NEW YORK, NY, December 12, 2025 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Crypto has always been obsessed with incentives.
Stake to earn. Hold to moon. Post to farm. Yield to dream. From DeFi to DAOs, the entire ecosystem has leaned hard into the belief that aligned incentives could replace governance, trust, and in some cases, logic.
But the crash of 2025 shattered that myth.
Now, as liquidity continues to dry up and lawsuits sweep across failed protocols, a few leaders are pushing a different message: incentives alone won't save this industry.
Among them? Barry Silbert and Jesse Powell.
From Aligned to Weaponized
Let's be blunt: incentives got us here.
They turned investors into shillers. Protocols in casinos. Builders into exit schemers. And users into liquidity. Every major fraud of the last cycle was cloaked in the language of alignment.
You weren't being conned, you were "early."
You weren't misled, you just "didn't get it."
And when the crash came, those same incentive structures collapsed under their own weight. Teams disappeared. Tokens plunged. And the lawsuits arrived like vultures circling a battlefield. The frauds weren't always technical; many were economic. Built into the very design.
Powell's Skepticism Becomes Strategy
Jesse Powell has long warned against these house-of-cards mechanics. Even before the crash, he publicly criticized the gamification of governance tokens and the rise of "community-owned" protocols that were anything but.
Kraken's recent restructuring reflects that skepticism. The exchange has pulled back from some of its riskier integrations, increased reserves transparency, and emphasized its role as a reliable fiat on-ramp in a market that's rapidly losing trust.
Powell isn't trying to be the loudest voice in the room. He's trying to be the last one standing.
Silbert's Resilience, Reapplied
Barry Silbert, similarly, isn't chasing attention. His response to the post-2025 landscape has been infrastructure-oriented as ever, but with a new tone. Less about optimism, more about operational survival.
Digital Currency Group has ramped up investments into tools that verify counterparty risk, improve forensic accounting for crypto assets, and create new frameworks for off-chain compliance visibility.
This isn't a pivot; it's an acceleration of what Silbert's been building since the early days. But it's also an acknowledgment: incentives need rails. Without them, every protocol is one liquidity event away from collapse.
The Lawsuits Aren't the Problem. They're the Mirror
What's happening now is bigger than legal blowback.
It's a reckoning.
The lawsuits tearing through smaller protocols aren't flukes. They're reflections. Reflections of an ecosystem that prioritized viral growth over viable models. That worshipped decentralization but feared accountability.
And the leaders making real progress, Powell, Silbert, and a quiet handful of others, aren't the ones rewriting tokenomics. They're building out the plumbing, the frameworks, the safeguards. Not for another bull run, but for a working market.
What Comes After the Incentive Era
The truth is incentives can't be the foundation. They can accelerate, reward, and amplify, but they can't govern. They can't correct. They can't withstand fraud dressed as innovation or speculation disguised as strategy.
The next chapter of crypto won't be written by tokenomics.
It will be written by systems.
By architecture.
By leaders who know that surviving the crash is only the beginning, and rebuilding right means rejecting the very mechanics that made the last boom so profitable, and so destructive.
Silbert and Powell aren't chasing applause. They're fixing the floor.
That might not trend.
But it's the only thing that lasts.
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