The Decline of Cryptocurrency's Cathedral: From Idealism to Speculative Gambling

Not long ago, I read that A Public Letter from Jocy, Founder of IOSG, to Chinese Crypto OGsJocy quoted Warren Buffett in her letter: "In the next 100 years, make sure the cathedral is not swallowed by the casino."

Jocy uses this metaphor to describe the dilemma in the cryptocurrency industry: on one side stands a grand cathedral built with code and ideals, while on the other side lies a massive casino full of speculation and hype.

Just a few days after sending this letter, a developer named Peter Steinberger suddenly became widely popular for his open-source AI project, Clawd bot, which he developed in his spare time.

But on the very day the project went viral, a group of cryptocurrency speculators quickly launched a meme coin named CLAWD without Peter's knowledge, with its market value briefly surging to $16 million. Subsequently, Peter posted on Twitter, stating that he would never issue any cryptocurrency and would not participate in any meme coins, and he asked "crypto folks" to stop bothering him.

Speculators believed that Peter's remarks caused the cryptocurrency's price to crash. During the project's renaming process, they took over his GitHub account and launched a frenzied online attack and personal harassment against him, demanding that Peter take responsibility for the scam created by the speculators themselves.

This is probably the moment during this period when I least want to admit that I'm a professional in the crypto industry.

The entire cryptocurrency industry is experiencing a major collapse. The prosperity of the casino is not only failing to benefit the cathedral, but is actively destroying those who are trying to build it.

From Satoshi Nakamoto mining the first Bitcoin block in 2009 to 2026, what has actually happened in the crypto industry over these seventeen years? How did that grand cathedral built on code and ideals gradually transform step by step into a casino filled with the sounds of dice and cries of despair?

To answer this question, let's go back to the very beginning, to the era when the bells still rang clearly.

For a long time after Bitcoin's birth, the mainstream narrative in this industry revolved around building. Early participants, mostly cypherpunks, libertarians, and tech geeks, were obsessed with the decentralized utopia envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, and they tried to contribute brick by brick to this cathedral, line by line of code.

Even the most famous memecoin in this industry, Dogecoin, initially shone with a light of idealism.

In December 2013, two software engineers, Billy Markus from IBM and Jackson Palmer from Adobe, decided to create a "ridiculous" cryptocurrency as a satire of the increasingly rampant cryptocurrency speculation at the time. Markus modified the Bitcoin code slightly, changed the font to a humorous comic style, and replaced Bitcoin's icon with a Shiba Inu meme image that was popular on the internet at the time. Thus, Dogecoin was born.

"It was born simply for the sake of a joke," Markus recalled many years later in a public letter. "We didn't have any expectations or plans at all."

But this joke unexpectedly gave birth to one of the most unique communities in the cryptocurrency world. Early Dogecoin players didn't care about the price fluctuations; instead, they were passionate about a tipping culture, using Dogecoins worth less than a cent to upvote content they liked on social media. In this nearly free way, they spread joy, kindness, and creativity.

In 2014, they raised $30,000 worth of Dogecoin for Jamaica's underfunded bobsled team, helping them compete in the Sochi Winter Olympics; they raised funds to build wells in water-scarce regions of Kenya; and they even sponsored a NASCAR race car driver named Josh Wise, allowing a car featuring the Shiba Inu logo to race in one of America's most popular auto racing events.

"Joy, kindness, learning, giving, empathy, fun, community, inspiration, creativity, generosity, foolishness, and absurdity," Markus defined the true value of Dogecoin in an open letter, "if the community embodies these things, that is the true value."

This is the most touching portrayal of the Cathedral era. In that time, people believed that the power of consensus could transform a joke into a force for good.

This enthusiasm for building reached its peak during the DeFi Summer of 2020. Ethereum builders constructed a permissionless, trustless decentralized financial world using smart contracts. From the decentralized exchange Uniswap to lending protocols like Compound and Aave, one financial application after another was built, like Lego blocks. The total value locked (TVL) across the entire crypto ecosystem surged from less than $700 million in just one year to $117.6 billion. A brand-new financial paradigm was rising on the horizon.

It wasn't until 2021 that things began to taste a bit off. That year, under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, central banks around the world launched an unprecedented money-printing spree. The United States alone introduced a $5 trillion economic stimulus plan. Trillions of dollars in hot money flooded into the market, searching for any asset worth speculating on. Cryptocurrencies became the wildest centerpiece of this liquidity feast.

