The Strongest Crypto Manifesto in History: Permissionless, Declaring War on Traditional Financial Rules
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The Strongest Crypto Manifesto in History: Permissionless, Declaring War on Traditional Financial Rules
Permissionless is one of the terms that best captures the essence of our industry.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsCompiled & Translated by TechFlow
While Asia is abuzz with Token2049, the West is also sharing its insights and reflections on the Web3 industry.
On September 14, at Permissionless II—the world’s largest DeFi event co-hosted by Blockworks and Bankless—Erik Voorhees, a seasoned industry OG and founder of ShapeShift, delivered an electrifying speech.
In this talk, Erik delved deeply into the future of finance, contrasted code with human laws, and explored the power and potential of decentralized finance. Drawing on profound thinking and extensive industry experience, he voiced unwavering support for open, permissionless financial systems while delivering sharp criticism of current financial regulations and the traditional financial system.
Rather than just a speech, it was more of a declaration of challenge—from open finance to the traditional financial system.
For anyone interested in Web3, DeFi, or the future of finance, this is a profoundly insightful talk worth reading—and has been hailed by insiders as one of the best crypto speeches ever.
TechFlow has compiled and translated the full transcript.
Full Speech Transcript
Alright, ladies and gentlemen, I’m Erik Voorhees, lover of freedom, founder of ShapeShift. Some call me a crypto elder. My girlfriend likes to call me the old man of crypto. Sometimes I’m seen as a hunter—specifically targeting fat, curly-haired frauds who overuse acronyms and donate heavily in Washington (note: satirizing certain concept-pushing financial practitioners).
I was asked to speak about:
Why are we here at this event? Why are we in this industry? Why are we in the state we’re in today?
It’s truly an honor to have this opportunity. But first, I’d like to get to know you—my audience (note: beginning live interaction).
Raise your hand if you came here for the free coffee. Hmm… someone’s lying.
Raise your hand if you came here for a Lambo. Sorry, you probably won’t get one this year—but keep holding on (possibly referring to a commemorative item).
Raise your hand if you love banks. No one raised their hand.
Raise your hand if you’re excited to have your eyeballs scanned by World Coin.
Raise your hand if you’re here to celebrate KYC or other forms of mass surveillance of innocent people.
Okay, raise your hand if you’re here to resist. Alright, some hands went up. I’m here to resist. It’s definitely peaceful—but equally revolutionary. As I prepared this speech, I realized the theme would perfectly match the name of this event.
Permissionless. I love that name. It’s one of the words that best captures the essence of our industry.
It’s radical. It’s rebellious. It’s non-compliant. It’s American. As an old-timer in crypto, let me remind you: it all began roughly 15 years ago with the invention of Bitcoin.
Why was that moment important? Why did it matter then? Why was Bitcoin interesting? It was interesting because it was permissionless. Bitcoin invented permissionless money. A few years later, with the invention of smart contracts on Ethereum, we gained all the tools needed to build a fully permissionless financial system.
This property is revolutionary. This attribute is more fundamental to cryptocurrency than any other. Every good project in this space embodies this trait. If something isn’t permissionless, we should at least view it as a stepping stone toward that goal.
But why is “permissionless” so novel and so hard to achieve? In the monetary world before crypto, every movement of funds required someone’s permission. You might say cash is permissionless—but try sending it across any distance. Try carrying $10,000 across a border, and you’ll quickly be reminded it doesn’t work. No, even cash isn’t truly permissionless, despite its many advantages—and it’s fading from society anyway.
So thank goodness a form of digital currency that is permissionless was invented—and at just the right time. Why does this matter? Because nearly all economic activity requires money. In a world where most people struggle just to put food on the table, the economy is effectively the arbiter of life and death for billions. Most people don’t have the luxury of pursuing their passions. They work, they labor, they trade—because they need to survive. Therefore, money is crucial to our human existence. Therefore, we should care about its quality, its nature, and who controls it.
