Espresso co-founder's decade-long journey in crypto: I originally wanted to disrupt Wall Street's flaws, but ended up witnessing a transformation into a casino-like environment.

Written by: Jill Gunter, Co-founder of Espresso

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

Ten years ago, I began my career in the crypto industry because, in my view, it was the most suitable and effective tool to address the various problems I witnessed during my brief stint on Wall Street.

I found that the current state of the financial system had given rise to three major societal ills, and I firmly believed that crypto technology could tackle these challenges.

1. Poor currency management

Hugo Chávez single-handedly drove Venezuela’s inflation rate above 20,000%.

My career began as a bond trader responsible for Latin American sovereign debt, so I personally experienced the hyperinflation and capital controls in countries like Venezuela and Argentina. The willful decisions of national leaders robbed entire generations of their livelihoods and savings, resulting in significant widening of sovereign bond spreads and locking these countries out of capital markets. The injustice inflicted on individuals by these circumstances is, and always has been, a tragedy.

Of course, Chávez and Cristina Kirchner (former presidents of Venezuela and Argentina, respectively) were not the only “villains” in this tragedy.

2. Wall Street’s financial barriers

Do you remember the 2011 protests at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan?

I joined Wall Street a few years after the 2008 financial crisis. Before joining, I had read Michael Lewis’ “Liar’s Poker,” and I thought the book’s depiction of the 1980s Wall Street culture of wild speculation was an outdated stereotype. I also knew that the Dodd-Frank Act had been passed the year before I joined, and that this legislative crackdown should have thoroughly cleaned up the speculative atmosphere on Manhattan’s trading floors.

At the systemic level, rampant risk-taking had indeed subsided, and trading desks focused on directional bets had mostly been dismantled. But if you looked closely, speculation had never really gone away. Many of the leaders who emerged after the 2008 industry shakeup were young traders who had taken over their bosses’ risk positions at the market bottom and then made a fortune thanks to Ben Bernanke’s quantitative easing policies. What kind of incentives does this experience instill in these new trading “bosses”? Even after witnessing the devastation of the crisis, this new generation was still taught that betting big with the company’s balance sheet could make their careers.

In my first year on Wall Street, I walked past the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters every day on my way to and from work. The longer I stayed, the more I agreed with their cause—they wanted to break Wall Street’s privilege and end the reality where reckless gambling by the elite left ordinary people to pick up the tab.

I agreed with their goals, but not their methods. Walking past the protesters was actually quite uneventful—their actions weren’t proactive. They held up signs, claiming to be the “99%,” but to me, they didn’t have a clear idea of what they wanted from the “1%.”

To me, the answer was obvious: the problem wasn’t just Wall Street’s gambling addiction, but the fact that Wall Street had access to investment opportunities and industry information that ordinary people never would—and when Wall Street lost, it was regular people who paid the price.

This can’t be solved by simply adding a few more rules. The core issue is creating a fair competitive environment for everyone.

3. Obscure and outdated financial systems

As early as 2012, I realized that to drive the financial system toward greater openness, fairness, transparency, and inclusion, its underlying infrastructure would have to be upgraded.

As a junior trader on the desk, I spent hours after each market close on the phone with back-office teams, chasing down bonds that should have settled weeks earlier and confirming that all derivatives positions had no “wrong-way risk.”

How could these processes not be fully digitized by now!

On the surface, a lot of steps seemed digitized—we used computers and electronic databases. But all these databases required manual intervention to update. Reconciling information across parties was a massive, costly, and often opaque task.

I still remember that even four years after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Barclays, which acquired its assets, still couldn’t untangle Lehman’s exact assets and liabilities. It sounds absurd, but when you consider the conflicting or incomplete database records, it all makes sense.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Bitcoin is just so cool.

Like gold, it’s an asset that’s immune to manipulation and independent of monetary policy. Its issuance and circulation model gave regular people around the world a decade-long window to use it as an investment tool before institutions could get in at scale. It also introduced a new kind of database called blockchain, which requires no clearing, settlement, or reconciliation—anyone can directly run and update it.

Bitcoin was (and still is) the cure for my disillusionment with Wall Street. Some use it to hedge against inflation and capital controls. It lets the “99%” invest ahead of Wall Street. Its underlying technology has the potential to replace the outdated and inefficient systems banks rely on, building a new digital and transparent infrastructure.

