According to Jesse Walden, managing partner of Variant Fund, the initial "cypherpunk" principles that drove the development of the first smart contract platforms will probably disappear over the course of the next ten years as institutional use pushes them to become faster and more compliant. 

In a blog post published on September 30, Walden detailed how the initial ten years of blockchain development were motivated by the cypherpunk principles of Bitcoin, which included resistance to censorship, open source, permissionlessness, and the idea of creating a democratic and equitable internet atop a global shared computer.

The virtues of performance, cost, profitability, and legal compliance now outweigh the loftier goals of the past in smart contract systems.

Walden claims that many of the most popular use cases for smart contract platforms, including tokenization of real-world assets (RWA), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), and stablecoins, no longer require decentralized and permissionless use cases. 

Rather, all they have to do to achieve openness, interoperability, and settlement is leverage the decentralization of the underlying blockchain.

Concerns over government surveillance, censorship, and restrictions on free speech on the internet—a then-emerging technology—led to the birth of the cypherpunk movement in the 1980s. 

Because of the uncensorable and permissionless nature of the Bitcoin network, some people view Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto as a cypherpunk or, at the very least, firmly associated with the cypherpunk movement.

Although cypherpunk blockchains are not going away, according to Walden, this is most likely the end of the beginning.

In the end, Walden claims that cryptocurrency is becoming more and more commercial, explaining that this entails certain inescapable concessions, such as compromising a little on rigorous decentralization to get users' hands on cryptocurrency wallets and apps more quickly.