The price of Bitcoin increased by 788% within a year, and Ethereum rose by 1264%. According to surveys, young Americans aged 25 to 34 invested half of the stimulus checks they received into the cryptocurrency and stock markets.

Money has never been so cheap; the dream of getting rich overnight has also never been so real.

The cathedral bells were gradually drowned out by the sound of dice being shaken in the casino.

The French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon made a sharp and incisive judgment in his work "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind":

"When an individual becomes part of a group, he no longer feels responsible for his actions. At this point, everyone reveals instincts that would otherwise be restrained when alone. ... A group is impulsive, fickle, and easily angered. It is entirely governed by unconscious motivations."

In the crypto world after 2021, when communities are no longer held together by shared visions and values, but instead bound only by the fragile interest of holding the same assets, "community-driven" quickly devolves into "tyranny of the mob."

The first to be sacrificed was the spiritual totem of Dogecoin, its creator Billy Markus.

As Dogecoin was hyped to hundreds or even thousands of times its original value during the frenzy of 2021, Markus's social media inbox was overwhelmed with a flood of private messages. People desperately asked him to "do something" to make the Dogecoin in their hands more valuable.

They don't care that Markus had already sold all his Dogecoins in 2015 after being laid off, which only bought him a used Honda; they also don't care that Markus's mother is about to lose her house because she can't afford the mortgage payments.

They only care about themselves.

"When I see things like price manipulation, greed, and fraud," Markus wrote in the open letter, "I don't get angry—I just feel disappointed."

If the attack on Markus was merely the prelude to this tyranny, then the assault on Vitalik Buterin pushed this farce to its first climax.

In May 2021, SHIB sent 50% of the total project token supply directly to Vitalik Buterin's public wallet address without any prior communication, with a nominal value of up to $8 billion at the time. Their strategy was very clever: Vitalik Buterin is regarded as a "god" in the crypto world, so as long as he didn't sell the tokens, it effectively provided the strongest credibility endorsement for SHIB. Even if he sold them, the large number of tokens being burned would still be positive news for the project.

This is a carefully designed moral trap. They have placed Vitalik Buterin in a dilemma where no matter what choice he makes, it seems he can only serve the interests of speculators.

But Vitalik Buterin rejected this sacrifice in the most resolute way. He donated $1.3 billion worth of SHIB to the India COVID-19 relief fund, burned the majority of the remaining tokens, sold a large amount of animal meme coins that he had received as "donations," and made genuine charitable donations to various organizations.

He acts like a strict patriarch cleansing the family, attempting to wake up the followers obsessed with Meme coin mania through repeated sell-offs. From 2021 to 2025, he has repeatedly sold and donated the Meme coins he received, transforming them into funds for animal welfare, biotech research, and disaster relief. He has even publicly called out multiple times: "I hope creators of Meme coins can directly donate to charities instead of sending the coins to me."

But his resistance seemed so powerless in the face of the collective speculative desire. The believers quickly came up with new interpretations for his actions: "V God is helping us burn tokens, which is good news!" "V God is doing marketing; he's actually supporting us!"

In the logic of crowds described in "The Crowd," all facts can be distorted to serve the collective emotions and fantasies.

If the sacrifice to Vitalik Buterin carried a touch of absurdity reminiscent of a religious rite, by 2026, when the iron fist of tyranny struck Clawd bot's developer Peter Steinberger, it had already transformed into a blatant act of kidnapping.

Speculators no longer needed divine endorsement; they could directly "create" a god and hitch him to their chariots. When Peter refused to endorse their CLAWD scam, he transformed from a celebrated hero into a traitor who had to be eliminated. Account hijacking, verbal attacks, private message harassment—all means were employed just to force his compliance.

In the name of the community, they practice tyranny, with their only doctrine being the K-line.

What magnitude of disaster is created when a community within an industry descends from a collaborative network based on shared ideals into a violent machine driven by shared positions?

The answer is: a collective suicide of prosperity.

According to an annual report released by the cryptocurrency data analysis company CoinGecko, the crypto world created 11.9 million new tokens in 2025. This means that, on average, more than 32,000 new "assets" were born every day. In contrast, another set of data shows that in the same year, 11.6 million crypto projects died.

By way of comparison, during the peak of the bull market in 2021, the number of failed projects that year was 2,584. Over the course of four years, this number has increased by 4,489 times.

When token issuance becomes an industry, what we gain is not diversity in value, but the mass production of trash.

