Wintermute CEO: The crypto industry has already lost its way; only personal sovereignty is the path worth taking.
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Wintermute CEO: The crypto industry has already lost its way; only personal sovereignty is the path worth taking.
The mass adoption of stablecoins, institutional entry, and KYC chains are not victories—they are merely us swapping to a more efficient set of shackles.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute
Translated and edited by TechFlow
TechFlow Introduction: Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute, draws inspiration from the “Golden Path” in Dune to pen a rare philosophical manifesto for the crypto industry. He does not discuss price, nor shout “alpha.” Instead, he names names: mass adoption of stablecoins, institutional onboarding, KYC-enabled blockchains—none of these constitute victory. They are merely new, more efficient shackles.
This article was simultaneously shared across two channels, reflecting the authentic sentiment of a cohort of crypto veterans: we won on the surface—but lost our soul.
Full Text Below:
I’ve been mentally drafting this piece for a long time. My stance has oscillated: Is cyberpunk viable? Is liberalism viable? Is crypto itself viable? What follows is my latest reflection on the current philosophical state of the crypto industry.
I don’t believe these ideas bear any necessary connection to price action, nor do I think this article holds any power to move markets. If you’re here looking for “alpha,” feel free to close this tab now. This piece reads more like a manifesto—a reckoning with the question, “Why are we here?”—a question that has grown increasingly scarce lately. The “p1” in the title signals that (perhaps) more will follow.
The Golden Path
Dune has ranked among my top three books for most of my life. In recent years, that ranking may have shifted (“Culture” series now ranks higher), but its influence on me has been profound—especially during my late teens and early twenties.
Most readers focus on the first three books, but it’s the fourth, Dune: The God Emperor, that left the deepest imprint on me. It profoundly shaped my thinking about progress, the value of diversity—not the political kind—and how things “ought to work.” I’ll spoil some details below; apologies in advance.
Prior to Book Four, the series’ core thesis is that humanity’s sole viable path to survival lies in outward expansion and diversification. The “Golden Path” is a millennia-long plan—to impose order upon humanity so thoroughly that, once it vanishes, people develop a visceral, cellular-level revulsion toward stability itself—toward any form of centralization. In other words, it aims to “teach humanity a lesson deep in its bones”:
“Protected safety equals total death—no matter how long that death is delayed.”
Seeking stability, imposing order, resisting chaos and entropy—these are human instincts. Building empires is also instinctive, whether as nation-states or corporations. We know all empires decay, all corporations die—yet we keep trying, each time constructing something grander, stronger. And the larger we build, the more catastrophic the collapse.
Worse still, the ultimate empire could drive humanity to extinction—either through over-centralization, leaving us defenseless against external shocks, or through internal “evolution” that abandons the very meaning of social existence. So history cycles endlessly: from chaos to self-organization, from self-organization to empire, from empire to collapse.
The central insight the “Golden Path” gave me is this: During phases of integration, we must embrace diversity and reject empire—no matter how seductive stability (and the prosperity it promises) may appear.
Existing nation-states provide abundant “protected safety.” Existing corporate/financial machinery provides abundant “protected safety” too. In my view, both are slowly steering us toward inevitable collapse. Let me be clear: This is not an anti-capitalist or anti-progress stance. Quite the opposite—the system contains less and less genuine capitalism, and ever more suffocating statism.
Overall, the future’s potential “Leviathans” take several forms:
Anarcho-capitalism. Corporations win; governments lose. Whether it’s the Tessier-Ashpool universe, CosaNostra Pizza Co., or Weyland-Yutani, the outlook is bleak for anyone not at the apex of the machine.
Nationalism. Nation-states control everything, carving up the world. Whether we end up in a world like 1984 or something milder remains uncertain.
Fascism. An unholy alliance between corporations and government. This is the Galactic Empire era of Star Wars—rebellion becomes nearly inevitable. Which country might be heading down this road is left to the reader’s judgment.
So what lies on the other side? What offers no “protected safety,” but instead places individual sovereignty and independence first? What strives to exist beyond borders, utterly ignoring closed financial systems? What treats “insecurity” as a feature—not a bug? I’m delighted you asked—that word is: crypto.
Paths Ahead
I’ve been in this “industry” for nearly nine years. I can’t recall ever feeling this lost—or this devoid of anything to look forward to.
On the surface, we seem to have gotten most of what we wanted: “institutional adoption,” and real-world usage of the technology. Yet something is missing—not just in price, but in its “soul,” in the fundamental question of “what exactly are we doing?” Meanwhile, the rest of the world marches on—and cooler kids have appeared on the block (“AI”). We’re utterly lost.
Of course, not everyone feels this way. Some see the rise of stablecoins as victory. Others celebrate (in my view, recklessly) decentralized perpetual exchanges beating TradFi and CeFi “dinosaurs.” Still others explore building their own empires at the DeFi–TradFi intersection. “Enterprise chains” are resurgent; enterprise blockchains are “great” again.
Yes, some are excited—but I’m not. Even though Wintermute stands to benefit significantly from such convergence.
I’m not excited because I see different paths ahead—and only one strikes me as both viable and worth pursuing:
Path One: TradFi absorbs crypto. Stablecoins achieve broad adoption. KYC-compliant enterprise chains. KYC-compliant “decentralized exchanges.” The financial machine runs more efficiently, with fewer intermediaries. Bitcoin becomes digital gold—mostly held by sovereign governments, corporate balance sheets, and ETFs. Or perhaps CBDCs roll out globally, delivering total control over our (financial) privacy. The technology works flawlessly—but isn’t it obvious we’ve lost? Probability: Highest.
