On Crypto Nihilism
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On Crypto Nihilism
The primary cause of today's crypto-nihilism lies in the massive influx of capital and builders into a set of artificially conceived pseudo-needs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Tang Han, Founder of SeeDAO
Recently, crypto nihilism has become widespread within the industry. But this is hardly surprising. For many seasoned practitioners, serious doubts about the current trajectory of the space have existed since last year—or even earlier.
In my view, the primary cause of today’s crypto nihilism lies in the massive influx of capital and builders into artificially constructed pseudo-needs. These fabricated needs attract no real users and solve no genuine problems. Instead, they spawn an ever-growing number of smaller, artificial issues, trapping money and people in a fragmented landscape of fake challenges. Since the problems themselves are man-made, the outcomes naturally feel hollow—like inventing an enemy only to realize you’re fighting yourself. Such games cannot last.
I don’t want to solely blame Ethereum’s ecosystem for this trend—that wouldn’t be fair. After all, the wave of Dapps previously swept through EOS, Polkadot, SOL (and in this cycle, again SOL). GameFi and meme coins were not designs championed by Vitalik. Yet today, this financial game—a collusion among idea generators, VCs, well-connected project teams, exchanges, market makers, and marketing firms—has increasingly alienated and confused more people. It fails to address real problems, suffers from low capital efficiency (at least Nasdaq money gets partially used to build the real world), and cannot change the world. As a result, it has devolved into a worse version of Wall Street. Trust erodes; dreams are seen as pretexts for financial harvesting; passion fades, and everything becomes dull. This stands in stark contrast to the original spirit that drew people into crypto—the desire for transformation.
Looking back, three points deserve reflection:
Cleaning Up the Current Financial System
The evolution from ICOs to VC-dominated crypto financial markets warrants reevaluation. In 2017–2018, the chaos of anyone being able to launch a token via ICO became unbearable, so the responsibility for vetting projects was handed over to VCs—especially Western VCs with seemingly impressive pedigrees. But after one full market cycle, we see that VCs haven’t brought better order to the industry. Instead, they created years-long vesting schedules and inflated valuations, colluding with exchanges, market makers, and PR firms to dump tokens on retail investors. In this bull run, people clearly no longer trust major VCs like a16z the way they did in 2019.
As the market grows more nihilistic and returns become uncertain, some VCs have even begun chasing down project teams for their money back. For new projects seeking funding, raising from VCs is clearly no longer an attractive option. Looking at this bull market, the most successful projects have been meme coins—they bypassed the VC model entirely, relying instead on communities and fully liquid token distribution. On SOL, there was a wave of users sending money directly to meme coin influencers on Twitter—an act resembling an ICO without smart contracts.
The return from ICOs to VCs and now back to ICO-like models is noteworthy. If insiders have seen through the true nature of VCs and lost faith in them, leading to feelings of nihilism, I believe that’s actually a good thing. This industry didn’t originate from VCs—Binance wasn’t founded by the U.S. government. Early crypto enthusiasts resisted the financial order dominated by Silicon Valley elites and Wall Street. But those early adopters were too naive and inexperienced, quickly surrendering market control amid ICO chaos. Now, global centralized exchanges are being regulated and absorbed by the U.S. government, and Wall Street controls Bitcoin holdings. That crypto markets now resemble U.S. equities—or even the Shanghai index—is thus no surprise.
But I dare say that financial innovation in crypto won’t stop just because the U.S. government absorbs Binance. Not only will it not stop—it may accelerate when public perception flips completely. The cycle of resistance, co-option, and renewed resistance will continue. After all, the very reason blockchain exists is precisely because people resist the financial order dominated by VCs and Wall Street—one that controls licenses, manufactures concepts, collaborates with media, enables market makers to scalp retail, and enjoys state-backed impunity. Our current sense of nihilism and disillusionment simply means we still oppose what we’ve always opposed—we merely had temporary illusions along the way.
Cleaning Up Words and Concepts
Stop endlessly expanding blockchain, fabricating concepts around it, and creating unrealistic expectations. The bitter fruit we now bear was largely self-inflicted. We first established “decentralization” as an ideology, then built the term Dapp upon it, aiming to move application computation onto the chain. When we realized on-chain computing resources were insufficient, we began scaling efforts, spawning countless scalability solutions and Layer 2 architectures. We also invented the term “Web3,” whose meaning is appallingly vague—still no one can clearly define what it actually means. Sometimes it refers to the blockchain industry, sometimes to Polkadot’s Web3 Foundation, and other times it’s compared with Web1 and Web2, claiming “Web1 is read-only, Web2 is read-write, Web3 is ownable.” Yet in practice, Web3 often links back to Dapps—moving application logic on-chain.
