🏜️ When Our Messiah Was Only a Dream

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🪐 How Simple Things Were

“How simple things were when our messiah was only a dream.” — Stilgar, Dune Messiah

Before Paul Atreides rose to power, the Fremen dreamt of a messiah who would free them from imperial rule.

When that dream came true, it changed everything. Hope became power, and power came with consequence.

Crypto’s journey follows a similar arc. We dreamt of freedom from banks and bureaucrats, of open money for the world.

That dream, too, became real. Bitcoin sits in government reserves, and institutions now build atop the very rails we designed to escape them.

The prophecy was fulfilled. But the simplicity of the dream is gone. Now begins the hard road, proving that what we built in rebellion can endure in power.

👑 The Aftermath of Victory

Frank Herbert’s Dune saga explores this very arc of dream versus reality. 

In the story, the Fremen people lived by a prophecy, a promise that one day, a messiah would lead them out of the desert and break the empire's grip.

That vision gave purpose to their struggle. 

Paul Atreides fulfilled the prophecy, toppling the empire and ushering in a new order, but at great cost. The jihad that followed spread across the galaxy, claiming billions of lives in his name.

His reign brought bureaucracy, war, and the slow corrosion of idealism. The Fremen won their freedom only to find themselves bound by new systems of power.

In crypto, our messiah was the idea of a decentralized world, a system where value flows freely, beyond borders and banks.

The “empire” of legacy finance saw the power of our messiah and, rather than being destroyed outright, adapted. We live in the aftermath of victory: freer than before, yet tethered to the very systems we sought to escape.

And like Dune’s saga, our story unfolds in three eras:

1. The Age of Dreams, when rebellion burned bright.

2. The Arrival of the Messiah, when the world finally adopted our vision.

3. And the Post-Messiah Era, where ideals give way to responsibility.

🌌 The Age of Dreams

The early years of crypto were defined by hope, rebellion, and clarity of purpose. This was the Age of Dreams.

A time where decentralization and “freedom from institutions” were our rallying cries on the dark corners of the internet.

The industry was tiny, more a movement than an industry actually. In 2013, Bitcoin's market cap hovered around $1-$2B, dismissed as a mere curiosity. No one took it seriously, except those attending ten-person events, mining blocks on secondhand laptops, and arguing about monetary policy in IRC chats.

Moments now lost in time, like tears in the rain.

We genuinely believed in a financial Lisan al-Gaib: the vision of a decentralized world that would liberate us from legacy banking.

Every transaction, every small victory, felt like part of a prophecy unfolding, a proof of concept for freedom.

In Dune, this was Arrakis before the empire fell. Up until when Paul Atreides wandered the desert, guided by only whispers of a prophecy.

The Fremen believed, even if they had never seen their savior.

The Age of Dreams was chaotic and naïve, but it gave crypto its soul, and set the stage for everything to come.

🪱 The Arrival of the Messiah

Then, the Messiah arrived. The prophecy came true, but not exactly as expected.

Bitcoin proved that value could exist outside the banking system. Ethereum built a new economy from lines of code. Stablecoins brought dollar liquidity to the edges of the internet.

One by one, the tools of dissent became infrastructure, and the empire took notice.

At first, they struck back, tightening regulation, dismissing crypto as speculation, and warning investors to stay away. But as the technology proved resilient, they gave in and began adopting it themselves.

Our Lisan al-Gaib, the idea of a decentralized world, came to life.

You can see this new order in three signs:

1. Institutional Adoption: TradFi yearns for crypto. At least 188 publicly traded companies have adopted Bitcoin as part of their treasury strategy, collectively holding over 1M BTC ($126B). Ten nations hold Bitcoin in their reserves, combining for 2.5% of BTCs total supply. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have become global liquidity engines, pulling in billions in daily flows.

2. Stablecoins as Money: Arguably the clearest sign of crypto’s reign is the rise of stablecoins as a global currency layer. They now form a $304B asset class, processing $27.6T in 2024, more than Visa and Mastercard. Combined. Everyone and their mother now wants their own stablecoin.

3. Finance Running Onchain: The fundamentals of finance are migrating onchain. The owner of the NYSE just invested $2B in Polymarket to integrate its tech. SWIFT is building a blockchain based ledger into its infrastructure stack. The CME is preparing 24/7 crypto futures and options. And these are just headlines from the last two weeks.

And inevitably, some original believers doubt this new reality. They whisper that the messiah is false, that crypto has “sold out” or failed to topple the powers that be. 

However, the truth is much simpler: the dream evolved. 

We still won the war. But at what cost?

🪞 The Post-Messiah Era

Paul Muad’Dib’s victory came with its own chains. He fulfilled the prophecy, but in doing so, also inherited its weight: death, suffering, and the burden of governance.

The arrival of our crypto messiah represents responsibility, compromise, and the sobering work of reality. 

We once prayed for mainstream adoption, and now we have it. That means the burden, and the opportunities, are ours.

• Financial inclusion remains unfinished, roughly 1.3B adults globally remain unbanked, cut off from even basic digital finance.

• Centralization still dominates payment rails, the SWIFT network alone moves $5T per day, dwarfing on-chain settlement volumes.

• True autonomy remains a distant goal, only 6–7% of the global population has ever used crypto.

And nowhere is this more true than in the frontier markets that gave Frontera its name. Across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, the stakes are highest and the need most acute. 

It’s in these places that crypto’s promise must be delivered first. The frontier is where underbanked populations, currency instability, and broken payment systems intersect, exactly the problems crypto was meant to solve. 

Our post-messiah mandate is to turn early adoption in these regions into lasting change: banking the unbanked in Mexico’s villages, providing safe dollars to Turkish savers, enabling instant remittances for Nigerian families, and giving everyone a shot at true financial autonomy.

The simple days of the dream have passed, but we should welcome the complexity of reality. It means our movement mattered. The decentralized future we envisioned is here, and it’s ours to shape.

🏜️ We Will Rule

The good news is, we were born for this. Crypto natives are the Fremen of this new world: resourceful, relentless, and molded by scarcity.

We learned to build from nothing, to ship with no funding, to do magic with limited tools and infinite conviction.

Against all odds, the desert made us strong. And like the Fremen, we will rule.

Now, the true work begins.

May thy knife chip and shatter.