A collective tacit understanding called decentralization

Writing by: Thejaswini M A

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

I’ve never fully trusted this whole thing. Not because I think I’m smarter than anyone else, but because those who shout the loudest about decentralization are often the ones most eager to funnel your money into their ecosystems. Throughout history, this kind of combination has never been a good sign.

But I’ve been watching all along. You have to watch too, because this is truly the most exciting show right now. The entire industry is built on the radical idea of “trustless currency,” yet almost everyone involved is untrustworthy. Irony is everywhere.

Today, just as all obvious truths eventually become common knowledge, people are slowly reaching a conclusion — and some of us have known it all along: decentralization has always been more of a performance than a genuine belief. The goal is to harvest “foolish money.” Those who constantly talk about “banks as enemies” are now shaking hands with the most centralized political powers on this planet, simply because it benefits their investment portfolios.

I’m not even angry. I’m just watching because this show is too good to miss.

On October 31, 2008, the aftershocks of the financial crisis were still felt. Satoshi Nakamoto released a nine-page white paper. He proposed a form of electronic currency that required no banks, no governments, and no permission from anyone. Direct transactions between parties, no middleman fees, and no central authority deciding whether you have the right to trade.

Honestly, the initial idea was very compelling. It was born directly into a world where hedge funds and central banks over-leverage the economy, profit from ordinary people’s losses, and rely on government bailouts when things go wrong. The anger behind it was entirely justified. If even this system — which makes elites rich while ordinary people foot the bill — can’t make people angry, then what can?

The brilliance of Nakamoto’s design lies precisely in its removal of human factors. No single point of control means no single point of attack. Instead, there are thousands of nodes, all equal and verifying each other. You can’t bribe the entire network, nor threaten it with a phone call. And it won’t freeze someone’s wallet just because a regulator is in a bad mood.

The idea of a trustless, decentralized system is a beautiful concept.

People often blame the industry’s decline on the influx of venture capital, NFT chaos, or the FTX collapse. But these are just symptoms. The real problem appeared much earlier — if you pay enough attention, it’s been evident almost from the start.

The issue with decentralization is that it’s expensive, slow, and requires thousands of participants with no shared interests to coordinate. Centralization, on the other hand, is efficient, fast, and profitable. So, when real money enters the scene, economic laws start to take their usual course. The industry begins to split, but few are willing to openly call it out.

In May 2017, the combined hash power of Bitcoin’s two largest mining pools was less than 30%, and the top six pools accounted for less than 65%. That was the most decentralized moment in Bitcoin’s mining history. Nine years later, the peak was long gone. By December 2023, the top two pools controlled over 55% of the hash rate, and the top six reached 90%.

Today, Foundry USA controls about 30% of the entire network’s hash power, AntPool about 18%, and together they nearly reach 50%. By March 2026, the abstract risk finally turned into reality: Foundry mined six consecutive blocks, triggering a rare two-block chain reorganization that covered legitimate blocks from AntPool and ViaBTC. Small miners watched helplessly as their valid work was erased from the ledger. Bitcoin has never experienced a 51% attack, and the network remains intact, but the centralization risks originally outlined in the white paper are no longer just theoretical — they’re now reflected in the charts as dangerous trends.

The white paper describes a system that no single entity can control. Now, it’s eighteen years old. You can interpret that as you will.

I want to be precise here, because lazy criticism can easily go astray. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Looking at all the crypto products today with real users, real trading volume, and real revenue, you’ll find that most of them are not truly decentralized.

But have they ever claimed to be decentralized? Confusing this point makes your critique sound sharper but misses the target.

Stablecoins are the only undisputed success story in the crypto industry. Used for trading, cross-border remittances, and serving as a payment tool in countries with ongoing currency devaluation. By 2025, USDT and USDC together account for 93% of the total stablecoin market cap, handling unprecedented trillions of dollars in transactions.

@visaonchainanalytics

Both USDC and USDT are issued by companies, and wallets can be frozen. Not to mention, their reserves are stored in banks — institutions that this industry was supposed to replace. The often-cited decentralized stablecoin DAI, which is used to prove that decentralization still exists, only holds about 3–4% of the market share. No one ever markets USDT as a decentralized product; its selling point has always been efficiency.

Cross-border dollar transfers in minutes, settlement in seconds, no correspondent banks, no SWIFT codes, no three-day clearing periods. They retain the issuer but eliminate all the inefficient and costly middlemen between issuer and user. The “revolution” that traditional finance has truly lost is actually just a centralized dollar reissued on the blockchain. And that was its original promise — and it has delivered.

Hyperliquid, with tens of billions in trading volume, is extremely fast and impressive as a product. But in practical terms, it’s controlled by 16 validators. During the JELLY incident in March 2025, these 16 validators reached consensus to delist a token within two minutes, turning a potential $12 million loss into profit. Two minutes. To get Ethereum governance to make any decision in two minutes, you’d probably need a natural disaster — and even then, someone might still publish a dissenting blog from a forgotten time zone.

