How a revolution got tamed, and what we have to build next

On January 3, 2009, the first block of Bitcoin went live with a sentence buried in its code: “The Times of London headline from that morning: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” Satoshi Nakamoto wrote that line into the Genesis Block by hand. A timestamp, technically. Also, a middle finger.

Fast-forward to September 2025: the CEO of a major Solana infrastructure company sat down to explain crypto’s endgame. He wrote, "We said crypto was Web 3.0". "That undermines it. It is actually Capitalism 2.0," he further explained.

Two opposite ideologies just seventeen years apart.

Makes everyone wonder what happened. How a movement that started as a protest against bank bailouts ends up celebrating its own absorption by BlackRock? How do the people who once warned us about gatekeepers become so excited about getting their own seats at the gate?

Let us engage with that framing seriously, because it's becoming the dominant story the industry tells about itself. We believe it's the wrong story.

This article is about the gap between what crypto was launched to do and what crypto is increasingly becoming. About the structural reasons that gap keeps widening. And about what would have to be true at the architectural level for crypto to actually deliver on the original promise rather than just deliver a faster version of the system it was meant to escape.

Writing this as someone working inside the industry, not as a critic from outside. The argument here is that crypto has unfinished business, and what's missing is something the industry hasn't yet built.

Let us walk through it.

The system that failed us

Before we talk about what crypto was supposed to be, we need to remember what it was responding to.

In 2008, a small number of banks made leveraged and reckless decisions that nearly caused the global financial system to evaporate. The textbook capitalist response to that would have been simple: let them die. After all, the whole point of a market system is that bad bets get punished. You made a stupid choice, you get punished, and someone smarter takes your place. It is what keeps the system honest.

Instead, we got bailouts. Rescue packages so large they had their own acronym (TARP), their own villain ("too big to fail"), and their own conflict of interest. Cherry on top? The Treasury Secretary who orchestrated the rescue, Hank Paulson, was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Imagine you got into a bar fight and the referee turned out to be your cousin. That's what 2008 looked like.

Here is why it matters: Once you start exempting the biggest players from the market rule, giving them the surety that the government will catch them if they fall, the market dies. 

A capitalist system without bankruptcy is, structurally, just feudalism with quarterly earnings calls. Think of the deal nobles had with kings in medieval Europe? You got royal protection because of who you were. The work you did barely mattered. 

The 2008 deal looked a lot like that. The big banks got permanent royal protection. Everyone else stayed peasants. The deal quietly rewrote the rules of business: “Profits would be private. Losses would be social.” Yes, just like that.

The COVID-19 pandemic confirmed that this is still the hardcoded rule. Big corporations got rescued at the speed of an executive order. Small businesses spent weeks drowning in paperwork. Workers were laid off and received a one-time $1,200 check from the government. The asymmetry was so obvious it stopped feeling like a scandal and started feeling like a weather pattern. Something that just happens and no one has control over it.

And then the receipts started coming in.

Every year in January, the big money people of the world, Presidents, CEOs, central bankers, the lot of them, gather in Davos. They eat expensive meals and give speeches about how to fix the world's problems, of course, most of which they helped create. 

And every single year, a charity called Oxfam picks that exact same week to publish a report on how much richer the rich have gotten over the past year. It's a small, kind of beautiful act of trolling. The January 2026 one was brutal. Here is what it said.

The world's billionaires are now sitting on $18.3 trillion collectively. Which is more money than the entire economies of most countries on Earth, combined. Their wealth jumped 16% in just one year. That's three times faster than the rate they were already getting richer at. Since 2020, billionaire wealth is up 81%. 

Your salary hasn’t gone up 81% since 2020. Mine sure didn't. I don't know anyone whose did. The number of billionaires in the world also crossed three thousand for the first time ever. Three thousand individuals on a planet of eight billion.

Now here is the other half of that.

Half of all the humans alive right now, about four billion people, own less than 1% of the world's wealth. All of them. Combined. Together. One person in the top 1% owns over eight thousand times what one person in the bottom 50% owns. Read that again, because it's insane. Eight thousand times.

But the part that should really sting is this: For decades, we have been told a story about why rich people are rich. It goes like this: they worked hard, took risks, built something real, and earned every dollar. You may not fully believe this story, fine. But most of us grew up inside it. It's the one portrayed in every billionaire magazine profile, entrepreneur podcast, and Shark Tank episode. It is the whole reason the word "billionaire" still sounds like a compliment in most people's mouths instead of an accusation.

