It’s Time to Kill God Mode

Seven years ago at ETH Denver 2019, Andreas Antonopoulos said building stoppable code was pointless. That we already have a platform for building it called the cloud and it’s an international surveillance engine where you put your data on other people’s computer so they can rape your privacy everyday and make billions.

And yet today, that’s exactly what some of the most used crypto is doing.

He said the day will come where the enterprise alliance, corporate partners, senior executives, board dudes, consultants, and all of the MBAs, will push us towards stoppable code. And when that day comes, it will require courage to resist it.

That day is here.

For most of history, freedom was something governments could grant or take away. The more they allowed, the more people would prosper. Now it doesn’t have to. Cryptography gives individuals the ability to assert sovereignty. Power that doesn’t rely on permission. Power that rivals even the state.

And that’s exactly why it’s revolutionary because it threatens existing power structures. However, they’re extremely difficult to dislodge. Companies protect control. People protect their jobs. Systems drift toward what is easiest to manage, regulate, and monetize. Stoppable systems fit neatly into that world. Unstoppable ones don’t.

Ethereum is no longer an early-stage experiment. Five years ago, critical smart contract bugs that ended entire applications were common and the UX was unusable for most people. That’s no longer true.

Core primitives like swapping, lending, and trustless stablecoins have gone through multiple iterations over the past eight years. The code is battle-tested and robust. The design is close to its final, more modular, state. UX isn’t perfect, but it’s dramatically better. It’s easy to forget how far it’s come. Making an onchain transaction today versus just a few years ago is night and day. And that progress isn’t just L1. L2s have been live for over 4.5 years, and zkEVMs are moving faster than anyone expected. It’s time to take the training wheels off.

We are not early.

Are decentralized multisigs with external signers and timelocks an improvement over centralized control? Yes. But they are still control. And if there’s control, it will be used, and slowly overtime without us noticing it we will be pushed towards stoppable code.

But we need to have courage. It's time to eliminate God mode. It's time to make the code truly unstoppable. Because with global, unstoppable, neutral financial access, capital formation without permission, escaping jurisdictional constraints, rules that don't change based on who you are. It's going to upset existing power structures, but we will change the world forever.