Permission is often subtle—but it’s everywhere. Every time you pay with a card, you’re being granted permission. It seems like the only permission needed is whether you have enough funds. But in reality, there’s another, far more hidden layer of approval happening.
Banks, financial institutions, governments—many parties along the way, all strangers to you, people you’ll never meet—are blessing every single transaction you make. You don’t notice it, because as long as you behave like a “good citizen,” permission flows freely. But if you need permission to spend and trade, then you need permission to exist.
So why do we accept a world where you can only freely transact when conditionally approved by strangers? This is certainly not freedom. This is enslavement. It’s definitive. The chains press lightly most of the time—but that shouldn’t make us forget they exist. If tolerated, they grow heavier.
Let’s admit it: the laws and regulations restricting our transactions only accumulate. Compare the average person 100 years ago to the average person today—who is more economically free? 120 years ago, there wasn’t even an income tax. Back then, things were so radical that you could actually keep the money you earned. You could even cross borders without what we now call a passport—a cute little “stamp book.” How astonishing that society functioned at all under such anarchic conditions! Yet, without income taxes or immigration restrictions, the United States experienced the greatest period of growth the world had ever seen. When labor and capital are unpermissioned, societies tend to grow fastest.
But some people like to plunder. The money you earn and your ability to freely cross borders have gradually been taken away—always under the guise of collectivist propaganda like “national interest.” Today, you endure taxes that steal half your income. But the state is just a group of strangers. So half your money is stolen by a group of strangers.
What excuses do you tell yourself to cope with this embarrassment? Those who plunder you and claim it’s for your own good are revoking your permission to build your own life. So what stops this trend from continuing? What prevents tomorrow’s people from being even more enslaved? What force resists the growing tide of permission?
Us.
You may not realize it, but what we’re building is a modern economic defense against state plunder and restriction. We’re saying “no” to the ongoing invasion of permissioned existence. Our salvation won’t come from the so-called political process or political circus (a jab at incompetent performers), because they’re precisely what created this mess. Now, as free men and women, redemption is our own responsibility. All action originates in our minds, our hands, our decisions. And we’re doing it—permissionlessly.
Permission is something a kindergarten child should ask for before going to the bathroom—not something a respected man should need in his financial affairs.
Because if I can only transact with you under the grace of someone looking down on me, then I feel less like a man and more like a child. But is “child” even the right metaphor? Children are usually loved by their parents. Have you ever felt the CIA loves you that way?
Farm animals might be a better metaphor. We allow ourselves to be treated like farm animals. In the pen, we graze, we produce, we get harvested.
But we can vote. Yes, we get to choose who operates the shears. We can vote whether we want red or blue to rob us. We endlessly debate which color is better. To give up so much permission, we must really respect our leaders. We must crave greatness from these lords. They must be brilliant, noble individuals. They must inspire and guide us toward goals we couldn’t achieve without them. Are these accurate descriptions of world leaders? Are they flawless sages? Do moral paragons like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, such incredible specimens of humanity, really deserve our submission? I look at the political class—bureaucrats sucking on the teat of plundered wealth, their authority gilded, their arrogance disguised as confidence, their fake smiles matched only by the absurdity of their thoughts. I find no reason to submit to the terms they set to restrict me. To such people, we owe nothing. But to humanity—we owe much. That’s why we’re here. Cryptocurrency is our resistance. Cryptocurrency is our resistance. It’s resistance against a system undeserving of its authority. It’s our stand against coercion and enslavement. It’s our protest against endless arrogance and moral bankruptcy. Cryptocurrency is our resistance against permission. For free, sovereign individuals, this resistance is nothing less than the noble restoration of dignity and grace—serving peace and civilization. This is why we’re here today. The truth is, we don’t need permission from petty tyrants who’ve built nothing to create something great. That was exactly the principle upon which America was founded. State permission is a sham, a fraud—tolerated only by those suffering from Stockholm syndrome. It’s a curtain placed before our eyes, and we’ve only failed to see behind it because we’ve been too weak, too afraid, too helpless, too distracted, and often too comfortable.