In 2023, that story officially died. For the first time on record, more new billionaires made the list by inheriting their money than by building anything new. And every single billionaire under the age of thirty, every one of them, inherited it. Not one of them built their own fortune.

So much for meritocracy. The kids just inherited the casino.

This is what we mean when we say capitalism failed. Real capitalism (the idea) is supposed to be a fair race. People compete, and the best products win. Anybody can show up and play. Prices tell the truth about what things are worth. As an idea, this is perfectly fine. We are not against it. Most people aren't.

What we are actually living inside right now, though, is something pretty different. The race got rigged somewhere along the way. A small handful of families now own enough of the world that they basically get to decide what happens to the rest of us; what gets built, who gets elected, what laws get passed, what shows up on your phone in the morning, all of it. And now their children inherit that power without lifting a finger to earn it. The race is technically still going on. It just got quietly renamed to "you watch us run while you cheer."

And it was into exactly this world that somebody showed up with a completely different idea.

the promise that pulled us in

Bitcoin was a direct response to what happened in 2008. The Genesis Block headline mentioned at the start was deliberate. Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, they wanted you to know exactly what Bitcoin was fighting.

You can read the Bitcoin whitepaper itself on a coffee break. And what it proposed was almost embarrassingly modest, given how much would later be built on top of it. It said: let's build a system where two people can send money to each other directly, without needing a bank in the middle to approve the transaction, without needing a government to back the currency, without needing to trust any single institution at all, making your savings are not worth less every year. Just simple math.

This was the cypherpunk dream finally turning into working code.  When Web3 came along, that's the next wave after Bitcoin, the one that brought us Ethereum, Solana, NFTs, smart contracts, all of that, the dream got bigger.

The pitch went like this. The internet had been quietly taken over by five or six gigantic companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, that crowd. They owned your data, they owned your attention, they took most of the money, and you got to be the product. Web3 was going to fix that. Tokens, little digital ownership certificates, would let users actually own pieces of the platforms they used. Online communities would govern themselves through these things called DAOs, which we'll explain in a minute. Value would flow back to the people doing the work and using the products, instead of being vacuumed up by shareholders. The gatekeepers would have to find new jobs.

Let's be honest. People meant it. The dream was real. A lot of us fell in love with this promise because the alternative we were living in was so plainly broken. When the existing system openly works in favor of a hereditary elite, the phrase "math without trust" starts to sound like a kind of religious salvation.

Which is exactly why what happened next hurts so much.

how it got captured

The capture of crypto didn't happen in one big dramatic moment. It happened on multiple fronts, all at the same time. Let us walk through them one by one.

Wall Street walked through the front door

You can tell a lot about the state of a revolution by looking at who its biggest customer is.

As of early 2026, the single largest holder of Bitcoin in the entire world, outside of Satoshi's original untouched stash and a handful of early miners, is BlackRock. If you've never heard of BlackRock, it is the world's biggest asset manager. They manage about eleven trillion dollars of other people's money. Pension funds, retirement accounts, and sovereign wealth funds, they handle it. They are essentially the most central institution in the global financial system. If Wall Street had a king, BlackRock would be it.

A couple of years ago, BlackRock launched something called the iShares Bitcoin Trust, which they call IBIT for short. This is an ETF, which stands for exchange-traded fund. Don't worry about the technical details. The simple version is: an ETF is a Wall Street product that lets normal investors gain exposure to something without having to actually own that thing. You can buy shares of IBIT inside a regular brokerage account, like a 401(k), and the fund itself goes off and buys real Bitcoin for you. You never have to touch the Bitcoin. BlackRock holds it for you.

Here is where this gets remarkable. IBIT now holds about $54 billion worth of Bitcoin. That one single fund controls roughly 49% of the entire U.S. Bitcoin ETF market. And it accounts for about 60% of all the Bitcoin held inside U.S. ETFs. In the last three months of 2024, BlackRock alone accounted for 96% of all new Bitcoin flowing into ETFs. 

Larry Fink, the guy who runs BlackRock, used to publicly dismiss Bitcoin as a tool for money laundering and criminals. He now calls it "the new gold." Wells Fargo, one of the biggest banks in America, accepts it as collateral for loans now. Every major Wall Street bank is racing to file for their own Bitcoin ETF.

So think about what this means. The asset that was specifically designed to bypass Wall Street's pipes, to escape the gatekeepers, to free people from the banks, is now flowing through Wall Street's pipes. Owned by Wall Street's biggest player. Custodied by Wall Street's banks. Sold by Wall Street's salesforce. Marketed to grandma as a retirement diversifier.

