Interview│Justin Bons - Cyber Capital│ETHDam III - 2025

Transcript

[Music] Hello, I'm Justin Bonds, the founder of Cyber Capital, which is the oldest liquid token fund in the world today. I've been a full-time cryptocurrency researcher for over 12 years. And I've dedicated myself to this movement and to seek the truth because I think that's what we are supposed to do as researchers. We're supposed to uncover, unravel, expose the scams, and make a better world. And that's what we're to do here today. The key message is freedom. The key message is liberty. The key message is censorship resistance.

The key message is immutability. The key message is financial sovereignty. But we cannot bring any of these benefits to the masses if the system doesn't scale. And if the governance gets a way of scaling the system, you've just killed the dream. So let's think very carefully about what we do next. You said the biggest problem is not scalability, it's the decision not to scale. Yes. Yeah. If governance is the brain of a blockchain, what kind of brain would you say Bitcoin has today? Yeah. The brain of Bitcoin today is the brain of a dictator. The brain of Bitcoin today is the brain of a tyrant.

And that to me is completely antithetical of what cryptocurrency is supposed to be about. It's about the dem democratization of power. It's about the distribution of power to concentrate the power of decision-m for these blockchains all on just a few people all on what are essentially old school politics or real politic to me is completely insane. So, it's it's no wonder that in my eyes, Bitcoin has completely failed as a project when you look at its original goals and we're all watching Ethereum fail before our eyes as they seem to be completely unable to make sensible and competitive decisions in this market. I think this is why

governance is absolutely critical. Not just in order to have a more fair and just system that is actually decentralized, but also have a system that can't be corrupted, that can't be captured by the powers that be. Because it's far too easy. It's far too easy to come along and bribe a bunch of developers and effectively now control the destiny of millions of people. That is insane. You know, this is why we need to take a really good look of ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves the question, who decides? Because in reality, who decides in most blockchains, it's just a few founders or it's just a few VCs or it's just you get 10 of the right people in the same room together behind closed curtains and now

they get to decide and the whole community goes along with it. It's a form of decentralization circus. And the only way the way that I see that we can solve this key problem in blockchain is through stakeholder governance because we should be able to not only own the capital but we also should be able to have the decision making that comes along with that capital. That is not a crazy idea. That is how equity works. Right? And since it's impossible for us to set up actually democratic systems within the context of a blockchain, this type of equity based voting, stakeholderbased voting has to be the future of blockchain technology. And I'm not sure how many times we need to watch blockchain fails before that lesson gets

driven home. But I'm here telling you today that is absolutely critical for the decentralization, for the security, for the reliability and for the path of the entire crypto ecosystem that we implement systems of onchain governance today because this is the future and I have absolutely no doubt about where we're going for new developers building on L1, right? Um, you warn ignore regulations when building, but be careful where you sit. So, what advice would you give to a 19-year-old building the next A1 chain from her bedroom?

Yeah, that's a tough one. Um, yeah, I will say like go you go go go supporting and and building what you believe in, but you know, don't do it out of a jurisdiction where they might put you in jail. Like we're in a situation right now where we have many of our heroes that have spent time in jail or in jail right now just for writing code. So, I would seriously consider and I don't want to stifle innovation here, which is something I'm worried about, but like the fact that we have so many of our heroes in in jail right now just for writing code. Yeah. I mean, we have to put this warning out there uh to to to not let governments push us around in this way. And, you know, also remind the governments that what we're trying to do

here is we're doing it for the public good, right? We we want to protect people. Decentralization is a form of protection where we don't need the type of draconian regulations that we might need with uh legacy systems. This is why decentralization is so important. This is why cryptocurrency is so important. It's only a matter of time before regulators will really start to realize this and appreciate this. In the meantime, however, please do be cautious. Um I I would hate to see more people go to jail when they could have just built it in a more friendly jurisdiction.