PANews reported on February 5th that Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute, pointed out multiple predicaments facing the current crypto industry. He believes the public chain debate ("Solana vs Ethereum vs [other chain]") is meaningless because no breakthrough applications have yet emerged on any chain. Stablecoins are merely a very niche "victory," but from a macro perspective, nothing has changed; their essence remains the replacement of one centralized intermediary with another. The scalability of blockchain applications is generally questionable, especially perpetual exchanges, which struggle to achieve traditional financial-grade scale. Their fundamental bottleneck lies in risk engine design rather than simply throughput.

He further criticized the distorted values ​​within the industry: Bitcoin's original vision has been obscured by price narratives, and the cyberpunk trend of "institutional entry" has overwhelmed the cypherpunk spirit. Only a very few opinion leaders, such as Vitalik, are still focusing on the essential issues. The token economic model is almost ineffective, and mechanisms such as buybacks, lock-ups, and airdrops are all in trouble, requiring a restart experiment from the underlying logic. Despite pointing out many drawbacks, Gaevoy remains cautiously optimistic about the industry's long-term development, believing that the current market has moved beyond the blind frenzy of the "Trump-driven rally," speculators will gradually exit, and true believers may usher in a healthier environment.