Path Two: Governments surrender to blockchain—everything runs on permissionless ledgers, fully ignoring KYC/AML regimes. Crypto is taxed only upon fiat conversion. Token valuations reach trillions. A free, glorious world. Also a profoundly illusory one. We win—but it’s a dream. Probability: Lowest.
Path Three: Uneasy coexistence. We build something that operates entirely parallel to, and independent of, the existing system. You personally can inhabit both worlds simultaneously—while governments cannot touch yours, by design. We win—and win decisively. Probability: Entirely up to us.
I hope I’ve conveyed how unattractive Path One is to me. It simply makes the existing machine—whatever Leviathan ultimately prevails—run more efficiently.
I know some believe Path Two is possible—but it’s a daydream. Governments won’t relinquish sovereignty any more than corporations will voluntarily abandon monopoly power. Casinos won’t operate unimpeded on Solana. The CFTC won’t simply let Hyperliquid run unregulated, KYC-free (even if today’s regulators do, tomorrow’s—or the next day’s—won’t). Shall I remind you that any centralized stablecoin issuer can freeze your tokens via court order? The only plausible scenario for Path Two is widespread socioeconomic collapse—as a father of three and employer of over a hundred people, that’s not what I’m hoping for.
That leaves Path Three. You can call it the metaverse, network states, DAOs, or cultural tribes. Their commonality is independent existence—often in direct tension with the political and financial systems of physical space.
Entering the Matrix
Our biggest problem is that many have never internalized this lesson—not deep in their bones. Especially we Westerners, who’ve grown accustomed to progress, to everything becoming ever more convenient—yet never truly experienced the dark side of losing sovereignty.
Ironically, our deepest encounter with that darkness came between 2022 and 2024—we suffered heavy regulatory blows from the SEC and CFTC, while simultaneously brushing past a near-total takeover of the crypto industry by centralized entities (FTX/Alameda plus the VC complex). Yet we drew precisely the wrong lessons. Rather than doubling down on freedom, we assumed winning meant putting the right people in the right positions.
Meanwhile, for years we’ve complained about poor crypto UX, Bitcoin’s inconvenience as a medium of exchange (true—it *is* inconvenient), endless hacks, and so on. What if we got it wrong from the start? What if that inconvenience is precisely the culture we should actively embrace—the fair price of sovereign identity?
I’m not saying MetaMask represents the pinnacle of innovation. Nor am I saying we should all engrave our seed phrases onto metal cylinders. I mean we should strive to build UX for that 50% of users who genuinely need sovereignty—including users in developing countries enduring democratic erosion and full-scale governmental control, and users in developed nations increasingly resembling China and Russia, enacting absurd privacy-infringing laws (yes, I mean you, Europe and the UK).
Our goal shouldn’t be fighting “regulation” or “government.” Our fight is to create something fundamentally uncontrollable. That means relying on no single point: fiat on/off-ramps, app stores, DNS hosting, centralized sequencers, social media platforms—and certainly not centralized stablecoins (which can be frozen).
Whatever we build must not be easily shut down by a court order or a corporate bureaucrat flipping a switch. Tax authorities shouldn’t monitor our MiCA-noncompliant tokens (at least before conversion). The ultimate goal is simple: We must build a system where ordinary people can exist within it—without needing permission from anyone.
Concretely, this means:
Embracing permissionless sovereign protocols—and rejecting black-box off-chain solutions.
DAOs point in the right direction—I mean, specifically, those “unsuccessful” DAOs: those without centralized entities secretly pulling the strings, those not using governance theater to mask hollow pretense. We’ve never truly built proper communities—we’ve focused instead on incentivizing “comment spam.”
Learning to either avoid dependence on centralized tech stacks altogether—or dynamically switching stacks when an external switch gets flipped. This applies to infrastructure (cloud services, LLMs), social coordination mechanisms—and, of course, stablecoins (discussed next).
Making algorithmic stablecoins great again. Our error was diving too deeply into Ponzi structures. DAI and UST weren’t wrong paths per se—the mistake was adding USDC to DAI’s backing, and attaching unsustainable yields to UST. It’s perfectly reasonable that DAI, backed solely by ETH, cannot scale to Tether’s size—we need to build a parallel economy first, which we’ve never truly done or even attempted. A better alternative is transacting directly in crypto among ourselves—though I suspect this will materialize only later.
Privacy tools are non-negotiable.
The Scattering
The God Emperor ends with “The Scattering”—after the God Emperor’s death, humanity flees into the void. After 2022, at the moment we absorbed that lesson, we should have had our own “Scattering.” But it’s not too late.
We don’t always get to choose which part of the world we inhabit today. Some of us are trapped in countries with almost no exit. Others are bound by self-imposed responsibilities. My rather pessimistic forecast is this: Over the coming years, we’ll find more and more reasons to want to flee. The Leviathan will keep growing, conquering, oppressing. Even if a parallel crypto world truly exists, escaping into it fully is impossible right now. But we can—at least—begin (or re-begin) building escape routes for others, while letting the real world and the crypto world coexist.
The means of escape will be the only thing worth building. When crypto inevitably fades from fashion, some things will continue functioning—even amid the outside world’s indifference. More importantly, they’ll imbue everything we build and do with meaning.
Most of us will choose to coexist with the Leviathan. Responsibility, comfort, money—or other meanings—will compel them. There’s nothing wrong with that. Those who stay will build the exits—and perhaps (just perhaps) recover what we’ve lost.
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