Four tribes, alike in volatility

In fair cyberspace, where we lay our scene

From ancient chains they claim autonomy

Where civil wants make civil memes obscene

— Willtoshi Shakamoto

Enter: The Cryptoanarchist

Stoic. Technical. Principled, perhaps to a fault. They find the blockchain not in search of wealth, but for sovereignty. To them, the laws of code supersede the laws imposed by petty nation states. They are builders, auditors, privacy purists — allergic to KYC and indifferent to price. While they might come off as heartless to some, it’s only from their unwillingness to bend their values to the whims of the market. They dream of a shining city that can’t be co-opted by anyone.

Enter: The Degenerate Gambler.

Always online. Always early. Occasionally right. They find the blockchain with a simple goal of multiplying their cash by a couple orders of magnitude, by whatever means necessary. Don’t try to test them on what they really know or you’ll find they’re made of straw; and yet somehow their ability to extract patterns with minimal data remains unmatched. They dream of a shining city that’s gated to exclude anyone whose net worth is even a cent lower than theirs.

Enter: The Banker

Calm. Calculating. Fashionably late. Intimidating to the rest of them, the banker is a walking contradiction: projecting power and confidence, chasing the same yields as the gamblers, and yet lacking the courage to make the same early bets. The Banker somehow arrives already natively speaking the language of tokens as if it were their native tongue, even if they still think the ledger being “secure” means it’s encrypted. They dream of a shining city that’s slightly more efficient and easier to audit than the shiny city they already live in right now.

Enter: The Unbanked

Quiet. Pragmatic. Early by necessity. They aren’t betting on blockchains — they need them to survive. They live in places where money fails quickly, and the institutions haven’t been around long enough to have earned much trust. Despite being thrust into center stage by no choice of their own, they ultimately came to the blockchain looking for a home where they can park their savings and build long term wealth for themselves and their families. They dream of a shining city where they’re truly free from the various oppressive forces they were born into.

Thus these four — so different in creed, yet bound together by code — find themselves drawn towards this neutral stage, the perfect meeting ground for reconciling their differences. And what is a chain to do but to support them all? What of each chain’s ideological purity: originally the carrot which draws in their initial users, which must be shed on the road to mainstream adoption? This is the tragedy of the blockchain: that in the end no protocol can remain pure forever. For although these four tribes each enter with separate dreams, they are fated, like Verona’s star-crossed lovers and the four companions of Oz, to either rise and fall together or not at all.

In the beginning, there was Bitcoin. Launched in the wake of the ‘08 Financial Crisis, it started out appealing to cypherpunks and after a few years of existing had only grown to a few thousand members. But, by late 2017 the tide was turning: daily spot volumes on Coinbase were over ~$2B as the price of a single Bitcoin neared $20k, and mainstream markets noticed. Yet, just as the network’s throughput (capped at ~7 tx/s) was being stress‑tested by user demand, the Block‑Size War tore the community apart, culminating in Bitcoin Cash fork in August 2017, when dissidents fled to 8MB blocks in search of cheaper payments. The episode demonstrated that, without active leadership, Bitcoin’s social layer would default to safety over scale — a choice that solidified its narrative as digital gold while quietly surrendering the “everyday payments” use case to faster chains. Bitcoin had successfully attracted the cryptoanarchists and gamblers and even the bankers, but showed it could never truly support the unbanked, and so it would ultimately cede its role of becoming the road to Oz to another chain. While today the market is still happy to assign value to Bitcoin the asset, this exists via memetic exception that proves the rule — the network is no longer meant to support an entire city’s worth of transactions, and serious capital allocators must now judge every single other crypto asset by their network metrics and not their status as being “the first”.

Ethereum arrived in 2015 promising expressive smart‑contracts and, for a period, reunited the crypto‑anarchists around a fresh canvas. It once again attracted the gamblers, drawn in by the generational opportunity to make an early investment into protocols which were attempting to replace the many failing institutions around us. Finally it once again attracted the bankers, this time realizing that they too stood to gain from the operational efficiencies that generalized blockchains provide us. But, by December 2017, the cracks were staring to show — a whimsical NFT experiment called CryptoKitties had eaten through 25% of Ethereum’s blockspace, leaving 30,000+ transactions stuck in limbo and proving that global computation on a single‑lane highway would eventually price out the masses. DeFi Summer in 2020 then turbo‑charged demand: average gas accelerated from pennies to double‑digit dollars, periodically spiking above $100 during NFT mints, and the unbanked were once again priced out of using the chain. This underscored a core constraint that all blockchains must eventually face in supporting both archetypes simultaneously: creating an economic model which allows fees to scale in response to short-term market demand, without pricing out less time-constrained transactions which are happy to stay in the collector lanes in exchange for low fees.

