The following is a guest post and opinion from John deVadoss, Co-Founder of the InterWork Alliancez.
“Decentralization” is crypto’s all-purpose slogan, yet the word never appears in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper. What Satoshi outlined was narrower and more radical: a peer-to-peer system that swaps institutional trust for publicly auditable cryptographic proof. Trust can be minimized without power being evenly dispersed, and that difference—blurred by evangelists and regulators alike—has derailed the conversation ever since.
When former SEC director William Hinman floated in 2018 that a token might escape securities law once its network became “sufficiently decentralized,” node-counting turned into a compliance ritual and a developer masquerade. Projects could declare themselves beyond oversight by gesturing at a metric no one could define. The rhetoric of decentralization has become a smokescreen for a familiar hierarchy: insiders controlling scarce resources, outsiders providing exit liquidity.
Crypto matters, not because it dissolves power, but because it rearranges who can wield it. Three capabilities distinguish blockchains from the legacy financial stack—and they continue to work even when influence remains lumpy:
- Self-custody of digital value. A 12-word seed lets anyone safeguard assets without a bank charter or political patronage.
- Global, permissionless settlement. Dollar-pegged stablecoins cross borders in seconds for fractions of a cent, sidestepping SWIFT queues and capital controls.
- Programmable finance. Smart contracts turn assets into composable software, allowing anyone with an internet connection to build markets rather than merely use them.
What links these are proofs and verifiability.
You do not trust an exchange because it has thousands of nodes; you trust it because you can prove tokens cannot move without your signature. Mathematics cannot erase politics, but it can fence in abuse. Privilege still concentrates—among miners, validators, and stablecoin treasuries—yet their discretion is easier to detect, audit, and, if necessary, route around. Engineering progress therefore means attacking concrete choke points where privilege can metastasize.
While cryptography cannot abolish hierarchy, it can drag hierarchy into the daylight and keep the exits unlocked. That goal is less utopian and more subversive than “fairy-tale decentralization.” Why? Because transparency and exit, not equal vote tallies, form the bedrock of freedom in digital markets. Validators may be powerful, but if users can cheaply verify state and migrate to an alternative protocol, that power becomes contestable.
The industry should retire its most overused narrative. “Decentralization” implies an endpoint—a final dispersal of authority. In practice, power adapts; the question is whether power structures remain open to challenge. Measured that way, crypto’s progress depends on how hard it is to obfuscate privilege, not on how eloquently a protocol touts itself as being “decentralized.” All those “decentralized” AI projects—yes, this applies to you too.
Crypto’s enduring promise is pluralism; the task is to keep compressing the discretionary power of gatekeepers such that exit is always only one permissionless transaction away.
The alternative is that crypto passively devolves into the technology stack for software-defined property and assets.