Many in our industry have already seen behind the curtain. We’ve realized that Washington is no more necessary to a good society today than King George and the British Parliament were 250 years ago. Cryptocurrency is the technological and financial declaration of personal freedom and independence. Cryptocurrency is the freedom of free men and women in a just society to act in our own economic self-interest—to trade, exchange, deal, build, and commerce.
We should be optimistic about the future, because we live in the dawn of a peaceful revolution where any two people on Earth can exchange value without permission. Does that scare you?
Or maybe it does. Yet arrogance affects everyone. Are we sure we aren’t suffering from some delusion?
As good skeptics, we should first doubt ourselves and our own assumptions.
We should always ask: are we agents of good—or agents of chaos?
Are we just rebellious teenagers craving a chaotic, permissionless world?
Are we merely destructive degenerates—too immature and naive to appreciate order, launching reckless attacks against its very existence?
How can we so disrespectfully condemn the necessity of compliance, the virtue of permission, the many glorious achievements of central management? Don’t we care about society? If we succeed, won’t bad actors thrive in society? Won’t society collapse?
These are the strongest accusations against us. Yet they are easily defeated. They fall apart because what we seek isn’t truly freedom from rules and permission—but rather a preference for objective, transparent rules over the subjective, opaque rules of the status quo. We like to say “code is law,” but that’s a misnomer. Code is better than law. We’re showing the world the fundamental difference between human-based law and math-based law.
Compare a redundant audit and formally verified smart contract to any embarrassing piece of congressional legislation—which is more scientific? Which demonstrates order more effectively? One is an engineering problem; the other is an election problem. Compare a smart contract, where every variable is mathematically defined, to the 1933 Securities Act, where a thousand-dollar lawyer debates how similar a cartoon ape picture is to an orange grove in Florida.
The absurdity of most financial regulations is obvious—we shouldn’t tolerate it. But we all desire orderly, objective, transparent markets. To all regulators in the audience: before you send me another subpoena, consider that this is common ground we share.
We all want rules. We all want good rules.
This is my most important point today. The traditional financial system is built on human rules—not mathematical ones. Society can do better. Human rules are formed through a political process that everyone admits is error-prone and often corrupt. Human rules rely on highly subjective natural language and leave vast room for interpretation. When enforcement comes, no one can predict in advance which violations will actually be pursued.
Gary Gensler claims all tokens are securities. Well, Gary, why hasn’t the SEC enforced that against all tokens? The most generous explanation is resource constraints. Fine—but that still proves financial regulation today is subjective and selectively enforced. If we care about orderly markets, how can we respect that? Compare it to any smart contract, which enforces 100% of the time—predictably, consistently.
Uniswap’s Enforcement Division never lacks resources. Its rules are objective and transparent. We no longer need to suffer subjective rules in finance. But rather than rejecting rules altogether, we should pursue better rules. That is our task. That is our mission. That is our revolution. That’s why we’re here. Call us agents of chaos? View us as destructive anarchists? We are the only ones building financial rules that are 100% enforced. Code cops are better than real cops. We want strong rules in our markets—any rule easily broken is a fragile rule.
There’s a law saying I can’t cross a border without declaring $10,000 in my pocket. Interesting. I can easily break that law—what an embarrassing weakness in the very definition of “law.” Laws of physics, laws of mathematics, laws of code—those make sense. They’re strong, consistent, worthy of respect.
Human laws, at best, are highly fault-tolerant. Maybe they were once necessary—like how we once needed post offices to send letters. Yet both the post office and the SEC still exist—redundant, embarrassing. So I believe their budgets will increase again next year. Now compare the subjective laws of regulators or rebellious teenagers with the laws of code. Compare the 23-page Dodd-Frank Act—its odious tone spawning 400 new financial regulations totaling thousands of pages—with an Aave lending contract designed to create an orderly market. Which represents a more advanced civilization? Which is clearly a product of 20th-century technology, and which belongs to the 21st century? Compare open-source collaboration in crypto with backroom deals in D.C.—which rule-making process is nobler, more ethical? We are not agents of chaos—we are agents of order. Though some may disapprove of the order we’re building, again—no dinosaur would approve of an asteroid.
