You Can Turn Anything Into a Meme — But Cherish the Cathedral
You Can Turn Anything Into a Meme — But Cherish the Cathedral
Not long ago, I read Jocy’s open letter to Chinese Crypto OGs. In it, she quotes a line attributed to Warren Buffett: “For the next 100 years, make sure the cathedral isn’t swallowed by the casino.” Jocy uses that metaphor to describe a tension everyone in crypto can feel:
- The cathedral: built patiently with code, cryptography, and ideals—open networks, credible neutrality, censorship resistance, self-custody, and composable public infrastructure.
- The casino: loud, liquid, memetic—attention trading, leverage, “hot” narratives, and the endless search for the next pump.
Crypto has always been both. The problem is not that the casino exists; it’s that the casino has become so efficient at monetizing attention that it can devour whatever the cathedral builds—sometimes without consent, sometimes at the expense of security, and often at the expense of the builders who keep the lights on.
January 2026 gave us a perfect (and uncomfortable) example.
The cathedral is not a vibe. It’s a supply chain.
When people say “we’re here to build,” it can sound like a slogan. But the cathedral is tangible. It looks like:
- Open-source client software and libraries
- Audited smart contracts and secure cryptographic primitives
- Validator infrastructure, rollups, bridges, and data availability layers
- Wallet standards, signing UX, hardware isolation, and key management
- Research, education, documentation, and community governance
It’s also fragile. Crypto’s cathedral is a global software supply chain that secures real value—often with adversaries actively probing every seam. And the 2025–2026 cycle has made that fragility more visible: scams scale with attention, and attention increasingly flows to meme-friendly stories.
If you want a data-driven snapshot of how sentiment and activity swung, CoinGecko’s 2025 Q1 Crypto Industry Report captures the mood shift from late-2024 exuberance to early-2025 drawdown, and how “meme coin frenzy” can surge—and then unwind—at industrial speed.
The casino isn’t “retail.” It’s an incentive machine.
It’s tempting to frame the casino as “newcomers gambling.” That’s outdated. The modern casino is a high-performance incentive machine:
- Launchpads and instant-liquidity token creation reduce “time to market” to minutes.
- Social platforms compress narrative formation into hours.
- Copy-trading and bots compress “learning” into blind mirroring.
- Meme liquidity turns culture into a financial derivative.
And the meme layer isn’t disappearing. Even when performance cools, mindshare can remain massive. CoinGecko’s year-end analysis, Major Crypto Narratives Record -77% to +186% Returns in 2025, shows a pattern many users lived through: hype can dominate attention while underperforming in returns.
This matters because the casino doesn’t only extract money—it extracts developer time, user trust, and security budget.
When everything becomes a meme: the Peter Steinberger incident
Just days after Jocy’s letter circulated, developer Peter Steinberger—known for an open-source AI agent that went viral—found himself dealing with a very crypto-native form of “success”: scammers and opportunists attempting to turn the project’s name into a tradable token narrative.
A report on the rebrand and the surrounding chaos noted that Steinberger faced harassment from crypto fans and even a temporary takeover incident during account transitions, as scammers tried to exploit the confusion around names and handles (Business Insider coverage).
This is the casino’s most distilled logic:
- Something becomes culturally salient.
- Someone mints a token “about it.”
- Liquidity appears faster than legitimacy.
- Confusion becomes a feature, not a bug.
- The builder inherits the mess: impersonation, phishing, reputation risk, community fragmentation.
None of that builds the cathedral. But it feeds on cathedral-adjacent signals: open-source credibility, developer authenticity, and public attention.
The uncomfortable truth is: crypto can meme anything faster than it can secure anything.
The real cost: security and trust decay
If you build in crypto long enough, you see a pattern:
- Speculation spikes → phishing spikes
- Narrative churn rises → fake accounts rise
- “Just launched” tokens proliferate → approval scams proliferate
- New users arrive through memes → new users lose funds through social engineering
Chainalysis’ 2026 Crypto Crime Report (Scams) describes how scam inflows and impersonation tactics accelerated in 2025, with fraudsters adapting quickly and increasingly blending techniques. This isn’t abstract. It changes how users behave:
- Users become suspicious of legitimate projects.
- Builders spend more time fighting impersonators than shipping code.
- The industry normalizes “assume it’s a scam,” which is corrosive to adoption.
A cathedral can’t scale on paranoia alone.
How to cherish the cathedral (without pretending the casino won’t exist)
Cherishing the cathedral doesn’t mean banning memes. It means building boundaries so the casino can’t cannibalize the infrastructure layer.
1) Treat open source like critical infrastructure, not free labor
Open source is the cathedral’s rebar. If we want it to survive attention cycles, we need standards, funding, and security hygiene—not just applause.
Two practical frameworks worth knowing:
- The Open Source Security Foundation’s Open Source Project Security Baseline (a maturity-based set of security requirements for projects)
- NIST’s Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) (widely referenced guidance for reducing vulnerability risk across the software lifecycle)
Even if you’re “just” a token team, your code runs a balance sheet. Act like it.
2) Make “legitimacy signals” expensive to fake
Projects should assume they’ll be impersonated and plan accordingly:
- Publish canonical links (site, docs, social accounts) in multiple places
- Use signed announcements (PGP, on-chain messages, or verifiable credentials)
- Pin contract addresses and verify them consistently
- Build “anti-confusion” UX: warnings, allowlists, clear migration paths
If your identity layer is weak, the casino will borrow your name.
3) Users: adopt a security posture that matches 2026 reality
This is the part most people skip until it’s too late. A simple posture shift prevents most catastrophic losses:
- Separate wallets by intent: one for long-term holdings, one for DeFi/memes, one for testing.
- Verify before you sign: the moment you feel rushed is the moment you’re being manipulated.
- Assume screenshots can lie: rely on official sources, not forwarded posts.
- Re-check addresses every time, especially after “rebrands” and handle changes.
- Reduce approval blast radius: don’t leave unlimited token allowances lying around after you’re done.
A hardware wallet fits naturally into this posture. With a device like OneKey, your private keys stay isolated from your daily computer and browser environment, which helps reduce the damage from phishing pages, malicious extensions, and “just sign this” social engineering. Self-custody is part of the cathedral—because without it, users don’t own anything they can actually defend.
A healthier bargain: memes can onboard, but they shouldn’t dictate the rules
Memes are not the enemy. They can be an onboarding ramp, a coordination tool, even a cultural glue. The enemy is when we collectively accept that:
- attention is the only metric that matters,
- builders must tolerate being tokenized without consent,
- and users should “learn by losing money.”
A cathedral that survives 100 years needs a different bargain:
- Speculation must pay rent to security, not sabotage it.
- Builders must be protected by norms and tooling, not sacrificed to virality.
- Users must be educated toward self-custody and verification, not trained into reflexive clicking.
You can turn anything into a meme. Crypto will keep proving that.
But if we want crypto to be more than a casino with better APIs, we have to cherish the cathedral—patiently, deliberately, and starting with the unglamorous work: security, standards, open-source stewardship, and safer self-custody.
