“Longevity isn’t about fame. It’s about keeping the part of you that the industry can’t monetize.”

Over the past few weeks, several high-profile disputes between teams and investors have surfaced: refund-style requests on instruments historically treated as at-risk capital, termination clauses tied to fixed launch timelines, SAFEs combined with advisory or fee arrangements to address valuation mismatches, lockup structures that produce different liquidity timelines for different parties, etc. At first glance, each incident looks like a one-off controversy. Different investors, different projects, different contexts. But if you zoom out even slightly, they all point to the same structural breakdown: our incentive systems are no longer aligned with the economic reality of the market we’re operating in. This is one of those moments where first-principles thinking becomes useful. If you strip away the personalities, the screenshots, and the outrage cycles on social media, you’re left with a simple observation: every participant in the ecosystem is optimizing rationally for their own survival inside a system driven predominantly by self-interest and very few rules. That’s not a story about “good” or “bad” actors. It’s a story about incentives. Projects are acting the way founders tend to act in bear markets: protecting runway, delaying launches until certain milestones are hit, prudently allocating capital, and trying not to give away the entire cap table in the process. Investors are doing their job as well: de-risking, seeking protection, and attempting to bridge the gap between the valuations they paid and the valuations the market is now willing to recognize. Exchanges and market makers are similarly looking out for themselves: pricing in risk, guarding against volatility, and de-risking wherever feasible. Retail is reacting the way it usually does: often operating with less information and more exposure than institutional participants. None of these behaviors are irrational. If anything, the surprising part is how long the old structures held. The SAFE, the SAFT, the advisory agreement, the lockup, even the idea of a TGE as a discrete “event” rather than a multi-stage continuum- all of these were born out of a specific model of how projects launch, develop, and gain users. That model assumed three things: trust, velocity, and liquidity. Today, all three are far more constrained than those templates envisioned. So what we’re seeing now is less a moral failure than a coordination failure. A game-theory breakdown in a system that has quietly shifted into survival mode. And when that happens, blame is the easiest but least interesting lens. The more useful question for anyone building long-term in this space is: What incentives produced these behaviors, and how do we redesign them so that no party feels forced to trade long-term trust for short-term survival? Until we revisit that question honestly, these disputes won’t be aberrations. They’ll be signals pointing to an industry overdue for structural redesign.

My favourite people in the world are walking contradictions. CEOs who go to therapy. Fighters who write poetry. Surfers who code. Scientists who pray. Stoics who cry. Killers with soft hearts. They remind me you don’t have to pick one side of yourself to be great. You can be disciplined and playful. Intense and fun. Brilliant and still learning. The most interesting humans I know are the ones who let themselves be everything they are. Those are my kind of people. – Jude Fredman