Do we care about society? Yes, absolutely. We deeply care about society. Many of us are here because we’ve seen widespread economic injustice in the world—and we want to help. We live in society. We benefit from it. We owe it our effort to improve it.
But unlike any politician—who forces others at gunpoint to comply with their views—we are here to build peacefully. We impose nothing on anyone. So don’t let the status quo tell you you don’t care about rules or society—because you’re building a superior technology for rules within society.
And they—the politicians, the regulators, the plunderers of Washington D.C.—should praise your outstanding work in the domain of order and rule-making. Compared to what we’re building, they are the true agents of chaos. They’re the ones printing billions and then pretending not to know where inflation comes from. For them to claim moral or intellectual superiority on any economic issue is absurd. At the very least, they should politely step aside. Certainly, we have many enemies. Many people find the idea of open, permissionless finance repulsive—because they’re used to controlling things they didn’t build. Now, finally, they can’t. For the rest of us—for radicals who don’t impose their views by force on millions of innocent people—how optimistic we should be. The light of opportunity shines brightly for everyone who discovers this permissionless Promethean fire. What extraordinary creative energy fills this room.
Yes, we endure seemingly endless setbacks and struggles. Yes, scammers are everywhere. Yes, we are condemned by the systems we aim to replace. Some of us face persecution; all of us suffer at times. Friends, try to see beyond those struggles. For every noble challenge you face in your work, be grateful—you are alive, and your work matters. Be grateful for the opportunity before you. Think about those working in traditional finance, the cogs inside regulatory agencies, going to work every day with dead eyes and weak hearts. Their souls know they’re not part of anything creative or beautiful. They’re not part of anything wild or romantic. But many of you are. So embrace it. Cherish it. Build upon it. Wild and romantic—these words still define the core of crypto. In a bureaucratic, oppressive, absurd world where society seems to consume itself, grinding into dust anyone daring to stand as an individual against an ancient machine, crypto’s wild and romantic heart still beats between the blocks, filled with relentless ambition. Look to the horizon. Remember—you are neither slave nor serf. In America, the ordinary person is noble. So act accordingly. Become vibrant, principled, proud men and women. Become pioneering industrialists, reflecting the nobility of that role. Build consciously. See through every petty distraction—especially when it waves a flag and demands tribute. Any regulator can submit a pull request. The fact that they don’t speaks volumes. The inner sanctum of legal finance has long since been lost to the political circus. So now we enter a new frontier—we build what is meta-legal and permissionless. In this new land, the old west, we recognize allegiance only to moral virtue, mathematics, and the sublime power of open, composable, immutable code. In our boldness, we build—but impose nothing. We invent not just on clean whiteboards, but also with muddy hands in real engineering, constructing for all humanity the world’s first and only transparent, objective financial system. We built it without a single tax dollar. We built it without permission.
Consider the significance of opposing this development—opposing objective, transparent rule sets and voluntary association among adults—while demanding peaceful people obey at gunpoint. Examine those who do this, and you’ll find the enemies of humanity so pitifully exposed. They no longer ignore us. They still laugh—but clearly, they’ve begun fighting us.
But we will win. Setting aside moral arguments, because man is a capitalist creature, capital flows where it is respected. Like water, it flows where it can. When the permissioned constraints of the fiat system suffocate and strangle, our open, decentralized alternative stands ready to receive it. True innovation is messy—it sometimes veers in unproductive directions, then corrects course.
But capital will flow to ordered, decentralized finance just as inevitably as water flows to the sea. Both will happen naturally. Neither requires permission. Thank you.
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@ErikVoorhees
