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| By Jurica Dujmovic |
This may be a controversial truth in today’s environment, but I didn’t get into crypto to get rich.
I got into it because I didn’t trust banks. Or the government.
After 2008, after watching institutions implode while taxpayers footed the bill, Bitcoin (BTC, “A-”) felt like a moral statement dressed up as code.
No middlemen. No bailouts. No permission. Just math, miners and a promise: Don’t trust — verify.
For a long time, that promise felt real.
Now, I’m not so sure.
The Trustless Dream vs. the Market We Actually Trade
Originally, decentralization wasn’t an optional feature. It was the product.
Bitcoin didn’t just offer price speculation. It offered an entirely new financial architecture where trust in institutions was replaced by cryptography and incentives.
Fast forward to today and ask yourself a simple question: Where does most trading volume actually happen?
Not on-chain, as crypto enthusiasts would want. Rather, most happens on centralized exchanges.
These platforms:
- Custody of billions of dollars in user funds
- Control listings and liquidity
- Act as gatekeepers to retail capital
- Set the tempo for market-wide price discovery
As an investor, that realization was uncomfortable. As a realist, it was clarifying.
The market had chosen convenience over ideology. And capital always follows convenience.
When “Community-Owned” Became VC-Owned
Now, another quiet shift is starting to change the game: Venture capital is replacing the retail crowd.
In the early days, you bought Bitcoin on shady websites or mined it yourself. Ethereum was sold in a public crowd sale.
Ownership was messy, distributed and slow.
Today, most major protocols launch with:
- 30–60% of supply allocated to venture funds and insiders
- Multi-year unlock schedules that create predictable sell pressure
- Retail entering after early investors are already up 10x–100x on paper
All of which means tokens increasingly behave less like decentralized commodities … and more like high-risk tech equity. Just without shareholder rights.
This doesn’t make them uninvestable. It just means the game is no longer ideological. It’s structural.
Which means investors have to ask tougher questions when evaluating new opportunities. Such as …
- Who owns the supply?
- When does it unlock?
- Who controls governance in practice?
The hardest lesson for me as an early idealist was this: “Decentralized” as a narrative no longer guarantees fair distribution.
Regulation Rewired Crypto
For years, regulation was framed as the enemy. The external threat that would crush innovation and push builders underground.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, regulation quietly reshaped the market. Now, it dictates which parts of crypto attract the serious capital:
- Spot ETFs legitimized Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH, “B+”) as institutional assets
- Stablecoin oversight pushed liquidity toward compliant issuers
- Know-your-customer rules funneled retail through regulated on-ramps
- Institutional custody became the preferred storage layer for large funds
Paradoxically, regulation didn’t centralize crypto directly — it centralized access to it.
The base layers of Bitcoin and Ethereum remain remarkably decentralized. But the financial rails around them are now deeply institutional.
From an investor’s standpoint, this created two simultaneous realities:
- Permissionless technology still exists.
- Most capital now enters through permissioned gateways.
Ignoring either side of that equation is expensive.
What Is Still Truly Trustless?
Despite the changes sparked by new regulation and institutional adoption, not every decentralized system fell under the centralized umbrella.
In fact, some systems remain stubbornly resistant to outside control:
- Bitcoin’s monetary policy has not changed.
- Ethereum’s base layer still resists direct capture despite political pressure.
- Validator networks remain globally distributed.
- Rollups and cryptographic systems still settle on public chains.
From an investment lens, decentralization is no longer a yes/no question.
Semi-centralized Layer-2s, for example, are built on Ethereum’s decentralized base layer … and yet still bear some risks and benefits of centralization.
The same is true for exchange-dependent tokens that live only on CEXes or DeFi protocols that give admins the keys to emergency shutdown protocols.
Similarly, a project may be backed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). But a quick look on-chain may reveal that only a few wallets dominate governance.
That means our current market remains a gray area. One that contains a risk spectrum that affects:
- Regulatory exposure
- Governance capture risk
- Censorship resistance
- Long-term survivability
Welcome to modern crypto. Where the Wild West is being tamed … and made more confusing for average investors in the process.
Where I Now See the Real Investment Edge
Once I stopped viewing decentralization as a moral line in the sand and started viewing it as a market variable, the opportunity map shifted.
Here’s where I now see consistent asymmetric value:
Infrastructure over apps. Blockspace, data availability, validator tooling, wallets — the boring plumbing still compounds regardless of which narrative is hot.
Regulatory-resistant base layers. Assets that don’t depend on corporate issuers or foundation-level discretion still act as long-term macro hedges.
Compliance-ready DeFi and RWA plays. This is where institutional money actually feels comfortable deploying size.
Token unlock and liquidity arbitrage. Vesting schedules today matter as much as earnings reports in TradFi. But most crypto-native retail still ignores them.
Black-swan privacy bets. Privacy coins and censorship-resistant tooling sit in regulatory exile — until they don’t. Their risk profile is brutal, but their convexity remains intact.
None of these are ideological trades. They are structural ones.
The New Rules to Invest By
Crypto didn’t kill traditional finance.
In many ways, it became a strange reflection of it.
Centralized exchanges now resemble banks more than protocols. Venture capital allocates tokens before the public ever sees them. Governments regulate on-ramps, stablecoins and custody as tightly as any brokerage account.
The word decentralized is still everywhere in marketing. But in practice, it’s becoming a premium feature, not the default.
And part of me mourns this reality.
I miss when crypto was clearly outside the system. When self-custody wasn’t a niche practice. When decentralization wasn’t a marketing term diluted by compliance decks and VC roadshows.
But markets evolve. And ideology alone can’t pay the rent.
Life goes on. And as investors, we either adapt … or get left behind.
After more than a decade in this market, here’s what decentralization’s slow erosion has taught me: The highest returns now sit in the tension between permissionless tech and permissioned capital.
That’s where markets are confused. Where inefficiencies still exist. And where investors who think in systems instead of slogans still find their edge.
I encourage you to keep that, and the five investment edges I mentioned above, in mind when hunting for your next crypto play.
Best,
Jurica Dujmovic
P.S. Part of this revelation is recognizing the opportunity that RWA plays represent. They’re not truly decentralized, but they bring real-world value onto the blockchain.
And you can benefit without ever buying a single coin.
My fellow tech expert Michael Robinson just reviewed several TradFi companies at the heart of the $19 trillion crypto boom. You can learn more about them — and how to access his full reports on them — here.
