(This is a work in progress)
In corporations, values are typically imposed top down. In a DAO, they emerge from the grassroots.
We can extend this to the broader scope of Ethereum itself. Ethereum's values are hard to define. If someone says it's cypherpunk, those values are obvious—but you can't say everyone on Ethereum, everyone building on it, is cypherpunk. I don't think you can.
It's a fascinating world where different entities, players, and people flow in and out. There's this constant maelstrom, and people arrive with their own values. They may or may not get radicalized by Ethereum's inherent or nascent values. But they come in with rich values and eventually leave. This points to something called the plurality of values.
I think Uniswap should have saved them. The fact that they didn't is frustrating—they could have paid a modest amount to Bunni and bootstrapped them. It's crucial that people building on top of Uniswap feel safe, like they're part of a larger community with someone willing to step up and support them. That safety net doesn't exist. They completely destroyed Bunni, who was doing innovative work, and then dismantled them entirely. We need to learn from this. Maybe it was a strategic decision. Maybe it was a hard choice with no alternatives. That could very well be the case—I'm not doubting it.
What's important for us to remember is this: a platform cannot grow if the people building on top of it don't grow. If builders don't feel safe, if they don't feel like someone has their back, that's a problem.
https://x.com/bunni_xyz/status/1981160279871558114
With the influx of new people and the changing of the guard, the new guard sometimes forgets what brought us here in the first place. They haven't experienced the wild west. They haven't been in the trenches. Many of them probably haven't even used DeFi.
I'm speculating here, but it looks like it's become a job rather than a passion. For some people, it's become a career ladder—not something driven by motivation or values.
Things like meme coins and speculative projects attract the wrong kind of attention. They destroy the core purpose of DeFi, which was to build a reliable financial layer for people.
Now we have Treasury bills and US-dominated DeFi markets. There's no presence of the euro, no Chinese currencies, no Russian currencies—because they can't be done.
If you look underneath, we've already been captured. We just don't know it yet. It's a slow boil. We're frogs in a slow boil, and we haven't realized it.
What happens when meme coins dominate the conversation? It becomes a zero-sum game with very few winners and countless losers. About 99.99% of participants are retail traders. They get disillusioned and leave. The winners are a handful of centralized entities—seekers, quantitative funds, hedge funds. They run dubious, nearly fraudulent operations that power their business. More money flows into their hands while retail liquidity dries up. That liquidity was attracted by pure speculation in the first place. Retail traders lose everything, leave, and consider crypto a scam.
https://x.com/0xastronomica/status/1981531980924658110
Here's what happens next: if you're running a protocol and refuse to work with fraudulent actors to capture their liquidity, your competitors will. These competitors eventually embrace fraud. They have no choice. It's either survive by working with dubious, malicious people and entities, or die trying to hold onto your values. It's a personal moral conflict. Good people with strong crypto values sacrifice those principles for what they see as the greater good. Do that long enough, and everything starts to look like shit..
When you're competing in a finite game—where there's one winner and everyone else loses—and the other side isn't playing fair, you have no choice but to compete on their terms. Sometimes you make strategic decisions that help you win or at least coexist. But it always comes at the cost of your moral values.
Take a political situation, for example. Elections are coming up. There's a war between two or three parties. Your values align with one party that likely won't win the majority. The other side—your perceived enemy—is doing strategic voting. You have no choice but to do the same.
These finite, zero-sum games force you to comply. And when you comply, you lose something. You erode your values—your own personal moral values.