Why crypto needs to drop the tribalism

Adeniyi Abiodun is co-founder and chief product officer at Mysten Labs, the company behind the Sui blockchain. He previously held senior roles at Meta, VMware and Oracle.

The world of crypto is under massive pressure again. Recently, Bitcoin dropped below $100,000, altcoins took a beating, and more than $1 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out in hours. 

And still, when you open X, what do you see? Serious conversations about trust and risk, user protections, and utility? Or protocol teams subtweeting each other, traders cheering on liquidations, and threads about which chain “deserves” to get wiped out? 

This is, unfortunately, the crypto playbook of our times. It's a pattern that's plagued the industry since its earliest days, and one that threatens to undermine the technology's potential just as it reaches a critical inflection point. With institutional adoption on the horizon and regulatory frameworks finally taking shape, the industry's tendency toward tribalism and infighting isn't just counterproductive — it's existential. The question isn't whether crypto can survive external threats, but whether it can survive itself.

Crypto’s default move is infighting and backbiting. We don’t even question it at this point. So, under threat of another bear market and yet another political turn that could swing against the industry, people's savings and careers are at stake. In this context I have a simple question: Can we get out of our own way for one market cycle?

The answer starts with recognizing what we're actually fighting for. We need to rethink these shared assumptions. We either succeed or all fail together. A rising tide floats all ships. We should be united in trying to raise the waters, not sink each other’s boats. 

But unity requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth. We act like every platform and protocol is an isolated silo, independent of one another. But our industry is tiny and our enemies are vast. We compete against governments and global banks. We also come up against FAANG companies like Meta, where I spent years working on major changes for crypto before Sui. These businesses turn to reliable systems, which are centralized systems that keep developers and data inside their walls. Coming from the outside into crypto, I know the mindset shift we’re up against. 

So given that larger external battle, shouldn’t we be better? I believe in rivalries. Competition forces teams to ship faster and ultimately serve users better. But there’s a difference between competition and combat. Conflict with outside forces is unavoidable. Combat with each other is a choice, and it's a choice we keep making.

Those early divisive wars between the maxis and everyone else set the tone. The prevailing idea is that there is always a “right” side and a “wrong” side, and you simply must pledge allegiance to one or the other. Skipping past the “winners” like Binance over FTX, tribalism persists. We'll likely always see lawsuits between players erupt, as with Asher vs. 0xbow and Tether vs. Swan currently. We’ll also likely see an uptick of these instances under added fiscal pressures. 

None of that makes the system safer or the technology more robust. It just gives outsiders more reasons to write off the entire space. 

Yet there's a counterpoint to all this dysfunction. It doesn’t have to be like this. One of the things that inherently drew me away from centralized platforms and into a permissionless environment like Sui was the quality and passion of people across this industry. At conferences, you see founders and engineers from competing Layer 1s comparing notes and grabbing coffee. We are competitors. We are also colleagues, fighting against the same headwinds of unclear regulation, powerful incumbents, and a public that struggles to understand us. 

That’s the mindset we need more of in public, not just in the hallway between panels. We’re not only growing crypto, we’re rewiring the DNA of the entire internet. We’re creating a frictionless, coordination layer that changes the very notion of technology, which makes our internal conflict all the more absurd. To succeed, we need to remove the friction points among ourselves. 

We need to stop talking only to ourselves. The jargon that makes us feel clever often is a barrier against others joining. If we want to shift forward and have people trust us with their savings, their identities, and their time, we have to sound more like adults and less like we’re farming engagement.

The next phase of this industry won’t be decided by which tribe wins the most arguments on X. It will be decided by whether we can agree on some basic guardrails: real transparency around solvency and risk and an expectation that, when something breaks, user protection comes before victory laps.

We’ll keep competing. And of course, some chains, products and companies will fail. That’s how markets work. But if we act as if the goal is to win rather than grow, we’re only slowing the adoption we all claim to care about.

So to all the captains of our industry: Right now, the tide is going out. Again. So let’s stop firing inward. When we fight ourselves, nobody wins — least of all the people we’re here to serve.