I had to give up everything to pursue this cause. But at the time, skepticism about it was everywhere—the most common refrain was, “Isn’t this just for drug dealers?” In 2014, besides dark web markets like Silk Road, Bitcoin had few other use cases, and it was hard to refute this criticism—you really had to use your imagination to see its potential.

For years, I sometimes doubted whether this technology would ever truly take off… but suddenly, the whole world started paying attention, projecting all sorts of fantasies onto it.

Peak Hype

For years, I hoped people would see the potential of blockchain technology, but by 2017, I suddenly found myself becoming a skeptic within the industry—a complicated feeling.

On the one hand, I was surrounded by Silicon Valley’s culture; on the other, the times were changing, and everyone wanted to start a blockchain project. People pitched me “blockchain + journalism” startup ideas, and I saw headlines about “blockchain for dentistry”—and I couldn’t help but think, “No, that’s not what it’s for at all!”

Most of these people weren’t scammers—they weren’t launching vaporware, issuing tokens to fleece retail investors, or making meme coins. They genuinely believed in the diverse potential of the technology. But this enthusiasm was often misguided and not very rational.

From 2017 to 2018, the industry reached peak hype.

The Gartner Hype Cycle

The crypto and blockchain industry hasn’t, as Gartner’s classic hype cycle chart promises, steadily climbed the “Slope of Enlightenment.” Instead, it swings between frenzy and disillusionment every 3 to 4 years.

To understand why, you need to realize: blockchain is a technology, but it’s deeply tied to crypto assets as an asset class, and those assets are extremely high beta and high risk, making them especially sensitive to macro market swings. Over the past decade, the macro environment has been volatile: in zero-interest-rate times, risk appetite rises and crypto booms; when trade wars hit and risk appetite falls, crypto is declared “dead.”

To make matters worse, this emerging field faces wildly fluctuating regulatory environments, plus devastating events like Terra/Luna and FTX that destroyed vast sums of capital—so the sector’s extreme volatility is no surprise.

Remember, we all want to change the world

Sticking with the industry—whether you’re building, investing, commenting, or doing anything else—is extremely hard.

Everyone knows startups are tough, but building in crypto is even harder. Industry sentiment and funding conditions are unpredictable, product-market fit is unclear, legitimate founders might get subpoenaed or even jailed, and you have to watch some president launch a token scam and destroy the industry’s last vestiges of mainstream credibility… it’s crazy.

So I totally understand why, after eight years in the industry, someone might feel like they’ve wasted their life.

The author of this tweet admits that he thought he was joining a revolution, only to realize he had helped build a giant casino and regrets fueling the “casino-ification” of the economy.

But remember, no anti-establishment movement is perfect—every revolution has a price, and all change is accompanied by pain.

Elizabeth Warren and the “Occupy Wall Street” movement tried to shut down Wall Street’s casino, but meme stock crazes, altcoin bull markets, prediction markets, and decentralized perpetual exchanges have instead brought Wall Street’s casino to the masses.

Is this a good thing? Honestly, I’m not sure. For most of my time in crypto, it felt like we were just recreating consumer protection frameworks. But many of today’s so-called consumer protection rules are outdated or misleading, so maybe breaking new ground is a good thing. If my original goal was to create a level playing field, I have to admit, we’ve actually made progress.

Reforming the financial system fundamentally—this is a necessary step. If you want to change who benefits from financial gains and how, you will inevitably “casino-ify” the economy.

Report Card

It’s easy to become disillusioned; staying optimistic is hard.

But if I look at the state of the industry relative to the goals I had when I entered, I think things are actually pretty good.

On poor currency management: we now have Bitcoin and other sufficiently decentralized cryptocurrencies that can serve as real alternatives to fiat—they can’t be seized or devalued; add privacy coins, and assets can’t even be traced. This is genuine progress for human freedom.

On Wall Street’s monopoly: Yes, the casino has been “democratized”—now it’s not just Wall Street that can leverage up on junk assets and blow themselves up! But seriously, I think society as a whole is progressing, with less paternalistic intervention in how people take risks. After all, we’ve always let regular folks buy lottery tickets, but kept the best-performing equities of the past decade off-limits. Early retail investors in assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum show us what a more balanced world could look like.

As for the outdated, obscure database systems: the financial industry is finally starting to embrace better technology. Robinhood is using blockchain as the underlying tech for stock trading in the EU; Stripe is building a new global payments system on crypto rails; stablecoins have become mainstream products.

If you got into this industry for the revolution, take a closer look: everything you hoped for may already be here—it just doesn’t look exactly like you imagined.