In June 2025, a group of technological idealists raised an untimely but deafening cry at the 'Funding the Commons' event in Berlin. They pointed directly at the current meme market valued at over $65 billion, labeling it a 'breeding ground for fraud', and called for blockchain technology to return to its original intention of 'serving social welfare'.
This public 'rebellion' occurring in the belly of the industry is not only a critique of a popular track but also unveils a profound 'route dispute' that concerns the soul of the industry: Is the ultimate narrative of blockchain leading to a decentralized fair society, or is it destined to become an ever-open digital casino?
Berlin's 'dissenters': When 'public interest' confronts the 'speculation frenzy'
Among the numerous events during Berlin Blockchain Week, 'Funding the Commons' has always been a unique presence. It feels more like an academic seminar than an industry summit filled with business cooperation and project roadshows. Those gathered here are often builders and thinkers who care more about protocol sustainability, network externalities, and how to fund 'digital public goods'.
This year, the atmosphere here feels particularly sharp.
According to Dlews, a group of technicians, builders, and artists launched a fierce critique of the current mainstream trends in the industry during this event. Joshua Dávila, who describes himself as a 'socialist maximalist', is a representative figure among them. He and his companions have their sights set on meme coins—the 'star track' that attracted massive funds and attention between 2024 and 2025.
Their argument is direct and brutal: According to their statistics, on the meme coin issuance platform Pump.fun, which is on fire on the Solana chain, as high as 98% of token projects ultimately proved to be fraudulent 'rug pull' scams. With a market value exceeding $65 billion, it is built on a game where speculators 'pass the parcel' while project parties are always ready to run away. In their view, this is not only a huge waste of resources but also a betrayal of the potential of blockchain technology.
'We have a powerful tool that could be used to reshape cooperatives, provide humanitarian aid to sanctioned areas, or even redistribute wealth,' cried Davila and others, 'but we are using it to create and hype up worthless 'Dogecoin' and 'Frogcoin'.'
The vision proposed by this group of 'dissenters' is 'another path' for blockchain technology:
Support Digital Cooperatives: Use the framework of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to establish economic entities that are collectively owned and governed by members, freeing them from the exploitative structure of traditional companies.
Empower Humanitarian Aid: Through transparent and censorship-resistant on-chain transactions, deliver aid supplies and funds directly to those in greatest need, bypassing corrupt or inefficient middlemen.
Achieve Wealth Redistribution: Explore innovative mechanisms such as Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Quadratic Funding to ensure that the value generated by network development is more fairly returned to all participants, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few whales and early investors.
This series of politically economic demands with a strong leftist color forms a stark and awkward opposition to the liberal and even anarcho-capitalist currents pervading the crypto world.
2. The Opposition of Routes: The Inescapable 'Original Sin' and Mainstream Narrative of the Industry
The reason why the voices from Berlin seem 'lonely' is that they challenge a certain 'original sin' upon which the industry relies for survival and development—speculation.
From the very beginning of Bitcoin's birth, its disruptive technological narrative has been closely linked to the speculative story of 'getting rich overnight'. Speculation brought the first batch of users, the first funding, and also attracted media attention and subsequent larger-scale adoption. To some extent, speculation is the fuel for the cold start of the blockchain industry, the most effective means of attracting public attention.
Meme coins are the ultimate embodiment of this speculation culture. They strip away all complex technical concepts and grand application visions, simplifying them into the purest cultural symbols, community consensus, and wealth effects. For the mainstream world, understanding Ethereum's vision of a 'world computer' is difficult, but grasping a 'Pepe Frog' that has increased 100 times in value is much simpler.
This simple and brutal logic has brought tangible benefits to the industry:
User and traffic entry points: The rise of public chains like Solana owes much to their low transaction costs and efficient processing capabilities, making them a paradise for meme coin speculation, thus quickly gaining a large user base and ecological activity.
Capital catalysts: The astonishing returns of meme coins have attracted a substantial inflow of hot money, which circulates within the ecosystem, some of which spills over into more 'constructive' areas such as DeFi and infrastructure.