The occurrence of this disaster is the result of the combined effects of technological advancement, macroeconomic stimulus, and human greed. On one hand, new-generation blockchains like Solana have increased transaction speeds by 100 times while reducing costs by 1,000 times. The emergence of tools like pump.fun, which allow token creation for just a few dollars, has further lowered the barrier to token creation from setting up an entire blockchain to simply clicking a mouse. Technological progress has inadvertently provided the perfect breeding ground for the large-scale occurrence of this disaster.

On the other hand, the unprecedented global liquidity injection in 2020-2021 completely changed market risk preferences. When money no longer held its value and traditional value investments offered pitifully low returns, people began to obsessively chase volatility. Whether an asset had real value became less important; what mattered was whether it could provide sufficient volatility to satisfy people's desire for quick wealth.

Thus, we witnessed one of the most absurd scenes in the crypto world: the entire industry is rushing to become memetic.

Those social apps claiming to disrupt Web2, those blockchain games promising to build the metaverse, and those star projects wearing the halo of Layer2 scaling solutions—all their tokens exist solely for retail investors to trade on secondary markets.

When a Layer 2 token's functionality is essentially no different from that of a Shiba Inu coin, we have to admit that within the casino, everything becomes a meme.

These 11.6 million zeroed-out tokens are like 11.6 million bullets fired toward the future of the crypto world. Each one declares to the world that this industry is not trustworthy. And when an industry's incentive mechanism tilts entirely toward speculation rather than innovation, what price will those who genuinely want to build cathedrals pay?

They are experiencing a triple death.

The first death is the social death of the body and mind.

Peter Steinberger, the developer of Clawd bot, is just one example among many builders facing such dilemmas. When a developer invests months or even years of effort to create a truly valuable and popular product, what they may receive is not flowers and applause, but a pack of sharks sensing blood in the water.

They turn your project, your name, and your reputation into chips in their casino. If you comply, you become an accomplice to the scam; if you resist, you become an enemy that must be eliminated.

The second death is the death of the idol of a spiritual leader.

Vitalik's resistance is a tragic, Don Quixote-like endeavor. He tries to combat the industry's moral decline with his personal strength. He repeatedly sells assets, donates, and publicly appeals, yet in return, he only receives mockery from the masses and increasingly severe coercion.

When the spiritual leader of an industry's exemplary actions are interpreted solely as positive news by gamblers, the industry loses its last piece of moral decency.

In this twilight of idols, the beacon of the spirit is completely extinguished.

The third death is the death of capital in top-level design.

When the casino-like image of Meme coins became the most prominent label for the entire industry, even sophisticated capital seeking long-term value investments began to hesitate. In 2025, Eddy Lazzarin, CTO of a16z Crypto — a top-tier crypto venture capital firm known for its bold bets on the future — publicly stated on social media: "Meme coins are undermining the long-term vision of many builders. At best, it looks like a high-risk casino."

This is not merely a complaint from an executive—it is a dangerous warning sign. It indicates that the top decision-makers in the industry are losing confidence in the future. When capital no longer supports long-term cathedral projects but instead only chases quick-return casino games, the very source of innovation is completely cut off.

More fatally, the proliferation of meme coins has provided global regulators with the perfect ammunition. It has branded the entire industry with labels of fraud, money laundering, and high-risk speculation, unfairly tarnishing projects and companies that have worked hard for years to achieve compliance. In 2025, class-action lawsuits against platforms like Pump.fun have already begun citing the U.S. RICO Act, a law originally designed to combat the mafia.

Once, we gazed at the stars, dreaming that code could change the world; now, we're mired in muck, searching for the next hundredfold coin among animal and celebrity avatars. When builders are exiled, when spiritual leaders are undermined, and when both capital and regulation raise red flags—what remains for us?

Seventeen years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto cited a headline from The Times in the genesis block, aiming to create a fair financial world where money could not be over-issued and where banks could not act maliciously.

Seventeen years later, when a developer is attacked for creating something valuable, we have to admit that this industry is proving, at the fastest pace, that it is unworthy of a future.

When this frenzy recedes, it will leave behind a vast wasteland of shattered trust. Upon this wasteland, will we continue to play the gambling game of survivorship bias, or will we choose to rediscover our original aspirations, to identify, follow, and become those who still persist in ringing the bells of the great cathedral amidst the ruins?

This will be an unavoidable question for every participant in the crypto world. The sounds of bells, dice, and sighs will continue to echo above this industry for a long time.

A long time.