, the world around us moves on, there are cooler kids on the block ("AI"). We are utterly lost.
Of course, not everyone feels this way. Some see the rise of stablecoins as a victory. Some are celebrating (in my view, a highly reckless celebration) decentralized perpetual exchanges beating TradFi and CeFi "dinosaurs." Others are exploring building their own empires at the intersection of DeFi and TradFi. We see "enterprise chains" rising again, enterprise blockchain is "great" again.
Yes, some are excited, but I am not among them—even though Wintermute could benefit greatly from this convergence.
I'm not excited because I see different paths ahead, and only one of them is both feasible and worth taking:
Path One: TradFi absorbs crypto. Widespread stablecoin adoption. KYC'd enterprise chains. KYC'd "decentralized exchanges." The financial machine runs more efficiently, with fewer intermediaries. Bitcoin is digital gold, mostly owned by sovereign governments, corporate balance sheets, and ETFs. Or perhaps CBDCs are adopted globally, achieving complete control over our (financial) privacy. The technology works brilliantly, but isn't it obvious—we lost? Probability: Highest
Path Two: Governments surrender to blockchain, everything runs on permissionless ledgers, completely ignoring KYC/AML regimes. Crypto is only taxed when converted to fiat. Token valuations reach trillions. It's a free, glorious world. It's also a very虚幻的世界 (illusory world). We win (but it's a dream). Probability: Lowest
Path Three: Uneasy coexistence. We build something that operates in parallel to the existing system, completely independent of it. You, as an individual, can exist in both worlds simultaneously, and governments cannot touch it because it is designed to be closed. We win, and we win beautifully. Probability: Entirely up to us
I hope I've conveyed the feeling that Path One holds no appeal for me. It merely makes the existing machine (whichever of the three Leviathans ultimately wins) run more efficiently.
I know some believe Path Two is possible, but that's a pipe dream. Governments won't give up sovereignty, just as corporations won't voluntarily give up monopoly positions. Casinos won't operate undisturbed on Solana. The CFTC won't just let Hyperliquid run unregulated without KYC (even if the current regulators do, the next or the one after won't). Need I remind you that any centralized stablecoin issuer can freeze your tokens with a court order? The only scenario where this path could possibly happen is widespread socio-economic collapse—as a father of three and employer of over a hundred people, that's not what I'm hoping for.
That leaves only Path Three. You can call it the metaverse, network states, DAOs, or cultural tribes. What they have in common is independent existence, often in conflict with the political and financial systems of "meatspace."
Entering the Matrix
Our biggest problem is that many people never learned this lesson in their bones. Especially we Westerners, we've grown accustomed to progress, to everything becoming more convenient, without ever truly experiencing the dark side of losing sovereignty.
Ironically, our most profound experience of that dark side was between 2022 and 2024—we were hit hard by regulators like the SEC and CFTC, while simultaneously brushing shoulders with centralized entities almost buying up most of the crypto industry (FTX/Alameda plus the VC complex). Yet we learned the completely wrong lesson from it. Instead of doubling down on freedom, we thought putting the right people in the right places would make us win.
Meanwhile, for years we've been complaining about poor crypto UX, Bitcoin's inconvenience as a medium of exchange (it's true, it is inconvenient), endless hacks, etc. What if we got it wrong from the start? What if this inconvenience is precisely the culture we need to actively embrace, the reasonable price to pay for sovereign identity?
I'm not saying we should treat MetaMask as the pinnacle of innovation. I'm also not saying we should all engrave seed phrases on metal cylinders. I'm saying we should strive to build the user experience for the 50% of sovereign individuals who truly need it—including those in developing countries facing ongoing erosion of democracy and total government control, and those in developed countries living in places increasingly resembling China and Russia, enacting various stupid privacy-infringing laws (looking at you, Europe and the UK).
Our goal shouldn't be to fight "regulation" or "government." Our struggle should be to create something that simply cannot be controlled. This means not relying on any single point: fiat on/off ramps, app stores, DNS hosting, centralized sequencers, social media platforms, and of course, centralized stablecoins (which can be frozen).
Whatever we build should not be easily shut down by a court order or a corporate bureaucrat flipping a switch. Tax authorities shouldn't be eyeing our non-MiCA compliant tokens (at least not before we cash out). The ultimate goal is simple—we should create a system where ordinary people can exist without having to ask anyone for permission.
Concretely, this means:
Embrace permissionless sovereign protocols, reject black-box off-chain solutions.
DAOs are the right direction—I'm actually talking about those DAOs that "didn't succeed," those without a centralized entity actually pulling the strings behind the scenes, fooling people with pretend governance theater. We never really built proper communities, instead focusing on incentivizing "comment spam."
Learn to either not rely on centralized tech stacks, or be able to dynamically switch tech stacks when some external switch is flipped. This applies to infrastructure (cloud services, LLMs), social coordination mechanisms, and of course, stablecoins (more on this next point).
Make algorithmic stablecoins great again. Our mistake was getting too deep into Ponzi structures. DAI and UST themselves were not the wrong path—the mistake was adding USDC backing to DAI, and giving UST completely unsustainable yields. DAI backed solely by ETH cannot scale to Tether's size, and that's completely reasonable—we need to build a parallel economy first, something we never really did/tried. A better option is to transact directly in crypto among ourselves, though I think this will happen at a later stage.
Privacy tools are a must.
The Scattering
God Emperor ends with "The Scattering"—after the God-Emperor's fall, humanity flees into the void. After 2022, at the moment we learned our lesson, we should have had our own "Scattering," but it's not too late yet.
We can't always choose the part of the world we are in today. Some of us are trapped in a country with almost no way out, some are bound by self-imposed responsibilities. My rather pessimistic prediction is: in the coming years, we will have more and more reasons to want to escape. The Leviathan will continue to grow, conquer, oppress. Even if a parallel crypto world truly exists, it's impossible to fully escape into it now. But we can at least (re)start building exits for others, while allowing the real world and the crypto world to coexist.
The means of escape will be the only things worth building. When crypto is no longer popular (which is inevitable), something will still be able to operate in the indifference of the outside world. But more importantly, it will give meaning to everything we do and build.
Most of us will choose to coexist with the Leviathan. Responsibilities, comfort, money, or other meanings will drive them, and that's fine. Those who stay will build the exits, and perhaps (just perhaps) be able to recover what we have lost.