The whales never went away

OK, so part of the original Bitcoin dream was the idea that ordinary people would actually own this network. Decentralization was supposed to mean that. Not just decentralization of the technical pipes, but decentralization of the wealth flowing through them.

So, who actually owns the Bitcoin? Let us show you.

About 2% of all Bitcoin addresses in the world control 95% of the total supply. The top 1% of addresses control 87% of all the Bitcoin in existence. There are studies, actual peer-reviewed academic studies, comparing how unequal Bitcoin ownership is to how unequal wealth was in feudal Europe. Wealth inside the asset that was supposed to liberate us from feudalism is distributed more unequally than wealth was under actual feudalism.

In crypto-land, people who hold giant amounts of a token are called "whales." Because they're big. The whales never left Bitcoin. They were there from the start. They got in early when it was a few cents per coin, accumulated massive piles, and have been quietly sitting on them while the rest of the world rushes in to buy expensive bags from them at the top.

The 2025 bull market, when prices were going wild, created about 241,000 brand new crypto millionaires. And 36 new crypto billionaires. Sounds great. Until you ask where their money came from. It came from regular people buying expensive Bitcoin from the people who had been holding cheap Bitcoin for years. That is what every crypto bull market is. The dream of "getting in early" is mathematically the same as the dream of being the last person to get in early, which is impossible by definition for almost everyone reading this article.

The protocol is decentralized. The ownership of the protocol is a country club.

DAOs turned into shareholder voting with extra paperwork

Alright, let’s explain DAOs. The letters stand for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. In plain English, a DAO is a community-run online organization where decisions are made by the community rather than by a CEO. Members of the community vote on proposals. Anything, let's say, should we spend money on this project, should we change this feature, should we partner with this other group, and the votes get counted on chain so nobody can cheat.

Sounds great, right? Democracy for the Internet Age.

Here's the catch. The way you get votes in most DAOs is by holding tokens. The more tokens you have, the more votes you get. So if I hold a thousand tokens and you hold a million tokens, your vote counts a thousand times as much as mine.

Now imagine if we tried to run an actual country like this. Imagine telling Americans that on Election Day, instead of one citizen, one vote, your vote is going to be weighted by how much money you have in your bank account. Bill Gates would have a few billion votes. The cashier at your local supermarket would have, what, a few hundred? We would never agree to organize a country this way. We would call this what it actually is: oligarchy, Government by the rich.

But that's exactly how DAOs work. And surprise, the results look like an oligarchy.

Across all the major DAOs in 2026, the top 10% of token holders control 76% of all the voting power. Voter turnout averages below 10%, meaning 90% of token holders don't even bother to vote because they know their votes don't matter. In some large DAOs, turnout for routine decisions drops to fractions of a percent. There's a DAO called Decentraland where the average voter turnout on a proposal is 0.16%. 

In 2024, 73% of contentious DAO votes, the controversial ones, the ones where the community was actually divided, were decided by giant holders who owned more than 30% of the supply by themselves.

And it gets worse. Back in 2018, a16z bought 6% of all the tokens of a DAO called MakerDAO for $15 million. That means from basically the beginning of "decentralized governance" in crypto, a giant Sand Hill Road VC was already sitting at the table with a vote the size of a sofa.

Then there are the heists. A DAO called Compound got attacked in 2024 by someone who took out a giant short-term loan, used the borrowed tokens to vote himself the contents of the treasury, then paid back the loan with the stolen money. Legal, according to the rules of the protocol. A DAO called Mango Markets got drained the same way. A DAO called Wonderland managed two billion dollars of community money until the community discovered that the guy running the treasury was actually a convicted financial criminal operating under a fake name. The DAO had no way of figuring this out, because the DAO had no concept of "person." It only had a concept of "wallet."

This is what governance looks like when votes are denominated in money instead of in people. It looks exactly like the system Bitcoin was supposed to escape. Just with prettier graphics.

Regulatory dynamics and political adjacency

The 2025 U.S. regulatory environment has been more favorable to the crypto industry than the previous several years. Enforcement actions have been reduced. Memecoins have been exempted from securities oversight. A Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has been established by executive order. Stablecoin legislation has moved forward.

The industry has largely celebrated these changes as long-overdue regulatory clarity. There is genuine substance to that view: the previous regulatory environment was inconsistent and, at times, openly hostile, and rules that allow legitimate businesses to operate are valuable.

The harder question, which the industry has been reluctant to engage with,  is whether some of the recent regulatory shifts represent the kind of capture that the cypherpunk tradition specifically warned about?