Some call it FTX 2.0, but that’s not quite accurate. Hyperliquid makes decisions as a company. What it truly gained recognition for was: solving problems, compensating users, introducing on-chain validator voting for future delistings, and continuing operation. The problem is, for a while, Hyperliquid’s marketing spent a lot of effort insisting it wasn’t a company, even though its operational model was exactly that.

Prediction markets. Polymarket experienced the crypto industry’s first truly mainstream breakout during the 2024 U.S. election. People quoting its prices, even those who never held ETH, were using it. No one asked whether it was sufficiently decentralized; people only cared if it was accurate. And it was. Occasionally, there are discussions about insider trading and the “truth machine,” some of which I authored. It’s just a useful product, using crypto technology as a foundational pipeline rather than an ideological banner.

Regarding DAOs, I could write a whole paragraph, but the phrase “decentralized autonomous organization” has probably become the most ridiculous phrase in the language. So I’ll stop here.

These are the real functioning projects, and most are much more practical than what’s described in white papers.

Today’s crypto world has split into two categories.

One is the infrastructure layer: built for efficiency, scale, and real use, trading decentralization for performance, and most openly so.

The other is the protocol layer: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana — structurally still very different from all previous systems, where decentralization isn’t just marketing talk but a core design attribute preserved under immense pressure. Products will compromise on user experience, but users only want something that works. Under the pressure of real money, the industry inevitably moves toward centralization. That’s just a law, not a moral failure. The revolutionary rhetoric of the protocol layer is often borrowed by product layers, even though they are no longer the same thing.

In 2019, the founders who once quoted the cypherpunk manifesto in speeches are now sitting in Senate hearings, claiming they’ve always wanted to work constructively with regulators. For many in the industry, decentralization is just a regulatory strategy cloaked in ideology: as long as no one is responsible, no one needs to be accountable. This ideology is confusing enough to persuade lawyers and regulators to raise funds, launch products, and exit smoothly in many well-known cases. When regulation becomes unavoidable, this ideology is shelved to avoid trouble.

There are still true believers in the industry. They entered crypto because they saw governments destroy currencies, freeze accounts for political reasons, and exclude entire groups from basic financial services. They’ve become the moral shield for an industry fundamentally driven by profit. Profit itself is fine, but there’s no need to pretend.

In my view, this trade-off might be worth it, and those who make the choice are aware of it — even if they don’t admit it outright. The pure idea of decentralization has always struggled in the face of reality. No one is secretly plotting to kill decentralization. The fact is, whenever people choose between “convenient products” and “principles that don’t work,” they always pick the former. Quietly, without ceremony, without a funeral.

And what I find truly darkly humorous is how this story plays out on the political stage.

Before signing any crypto-related legislation or appointing any crypto-friendly regulators, the Trump Organization’s revenue in the first half of 2025 skyrocketed 17-fold to $864 million, with over 90% coming from crypto-related projects. According to The Wall Street Journal, by early 2026, the Trump family had cashed out at least $1.2 billion from just one project, World Liberty Financial. His 19-year-old son Barron is listed on the project’s website as a “DeFi visionary.” Honestly, I could sit in silence for five minutes just to mourn the person who wrote this.

@fortune.com

In 2021, this person called Bitcoin a scam; by 2024, he was on stage at a Bitcoin conference. The crowd that has long claimed “the government has no right to control your money” watched a sitting president profit directly from his regulated industry, and their main reaction was to predict the price and shout “bull market is here.”

In economics, there’s a concept called expressive preference: what you actually do says more about your true beliefs than what you claim to believe. The preference shown by the decentralization movement under real political pressure is: we care about decentralization until it costs us; afterward, we only care about the price.

I don’t want to judge too much. I’m just recording honestly, because someone has to.

The fervor of “we’re going to change the world” in 2017 and 2021 has mostly faded. The NFT crowd dispersed, and in the metaverse, people found other topics to confidently spout nonsense about. Those who remain are quieter, less messianic, and much more honest about what they’re actually doing. The protocol layer is functioning as designed, and the application layer has produced astonishing products. This revolution still created practical financial infrastructure, changed the way global value flows, and made many people extremely wealthy.

All I want to say is: be honest about what you’re doing.

If you’re running a centralized exchange with better user experience and crypto channels, just say so. If your stablecoin is issued by a company, can be frozen, and has reserves in banks, just say so. If your DAO is actually controlled by three wallets, and everyone in the room knows it, just say so. Users can handle honesty. What they can’t endure long-term is the gap between narrative and reality. Eventually, they’ll leave to express their dissatisfaction.

Satoshi Nakamoto has been silent for fifteen years. Maybe he foresaw all this and chose to watch quietly from behind the scenes. Or maybe he simply knew when to step away.