Wintermute CEO: The public blockchain debate is meaningless; the token economic model is almost defunct.

PANews reported on February 5th that Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute, pointed out multiple predicaments facing the current crypto industry. He believes the public chain debate ("Solana vs Ethereum vs [other chain]") is meaningless because no breakthrough applications have yet emerged on any chain. Stablecoins are merely a very niche "victory," but from a macro perspective, nothing has changed; their essence remains the replacement of one centralized intermediary with another. The scalability of blockchain applications is generally questionable, especially perpetual exchanges, which struggle to achieve traditional financial-grade scale. Their fundamental bottleneck lies in risk engine design rather than simply throughput.

He further criticized the distorted values ​​within the industry: Bitcoin's original vision has been obscured by price narratives, and the cyberpunk trend of "institutional entry" has overwhelmed the cypherpunk spirit. Only a very few opinion leaders, such as Vitalik, are still focusing on the essential issues. The token economic model is almost ineffective, and mechanisms such as buybacks, lock-ups, and airdrops are all in trouble, requiring a restart experiment from the underlying logic. Despite pointing out many drawbacks, Gaevoy remains cautiously optimistic about the industry's long-term development, believing that the current market has moved beyond the blind frenzy of the "Trump-driven rally," speculators will gradually exit, and true believers may usher in a healthier environment.