When political figures hold significant direct financial positions in the crypto assets that public policy directly affects, the appearance of conflict is real, regardless of who is involved. When new asset categories are exempted from oversight shortly after major political figures launch products in those categories, the pattern raises questions worth asking.

The industry can welcome regulatory progress and still notice when the structure of that progress resembles the regulatory capture dynamics it was supposed to escape.

This is one of those moments where the industry's instinct to defend favorable rules is in tension with its founding intellectual tradition. We can hold both observations at once.

And the industry openly admits it

If you think it’s being too harsh on the crypto industry, here's the funny part. The industry agrees with me. They're just happy about it.

That Helius CEO quote I opened with, the one calling crypto "Capitalism 2.0", was a celebration. A victory lap. Look at where crypto venture capital money is actually flowing in 2026. Per Bloomberg's reporting, crypto venture funds are pivoting away from token economies. The original Web3 dream and pivoting toward stablecoin infrastructure, prediction markets, fintech, and AI. Which is to say, they're pivoting back to traditional Wall Street fintech, just wearing a crypto pin on the lapel. The biggest crypto venture firms, Paradigm, a16z crypto, Multicoin, Polychain, and Pantera, now have asset levels that rival mid-sized hedge funds, with the same regulatory compliance requirements as any other hedge fund.

Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, called this entire trajectory years ago in a tweet that aged like fine wine. He said, "You don't own Web3. The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label."

We laughed at him then. Guess who’s not laughing now.

why this was always going to happen

OK, now let us slow down. Because if you take nothing else away from this article, take this next part.

What do all the failures we just walked you through have in common? Wall Street capture. Whales hoarding the supply. DAOs turning into an oligarchy… The President turning the White House into a memecoin pump. What is the single thing connecting all of these?

It is that the protocols can only see capital. They cannot see anything else.

Let me explain what I mean. Web3 was built on a beautifully simple idea: one token, one vote. Whoever holds more tokens has more say in governance. Whoever stakes more tokens validates more blocks and earns more rewards. Whoever holds more tokens gets bigger airdrops. The token is the unit of literally everything. The token is how the protocol measures who you are, what you deserve, and how much influence you should have.

Now take that rule and apply it to the world we actually live in. We just spent the first part of this article looking at how unequal that world is. Sixty thousand people own more wealth than four billion people. A few thousand families own most of the assets. Capital is already concentrated at extreme historical levels before crypto even gets started.

So what happens when you take that already-concentrated world, and you build a new system whose entire logic is "more capital equals more power"? What does that produce?

It produces a faster, more efficient, frictionless version of the system we were trying to escape, automatic plutocracy. Government by the rich, but run by smart contracts that never sleep and never make mistakes.

Imagine you wanted to fix a country with a corrupt election system. Currently, rich people buy off politicians and rig the elections. So you decide: let's build a better system. New rule: instead of one citizen, one vote, your vote is going to be weighted by how much money is in your bank account. Billionaires get billions of votes. Working-class people get a few hundred. The minimum-wage worker gets, like, twelve.

Did this fix corruption? Of course it didn't. It made it worse. The corruption that happened behind closed doors is now written in laws. It becomes official. 

That is exactly what was done when calling web3 on "one token equals one vote." Taking the world where capital was always winning and helping it build a digital architecture that says capital must always win, by design. That’s like turning a bug into a feature and calling it a revolutionary breakthrough. 

The plutocracy you keep reading about in DAOs is the design working exactly as intended. It is doing the only thing it is capable of doing. Capital concentrates because capital compounds: the more you have, the more you can get, and compounding capital takes over any system that lets votes be denominated in capital. This is not a moral failing of crypto people. It's arithmetic. Mathematics. There is no clever tokenomics design that fixes this because the problem lies below tokenomics.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other protocol assumed one thing: that each address equals one person behind it, and it turns out that assumptions in mathematics could be fatal. An address is just a string of letters and numbers. Yes, it can be controlled by a real human being, but it can also be controlled by a bot, a corporation, or a hedge fund. Or worse, by a memecoin scammer, thirty thousand phones in a warehouse running farming software around the clock. To the protocol, all of these are exactly the same. And whichever of them brings the most capital wins.

That’s the trap. And we need to understand that no amount of capital or voting schemes, be it quadratic voting, delegation, conviction voting, or AI-assisted governance, is going to fix it. Because the problem is a step deeper than the voting schemes. It is that protocols can’t tell a human apart from a hedge fund or a bot farm. And until that is addressed, nothing will fix the issue. 

That's what bringing power back to people actually looks like. As a layer of the stack. And that is what Humanode is trying to do. How? Let us leave that for the next article in this series.