While initially the cryptoanarchists and gamblers and bankers all agreed that this tradeoff was fine for the moment, global unbanked Dorothy was left in the lurch; ignored despite her central role in this play; and so we saw a prime opportunity for new chains to join the race once again. TRON stepped up and quietly became the rails of choice for dollar‑denominated stablecoins via their partnership with Tether— another project that produced immense market value despite not passing the purity tests of cryptotwitter pundits. As of May 2025, TRON has supported more than 300 million addresses and 10 billion lifetime transactions, driven largely by USDT remittances in Asian, Latin American and West African markets— a reminder that price‑sensitive users will happily brave weaker decentralization guarantees if it means their families receive a few extra dollars on every $100 sent. Once again we saw that without supporting all four archetypes simultaneously, Ethereum would ultimately cede market share to new chains which could. Since then we’ve seen Bankers refusing to underwrite ETH in the same way they did BTC, in the absence of real utility-driven metrics that the network promised all those years ago. However a glimmer of hope still remains: with the recent rise in L2s, both targeting the long tail of international consumers as well as institutions, Ethereum’s strategy might ultimately prove to be the best one to reconcile this broad range of stakeholder needs into one unified platform.

When Solana launched in 2020, they decided to take a different approach: what if instead of starting with the cryptoanarchists, they started with the degenerate gambler? Promising fast blocks and low fees, Solana quickly became the home of high risk and high yield opportunities in crypto, eschewing the moral superiority of Ethereum in favor of a more pragmatic approach to building decentralized software. A flat ~$0.00025 base fee ensured that even on memecoin mania days, swaps still cost less than a cent. Despite the misgivings from crypto purists and the large blow-ups that marred the ecosystem early on, this strategy ultimately worked for them. They realized correctly that while degenerate gamblers do follow cryptoanarchists building early stage projects, so too do the builders follow the degens, whose liquidity is a key ingredient in scaling any successful crypto dapp. After finding PMF in the degen market, Solana has made strides to reposition itself as supporting more legitimate use-cases like stablecoins, DePIN and AI, and now routinely supports 10x more daily active addresses than Ethereum’s mainnet (and almost 2x the entire Ethereum ecosystem combined). Solana now hopes that by maintaining low fees via new clients like Firedancer and supporting interesting applications with large userbases over the coming years, it can attract the bankers who are keen to underwrite protocol tokens backed by real market demand for their utility.

Finally, today we see a fourth model emerging: the banker‑first chains. Aptos, armed with the Move VM and $400 million in blue‑chip capital from a16z, Apollo, and Franklin Templeton, is starting at the top end of the market and piloting tokenized money‑market funds with Hang Seng Bank inside Hong‑Kong’s e‑HKD sandbox. Sui follows a similar script, touting 600ms finality and object‑centric data structures that speak directly to the needs of auditors. Whether the cypherpunks, degens, and unbanked will ever migrate to these pristine, regulator‑ready ledgers still remains to be seen — while cryptoanarchists and the unbanked will always be attracted by bounties and investments from well funded protocols, liquidity and culture are still not as easily programmable as code. These questions also remain unanswered in part because the bankers are only now starting to meaningfully enter crypto in the wake of ETF launches and a new crypto-friendly American president. It’s still unclear what they will really demand from the crypto ecosystem at large; after all a system’s design constraints can only be uncovered via repeated use.

Thus the ledger remains a living paradox: that no chain can ultimately survive without relaxing the very values which helped attract their initial champions. Chains that only court rebels will burn too bright to welcome the widows and wage-earners; those built for high finance alone sink beneath the weight of their own gatekeepers. Until a protocol can support the cryptoanarchist, the degen gambler, the banker, and the unbanked on one unified blockchain, Oz will remain a mirage that lies shimmering just beyond the next hard-fork. The chain that gets us there won’t just find product market fit with one rival tribe, but will succeed because it found a unique approach to weaving all of their worldviews together without tearing any threads along the way. There are many paths to nirvana, and it remains to be seen which strategy will ultimately be the one that gets us to Oz.

A glooming peace this crypto twilight brings

Though fees now low, our alt positions bled

So cast your keys, and tell the network kings

By consensus we will crown a dreamer’s head

For never was a tale of richer code

Than rebel, banker, degen, exile— all on one shared node

~

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900, at the height of a monetary debate that defined two presidential elections. In 1886, William McKinley ran as the “sound money” candidate championing a strict gold standard to anchor prices and attract investment, while his Democratic-Populist opponent William Jennings Bryan barnstormed for the unlimited coinage of silver at a 16-to-1 ratio to raise farm prices and ease debt. McKinley defeated Bryan, and four years later signed the Gold Standard Act of 1900 which formally pegged the dollar to gold at $20.67 per ounce. Baum’s novel, published just two months after the act was signed, can be read as a metaphor for the 1890s free-silver crusade: the shimmering Yellow Brick Road embodied the rigid path of the gold standard, along which characters like Dorothy needed to walk, even if it ultimately leads to the illusory power of the Wizard (political elites like McKinley whose power came from sheer stagecraft). Her silver slippers, later changed to ruby in the 1939 film, were the key to whisking ordinary people “home” to economic relief with bimetallism, which indebted farmers and industrial laborers (the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman) believed would inflate prices and revive the “heart” and “brains” of the economy. The Cowardly Lion channeled William Jennings Bryan, whose roaring speeches thrilled crowds but ultimately failed to secure him victory; the Emerald City’s mandatory green spectacles hinted that even paper greenbacks depend on shared illusion. Later that year McKinley once again defeated Bryan, this time by an even wider margin. The gold standard ultimately prevailed until the Great Depression, when the US was forced off gold domestically in 1933, and entirely in 1971.

Thanks to Brayton Williams, Eva Beylin, and Justin Blau for their feedback on this post.