@Alther 4 October 2025 more from that month

The Digital Swamp and the Crypto Leeches In the world of crypto, not everything that glitters is gold; there may be some that breathe with innocence and some that don't. Some build and some bleed. The crypto-economy is a digital swamp: with liquidity flowing, warming under the speculations, and surrounded by entities regarded as helpers that softly suck on the belief's veins. First are the leeches, almost like entities bringing about some revolution but mere illusion. Fancy teams with great-looking roadmaps abound, on the mouthpiece of "decentralization," while in the back rests a wallet waiting to empty its contents into itself at the expense of the investor. They vanish like the leeches that they are after the candle becomes brighter and the funds start coming in, leaving only the ghost tokens behind in the wallets of the hopeful. There are other leeches feeding in and out of market rhythm with the pump-and-dump tune. They create noise, carry out their obnoxious schemes, and vanish before silence descends. With every pump, it's a feast; with every dump, a hangover, paid for by those who were late. The glamoth influencers fit right in—the ones who sell belief for a fee. They are not traders but dream sellers, whispering about "the future of finance" while packing their bags. But the veins of some bloodsuckers are born evil. They hide in the blood of the blockchain-the mechanical ones, bots and MEV extractors-which live off very little. They bite on every deal, scraping out a small fraction of profit, not thieves and yet not saints as well. The old financial system has already started producing fresh lying leeches-the regulators and institutions that enter the swamp pretending to protect investors while having their eyes on the digital bloodstream for themselves. There are also leeches that are not bad. Leesches heal in nature-they purify blood, bring back to balance. In this way, some leeches in crypto keep the liquidity flow, so as not to stagnate-they are all essential for the healthy ecosystem of friction between a creation and its consumption; crypto certainly is no different. A digital swamp, ultimately, is not a place for the naive; it belongs to that class which learns to swim through murky waters while feeling out the soft, slow bite on their skin. Because in crypto, not every bite is fatal, but always worse is the one with which you don't feel it until you've already been drained.