Aevo Co-founder’s Long Post Criticizes the Industry: I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto

Original Title: I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto

Original Author: Ken Chan

Original Source:

Repost: Mars Finance

Editor’s Note: This weekend, an article by Aevo co-founder and CTO Ken Chan (@kenchangh) titled “I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto” went viral overseas.

Ken Chan’s tone in the article is extremely pessimistic—he believes the industry has lost its idealism and turned into the largest super-casino in human history, with the most participants ever, and feels sick for having contributed to this casino. While we don’t agree with Ken Chan’s views and many industry professionals have spoken out to refute him since the article went viral, objectively his statements do expose deeper issues currently facing the industry, such as faith confusion and a collapse of values.

Below is the original article by Ken Chan, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

Original Motivation

When I was a teenager, I was already highly politically motivated. Among all the books that radicalized me, the most influential were actually works by Ayn Rand (like “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”). In 2016, I was still a hopeful libertarian and even donated to Gary Johnson. In addition to being a committed Randian, I also loved computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The spirit of cypherpunks attracted me. The idea of Bitcoin as a private bank for wealth fascinated me—the concept of being able to store a billion dollars in your head and cross borders was incredibly powerful to me.

However, over time, I felt I lost my initial purpose in crypto. After going full-time in the industry, those alluring first notes about crypto’s transformative power faded away. I became disillusioned with the target users and who I was truly serving. I completely misunderstood who the real users of crypto were and mistook marketing for reality. Crypto claimed to decentralize the financial system, and I totally bought in, but in reality, it’s just a massive speculation and gambling system—a mirror reflection of the real economy.

Reality hit me like a truck. I wasn’t building a new financial system at all—I was building a casino, one that doesn’t call itself a casino, but is the largest, always-online, massively participated casino our generation has ever built. Part of me wishes I could at least be proud of spending my entire twenties building this casino, but another part of me feels I completely wasted my youth. I wasted my life on this—though at least, I made a lot of money along the way.

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

Crypto is a confusing thing. On one hand, you’ll hear promoters say they want to completely replace the existing financial system with on-chain systems. I can totally imagine that world—your bank account holds only USDC or Bitcoin, and you can send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in seconds. That vision is still powerful—I still believe in it.

But incentives have totally distorted how things play out. In reality, all market participants are happy to pour money in to fund the next so-called “Layer 1” (Aptos, Sui, Sei, ICP, etc.). The only winner in the 2020 Layer 1 wars was Solana, which fueled strong speculation to compete for the “fourth spot” (after Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana??), supporting hundreds of billions in market cap.

But did this really move us toward the ideal new financial system? Even though VCs write 5,000-word essays to convince you, the answer is no. This didn’t create a new system at all; in fact, it just burned everyone’s money (retail and VC alike), making everyone in the new system poorer.

I’m not singling out Layer 1s. I could give countless similar examples: spot DEXs, perpetual DEXs, prediction markets, meme platforms, etc. The cutthroat competition in these sectors doesn’t actually create a better financial system. Contrary to what VCs say, we don’t need to build a casino on Mars.

The Gambling-ization of Economic Models

If I said I joined crypto with zero financial motivation, that would be a lie. As a reader, you might think I made enough money and decided to quit the industry—doesn’t that sound hypocritical? Yes, maybe I am hypocritical, but maybe I’m just disgusted by having contributed to this mess of financialization and gambling.

Normalizing zero-sum “let’s quickly make money off each other” behavior is not a way to create wealth in the long term. It looks like it, but it isn’t. Eight years in crypto have completely destroyed my ability to recognize sustainable business models. Here, you don’t need a successful business or product to make money. This industry is filled with high-market-cap tokens with zero users—which goes completely against how the real world works. If you want to deliver value to customers, and not just gambling + entertainment (which is what casinos do), these zero-sum business models simply don’t work.

Conclusion

I used to think “financial nihilism” was a cute and harmless concept. I thought it didn’t matter if we kept launching zero-sum games for the next generation. I have no doubt Bitcoin will hit $1,000,000 one day, but that has nothing to do with the financial games the industry is creating.

This kind of industry mindset is extremely toxic, and I believe it will lead to a long-term collapse in social mobility for the younger generation. You can already see it happening, and we need to have the courage to resist these pointless games.

CMS Holdings once said: “Are you here to make money? Or to prove you’re right?”

This time, I choose to prove I’m right.