According to Cointelegraph, Jesse Walden, managing partner of Variant Fund, said that with institutional adoption, smart contract platforms will focus more on speed and compliance in the next decade, and the original "cypherpunk" values ââwill gradually disappear.
In a Sept. 30 blog post, Walden explained how the first decade of blockchain development was inspired by Bitcoinâs original cypherpunk values, including censorship resistance, open source, permissionlessness, and a vision for a democratic and fair internet.
Today, smart contract platforms are driven more by âperformance, cost, profitabilityâ and legal compliance than the lofty ideals of the past.
Walden noted that many popular use cases for smart contract platforms, such as stablecoins, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, or decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs), no longer need to be decentralized or permissionless.
Instead, they simply need to leverage the decentralization of the underlying blockchain to achieve âopenness, interoperability, and settlement.â
The cypherpunk movement began in the 1980s as a response to government surveillance, censorship, and restrictions on free speech. Some believe that Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto is a cypherpunk or at least closely associated with cypherpunk.
Walden said this isnât the end of cypherpunk blockchains, but âprobably the end of the beginning.â
Ultimately, Walden believes that cryptocurrencies are being commercialized, which brings inevitable compromises, such as relaxing strict decentralization in order to get crypto wallets and applications into users' hands more quickly.
But itâs not all bad news. Walden points out that a handful of avant-garde artists struck the right compromise between their core principles and pandering to the mass market, and that this mix of determination and pragmatism is to be admired because it has the greatest impact.
âIf you feel like the values ââthat got you into crypto are being diluted by the mainstream â I understand that feeling, but try to look at it from a different perspective â because the commercialization of crypto from an impact perspective could mean that the real opportunity is just beginning,â he said.