Aevo Co-founder: I Wasted 8 Years in the Crypto Industry

Written by: Ken Chan, Co-founder of Aevo

Translated by: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Editor’s Note: This weekend, an article by Ken Chan (@kenchangh), co-founder and CTO of Aevo, went viral overseas. The article is titled “I Wasted 8 Years of My Life in Crypto.”

Ken Chan takes a highly negative stance in the article. He believes the industry has lost its idealism and has instead become the largest and most widely participated super casino in human history. He feels disgusted by his own contributions to this casino. Although we do not agree with Ken Chan’s views, and many industry professionals have voiced rebuttals after the article went viral, objectively speaking, his statements do reveal deep issues currently facing the industry, such as a crisis of faith and collapsing values.

Below is the original content by Ken Chan, translated by Odaily Planet Daily.

The Initial Motivation

When I was a teenager, I was already politically driven. Of all the books that radicalized me, the most influential were actually works by Ayn Rand (such as The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged). In 2016, I was still a starry-eyed libertarian and even donated to Gary Johnson. In addition to being a staunch Randian, I also loved computer programming, so cryptocurrency was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk spirit attracted me. The idea of Bitcoin as a private bank for personal wealth fascinated me—being able to store a billion dollars in your mind and cross borders has always been an incredibly powerful concept to me.

However, as time went on, I felt I lost my original purpose in the crypto industry. After going full-time in this space, the alluring initial calls about the transformative power of crypto gradually faded. I became disillusioned with the target users and who we were really serving. I completely misunderstood who the real users of crypto were and mistook hype for reality. Crypto claimed to decentralize the financial system, and I fully bought into it, but in reality, it’s just a super system for speculation and gambling—a mirror of the real-world economy.

Reality hit me like a truck. I wasn’t building a new financial system at all; I was building a casino—a casino that doesn’t call itself a casino, but it’s the largest, always-on, massively participated casino ever created by our generation. Part of me wishes I could at least be proud of spending my entire twenties building this casino, but another part of me feels like I completely wasted my youth. I wasted my life on this—but at least I made quite a bit of money.

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say

Crypto is a confusing thing. On one hand, you’ll hear evangelists say they want to completely replace the existing financial system with on-chain systems. I can totally imagine that world—your bank account holds only USDC or Bitcoin, and you can wire a billion dollars to anyone in the world in seconds. That vision is still powerful, and I still believe in it.

But incentives have completely distorted the direction of reality. In practice, all market participants are happy to throw money in to fund the next so-called “Layer 1” (Aptos, Sui, Sei, ICP, etc.). The only winner in the Layer 1 war of 2020 was Solana, which sparked a powerful speculative drive to chase the fourth spot (after Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana ??), supporting hundreds of billions in market cap.

But has this really pushed us toward the ideal new financial system? Despite 5,000-word essays from VCs trying to convince you otherwise, the answer is no. This didn’t create a new system; it actually burned everyone’s funds (retail or VC alike), making everyone in the new system poorer.

I’m not just picking on Layer 1s. I could give countless similar examples: spot DEXs, perpetual DEXs, prediction markets, meme platforms, and so on. The crazy competition in these areas does not actually bring about a better financial system. Contrary to what VCs say, we don’t need to build casinos on Mars.

The Gambling-ization of Economic Models

If I said I joined the crypto industry with zero financial motivation, I’d be lying. As a reader, you might think I’m being hypocritical for deciding to leave after making enough money. Yes, maybe I am hypocritical, but maybe I’m just disgusted at my own contribution to this financialized and gambling-driven mire.

Normalizing zero-sum behavior like “let’s all make a quick buck off each other” is not a way to create long-term wealth. It looks like it is, but it’s not. Eight years in crypto have completely destroyed my ability to recognize sustainable business models. Here, you don’t need a successful business or product to make money. The industry is full of high-market-cap tokens with zero users—this completely defies how the real world works. If you want to bring value to customers, not just gambling + entertainment (which is what casinos do), these zero-sum business models simply don’t work.

Conclusion

I used to think “financial nihilism” was a cute and harmless concept. I thought it didn’t matter if we kept launching zero-sum games for the next generation. I have no doubt Bitcoin will one day reach $1 million, but that has nothing to do with the financial games the industry is creating.

This industry mindset is extremely toxic, and I believe it will lead to the long-term collapse of social mobility for the younger generation. You can already see it happening, and we must have the courage to resist these meaningless games.

CMS Holdings once said: “Are you here to make money? Or to prove you’re right?”

This time, I choose to prove I’m right.