Linguistic confusion is often a symptom of nihilism, leaving people unsure what they’re truly fighting for. Ultimately, we find ourselves battling for a tech stack aimed at “decentralizing network application computation,” centered on the ideology of “decentralization”—yet even this concept of decentralization lacks a clear definition. We can meaningfully discuss “courage,” “love,” or “freedom.” But how do we talk about “decentralization”? “Love” might be an end in itself, but “decentralization” sounds more like an incomplete means—why then is it elevated as an ideological goal?
If our goal is a tech stack for “decentralizing network application computation,” we should engage in technical discourse—evaluating feasibility, trade-offs, and costs. Without clarifying the ultimate purpose of this tech stack and its relationship to that goal, our actions risk contradicting our own reasoning, leading to frustration. When we fail to articulate these things clearly, we resort to marketing jargon, even inflating the narrative to something as grand as Web3—an internet-wide transformation—amplified by collusion with VCs. The result? People believed—for a while—but now they don’t.
Once coined, words are hard to erase. Here, I deeply admire Satoshi Nakamoto. As Bitcoin’s creator, he understood technology and held firm positions, never being ambiguous. Ideologically, he inscribed “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” into Bitcoin’s genesis block and chose lifelong anonymity. Firm stance, consistent action, no equivocation—this is the virtue of a political leader. Technically, he avoided the term “decentralization,” speaking instead directly of P2P. He refused to let fuzzy ideology hijack the tech stack, preventing non-technical people from romanticizing infeasible paths and spreading further misconceptions. He simply named the tech stack he wanted—this is the virtue of a technological leader.
Addressing Real Problems
Cleaning up the existing financial and linguistic systems helps us peel away externally imposed expectations and利益 structures from blockchain. Now, it’s time to face real problems.
To identify real problems, I take a personal stance: return to Bitcoin, not Ethereum. This isn’t just because Bitcoin’s market cap far exceeds Ethereum’s, but also because Satoshi’s tech stack is more revolutionary and his vision for the future more mature. In fact, if we strip away the many “meaningless terms” generated by collusion between Ethereum’s ecosystem and VCs, what remains is merely a tech stack for “decentralizing network application computation.” Bitcoin, by contrast, points toward a P2P tech stack. The former tends to place as much as possible on-chain—endlessly expanding blockchain use cases—while the latter exercises restraint, putting only what belongs on-chain and integrating with the P2P (now often called DWeb) community to build a new kind of internet.
In my view, it’s Bitcoin’s P2P tech stack that truly deserves to be called Web3—if we wish to preserve the term at all. Putting all application computation on-chain is not only impractical and resource-wasteful, but foolish. This idea acts as a source of endless problems. Most critically, it fails to attract real users. What users truly want is monetary freedom, market freedom, content freedom, social freedom, and freedom of association—not decentralization. Decentralization is merely a means. It only matters when it effectively serves our genuine goals.
A Real Problem: Bitcoin
Even saying this, some may still find it too abstract. They’ll ask: why not name one concrete problem you believe is real? Beyond Bitcoin (digital gold, possibly included in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet) and stablecoins (everyday payment tools, already widely used), what else qualifies as a real problem? What else is necessary? As Bitcoin’s market share grows, should the entire crypto market converge on just one asset?
Well, here is a real problem: Bitcoin’s economic mechanism makes it impossible for Bitcoin to exist in isolation. Not only can Bitcoin not stand alone, but it must be surrounded by a vast ecosystem. In my view, this is currently the only non-artificial problem.
This is because Bitcoin’s status as digital gold stems from its fixed supply of 21 million coins—a foundational belief. Changing this number would undermine that core tenet. Additionally, Bitcoin halves its block reward every four years. If we analyze Bitcoin as a nation, its military spending relative to GDP halves every four years. After four previous halvings, this ratio may soon reach a worrying level.
The social consensus behind Bitcoin keeps growing, yet the relative cost of securing it continues to shrink—clearly unsustainable in the long run. (Bitcoin’s price can’t rise infinitely, but miners’ rewards will keep decreasing.) In writing the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi embedded a strong assumption: absent inflation, Bitcoin must eventually evolve into a high-throughput transaction chain, where fees sustain miners and ensure network security. Previously, this was seen as an unfixable flaw. Today, thanks to Bitcoin’s code evolution, we can reinterpret this “flaw” as a structural insight: a symbiotic setup where the Bitcoin mainchain works alongside a broad Bitcoin ecosystem, ensuring long-term security without altering the hard cap on supply.
This vision won’t materialize automatically—it requires deliberate effort. If there’s anything worth building as an entrepreneur today, this is it. Because it’s difficult—and because it matters. Most importantly, this isn’t an official mandate from a philosopher-king, a license issued by a state, or a preference dictated by a VC or exchange CEO. This problem simply exists. It stands openly and fairly before everyone, grounded in numerical certainty. The entire industry must confront it—and in the future, every national central bank that includes Bitcoin on its balance sheet will face it too.
Let’s wake up and start doing something real.
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