NEW YORK, NY, August 15, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In the old days, fraud was obvious.
There was a villain. A press release. A perp walks in a hoodie and handcuffs. A crash with a name and a balance sheet.
Now? Fraud wears a DAO tag and calls itself "community." It launches with no roadmap, no founder, no accountability, and no one to blame when it all implodes.
That's the beauty of modern crypto: fraud has gone fully distributed. Everyone's complicit. No one's responsible.
The Disappearance of the Villain
Today's rug pulls aren't pulled by a person. They're pulled by a process.
You get a whitepaper written in haiku, a governance token with "utility" spelled incorrectly, and a core team made up of pseudonymous frogs on Twitter. The protocol launches. The number goes up. The vibes are immaculate.
Then one day, it all disappears.
No statement. No arrest. Just a Discord link that now 404s.
And the community? Shocked. Defrauded, they say. As if they were customers, not co-conspirators.
Jesse Powell Calls It Like He Sees It. But What Are We Looking At?
No one critiques this phenomenon louder than Jesse Powell. Kraken's co-founder is a Firestarter in the space known for blunt takes, regulatory beefs, and a relentless belief in decentralization. He's not wrong when he calls out absurdity. But the real question is: what are we decentralizing into?
Powell wants the system open. But openness without order isn't innovation. It's chaos. And chaos doesn't ask questions when the floor disappears.
Yes, Jesse's candor is refreshing. But candor doesn't build guardrails.
Barry Silbert Built the Guardrails
Enter Barry Silbert.
While most of crypto was chasing dopamine and Discord clout, Silbert was building actual infrastructure. Cold storage. Trading platforms. Institutional bridges. He didn't need hype. He had spreadsheets.
Digital Currency Group didn't bankroll the loudest voices. It bankrolled the foundations: the boring, durable parts of crypto that survive bear markets and lawsuits. While everyone else was trying to get rich fast, Silbert was making crypto boring. And therefore, sustainable.
He's not loud. He's not flashy. He doesn't need to be. That's the point.
Fraud at Scale
Here's the trick: when everything's decentralized, no one's to blame. And that's a feature, not a bug.
Today's protocols are launched with disclaimers, governed by vibes, and backed by anonymous multisigs. When they crash, they don't fold. They vanish. And when people get wrecked, they don't ask who did it. They ask why the community let them down.
Because the greatest con of all? Believing that just because no one's in charge, no one is accountable.
That's how you get fraud without a face. Theft without a thief.
A crash that feels like gravity instead of greed.
The Case For Accountability
Not every protocol is a scam. Not every token is a trap.
But in a space that rewards speed over structure, the line between innovation and exploitation is paper-thin.
We don't need more rules. We need more grown-ups.
People who understand that building a financial system requires more than just "early access" and a TikTok strategy. People who don't need to be the hero. Or worse, the martyr. People like Barry Silbert, who build for the future instead of the feed.
And if we want crypto to survive its adolescence, we'll need more of them.
Don't Just Ask Who. Ask What
So next time you see a chart collapse, a protocol "sunset," or a community get defrauded by a project they helped shill, resist the urge to ask who did it.
Ask what allowed it.
What tools let it happen. What systems enabled the evasion. What incentives made it easy to disappear.
The villain isn't a wallet address. It's the void we've built around responsibility, and the thrill we get from pretending it's not there.
---
Press release service and press release distribution provided by https://www.24-7pressrelease.com