Network stress testing: The surge in traffic caused by meme coin trading is the harshest practical test of public chain performance, exposing many technical bottlenecks, thus forcing protocols to optimize and iterate.
At the same time, the mainstream voices in the industry are at odds with Berlin's 'public interest faction'. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase and one of the industry leaders, has publicly criticized the socialist ideology, claiming it 'will harm those it claims to protect'. Moreover, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, left behind writings filled with distrust towards centralized financial institutions, with roots in the liberalism of the Cypherpunk movement. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, has profound thoughts on 'public goods' and 'social collaboration', proposing significant ideas such as quadratic funding, but his political spectrum cannot simply be summarized as 'socialism'.
In this broader context, the call to 'serve the public interest' sounds more like an unrealistic utopian fantasy. In a world where 'Code is Law' and the core driving force is the pursuit of personal wealth maximization, asking participants to give up speculation is no different from asking gamblers in a casino to give up gambling.
3. Reconciliation or division? Can the speculation engine fuel public interest ideals?
So, are speculation and public interest destined to be two parallel lines that never intersect? Is the outcome of this 'route dispute' bound to be the victory of one side and the demise of the other?
Upon deeper reflection, the situation may be more complex. There may be an uncomfortable relationship characterized by both contradiction and symbiosis between speculation and public interest.
The value generated by speculative activities can passively fund public facilities. Taking Ethereum as an example, whether through DeFi lending or meme coin trading, every on-chain activity requires paying gas fees. These fees constitute the income for validators and maintain the network's security. A secure and decentralized network is fundamental for all applications (whether speculative or public-interest oriented) to operate. From this perspective, the frenzied trading of meme coins objectively 'paid the bill' for the network security supporting Gitcoin (a well-known blockchain public fundraising platform).
Furthermore, the core of the issue may not be 'speculation', but rather 'fraud'. The high fraud rate of up to 98% criticized by Berlin's 'dissenters' at Pump.fun reveals the main contradiction in the current market: it is not that people should not participate in high-risk investments, but that the market lacks the most basic rules and protections, allowing wrongdoers to 'hunt' at extremely low costs.
The focus of the struggle should perhaps shift from 'anti-speculation' to 'anti-fraud'—how to establish better credibility mechanisms, decentralized identity systems (DID), smart contract auditing tools, and community governance models to drive blatant scams out of the market.
Finally, some projects are attempting to combine the two. Some emerging meme coin projects have begun introducing 'charity wallet' mechanisms, automatically donating a portion of transaction taxes to specific organizations. Although this is largely still a marketing gimmick, it also reflects the market's self-evolution, beginning to seek legitimacy beyond pure speculation.
A further exploration is whether it is possible to design a mechanism that systematically captures the externalities of speculative behavior and uses them to fund public goods, thus forming a virtuous cycle of 'speculation → tax → public interest'.
Conclusion: Soul-Searching at the Crossroads
The debate at Berlin Blockchain Week is not an isolated event. It marks that after experiencing multiple cycles of bull and bear markets and brutal growth, the blockchain industry is being forced into a stage of 'self-reflection' and maturity.
When the 'possibilities' of technology have been fully explored, the question of 'should' emerges. What kind of on-chain world should we build? What are the core values of this world?
The frenzy of meme coins and the ideals of 'Funding the Commons' constitute two starkly different signposts at this crossroads. One leads to extreme capital efficiency, cultural celebration, and individualistic wealth adventures; the other points toward grand social collaboration, fair distribution, and collectivist utopian experiments.
This route dispute will not have a clear winner in the short term. More likely, the industry will continue to move forward amidst this sense of tearing apart. The casino will remain open, as human greed is hard to change; meanwhile, idealistic builders will continue to construct the fairer digital future in the rolling and pushing of the boulder, like Sisyphus.
Ultimately, which path will define the legacy of blockchain depends not only on the technology itself but also on each one of us involved, what we choose to believe in, and what we build for.
This article represents only the author's personal views and does not reflect the positions or views of this platform. This article is for information sharing only and does not constitute any investment advice to anyone.
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