Illustration: a chocolate teapot labelled ‘Governance’ enthroned in the glittering DeFi bazaar

Five plus years ago I caught the fever. Crypto, DeFi, the whole glittering bazaar. It felt like standing at Ground Zero of Something — the moment when money, credit and the entire creaking apparatus of central banking would finally be marched out behind the woodshed and improved.

Reader, it was not.

What we got instead was efficiency, which is the consolation prize the universe hands to people who asked for a revolution (i). And that’s fine. Faster plumbing is still plumbing, and I’ve made my peace with it. But down in the basement of all this Progress there are things still scuttling about — features of DeFi that are not forces for good, have never been forces for good, and should be taken quietly out the back and retired before they breed.

DAO: Decidedly Awful Outcomes

A DAO is a marvel of governance in roughly the way a chocolate teapot is a marvel of engineering. The theory is luminous — no bosses, no rulers, just the pure crystalline Will of the Collective. The practice is that the instant there is real money on the table, the Will of the Collective is discovered to live, mysteriously, in the wallets of about four blokes. The voting is real. The voting also does not matter. Nobody is responsible for anything except their own enrichment, which may be pursued Entirely Guilt-Free, because Decentralisation means never having to say you did it.

File under: Interesting. Didn’t Work. Move Along.

Welcome to Speculatopia

The DeFi market is one enormous speculation engine in which up is down, down is up, and anything goes so long as it goes up. We forgave this in the early days, on the understanding that it would grow up into payments and trading and useful things. It did not grow up. It stayed exactly where it was born: somewhere between magical thinking and a slot machine.

Equiteasing with shareoids. A governance token is a share the way a scarecrow is a farmer — it has the silhouette and none of the qualifications. People buy them using the very same arguments they’d use for a real share, except a shareoid is legally entitled to precisely nothing. Which is, paradoxically, its great selling point: a thing anchored to nothing can float anywhere at all, including upwards, forever — right up until it can’t.

Fat-tail flat-earthers & ticker tricksters. Every one of these tokens is stuffed with fat-tail risk — legal, tax, technical, governance, the lot — and the genuinely remarkable thing is that the risk is right there, in daylight, waving both arms. Yet the price never seems to notice. Either the market is populated entirely by Flat-Earthers who cannot see the edge they’re standing on, or the Ticker Tricksters have painted the scenery so convincingly that no honest price can form. I lean towards the scenery.

Luckpilled and looking for the Greater Fool. A whole generation of young men rode in on the revolution and got marooned in the casino. Some even made money — the worst thing that can happen to a person — and are now Luckpilled and Skill-Deluded, mistaking a tailwind for a pair of wings, forever scanning the horizon for a Greater Fool to take the next risk-free yield off their hands. It’s sadder than the Wall Street of the eighties, and the eighties at least had the cocaine to explain itself.

The Monetary Nothingburger

And here is the big one. The grand promise was new money — money set free from the central banks. We ran the experiments. We got the Monetary Nothingburger. Money, it transpires, is still tethered firmly to the people who can tax you and arrest you, and no quantity of cryptography has loosened that knot by a single millimetre. We can probably stop pretending otherwise.

Bitconned — or Not?

About Bitcoin I go quiet. I won’t bet against it. I won’t bet on it. Bitconned, or not? Ask me in twenty years, when one of us will have been proven a fool — and I would genuinely like to know which.

The Wrong Side of the Vantasner Danger Meridian

DeFi has been sitting on the wrong side of the Vantasner Danger Meridian for a very long time now — that line past which the only sensible move is to stop, turn around, and walk Very Calmly Back.

Start walking.

Illustration: a lone figure crosses the Vantasner Danger Meridian, walking calmly away from the neon crypto casino-city

(i) Efficiency is what you call the magic, when the magic was supposed to happen, didn’t, but the trains now run four seconds earlier.

Originally published on LinkedIn, May 2026.