The birth of Bitcoin in 2008 at the hands of the anonymous entity Satoshi Nakamoto marked a revolutionary milestone in the history of global finance and technology. The whitepaper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" does not simply introduce a new digital currency but also proposes a completely decentralized system architecture, where trust is no longer placed on intermediary institutions but on cryptographic evidence. However, as noted by Tan Phat Digital, after nearly two decades, the world is witnessing clear signs that blockchain is deviating from its original vision. From an ideal of economic freedom and absolute transparency, blockchain is currently facing the trend of centralization of power, excessive commercialization that turns it into a speculative tool, and technical and legal barriers that have not been completely resolved.
The Original Vision and Ideological Divergence in the Digital Age
To understand clearly whether blockchain is going astray or not, it is necessary to carefully examine the ideological foundation on which Satoshi Nakamoto established. The core goal of blockchain is to eliminate the need for trusted third parties in online transactions. According to Nakamoto, dependence on financial intermediaries increases transaction costs and creates vulnerabilities for fraud and privacy invasion.
The Technical and Philosophical Origins of Decentralization
Blockchain is not a completely independent innovation but is the inheritance of the essence of decades of research in cryptography and distributed systems. Concepts like David Chaum's anonymous cryptocurrencies from the 1980s, Barbara Liskov's Byzantine fault tolerance, and Scott Stornetta's time stamping techniques were cleverly synthesized to create Bitcoin. This vision is associated with libertarianism, aiming to minimize government intervention in the economy through self-operating systems based on source code.
In the context of political economy, blockchain is seen as realizing the ideals of the Austrian economic school, especially Friedrich Hayek's view of decentralizing the economy to promote freedom and competition. However, another stream of thought, Ordoliberalism, believes that a legal framework is needed to ensure competition and prevent the formation of new power groups. This contradiction is the source of current debates about whether legal intervention is a barrier or a necessary factor for blockchain to move in the right direction.
The Paradox Between Ideals and Actual Use
Even though it is designed to operate without trust, actual data shows that users tend to seek "centralized trust anchors". Instead of directly interacting with the blockchain, many users — especially those lacking technical knowledge — prefer centralized exchanges (CEXs) like Coinbase or Binance for their convenience and customer support. This creates a paradox that Tan Phat Digital wants to emphasize: blockchain was created to eliminate intermediaries, but it promotes the birth of new intermediary entities with greater power than traditional banks in the digital ecosystem.
Centralization: When Power Returns to a Few
Centralization is currently considered a major threat for the integrity of the blockchain. Although in theory anyone can participate in the network, in reality, control is gradually falling into the hands of a few dominant groups of entities.
Domination of Mining Pools in Proof of Work (PoW)
In the Proof of Work mechanism, decentralization is based on the dispersion of computing power (hash rate) among millions of miners. However, the advantage of scale and the need to share risks have led to the formation of mining pools. When individual miners join the pool, they give up decision-making power over transaction selection in exchange for more stable income. Large mining pools like AntPool and ViaBTC currently control the majority of Bitcoin's hash rate, creating the risk of 51% attacks or transaction censorship.
Here are notable network indicators of centralization:
Nakamoto coefficient (Bitcoin): Only 2 - 3 entities. This leads to the risk of collusion to change the ledger or block specific transactions.
Cost of participating in mining: Requires specialized hardware (ASIC) which is extremely expensive. The result is the elimination of small, powerful individual miners concentrating on industrial-scale mining farms.
Geographical distribution: Currently, mining capacity is concentrated in areas with cheap electricity prices such as the US or Kazakhstan. This makes the network vulnerable to sudden policy changes by host countries.
Risks of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Centralization of Stake
Ethereum's shift to Proof of Stake (The Merge) is expected to increase sustainability, but it also brings new challenges in terms of centralization of stake (stake). In a PoS system, those who hold the most tokens have the greatest power in validating the block. Liquidity staking services like Lido or major exchanges have accumulated huge amounts of Ether, far beyond the ideal level of dispersion.
Research shows that in DeFi protocols like Compound, just 8 wallet addresses control up to 50% of voting rights. This turns Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) into "hidden centralized" entities, where important decisions about system upgrades or interest rate models are decided by a small group of "whales". By 2025, reports from experts show that the cryptocurrency market capitalization has exceeded 4,000 billion USD, but the distribution of power is still a problem that has not been completely solved.
See more: Why was Bitcoin born
Excessive Commercialization and Financial Speculation Fever
Blockchain was initially positioned as a technological infrastructure, but over the years More recently, it has been turned into a purely speculative tool. The focus on the price fluctuations of cryptocurrencies has overshadowed practical application development efforts.
From Core Technology to Financial Instruments
The ICO (2017) and NFT (2021) booms attracted billions of dollars in investment capital, but also brought with them countless shoddy projects and scams (rug-pulls). Venture capital funds (VC) play a dual role: providing capital and experience (treatment effect), but also putting pressure on the project to list tokens soon to optimize profits. This has led to many projects prioritizing "tokenomics" (token economic models) to push prices rather than building long-term use value for the community.
Market Purification and Utility-First Trends
However, periods of market downturn have acted as a natural filter. According to analysis by Tan Phat Digital, when the speculative "foam" layer is blown away, only projects with real use value can exist. Currently, blockchain is witnessing a strong shift to practical applications:
Finance (DeFi): Providing cheap cross-border payment solutions, lending without intermediaries. Typical integration partners include JPMorgan, Societe Generale and PayPal.
Supply chain: Applications for food traceability and anti-counterfeiting. Being put into operation by large retail and agricultural enterprises.
Real assets (RWA): Tokenize assets such as bonds and real estate to increase liquidity. Large financial institutions such as BlackRock, Fidelity and Siemens are leading this trend. In particular, BlackRock has identified tokenization as a key investment theme for the period 2026.
Medical: Secure storage and sharing of medical records through modern medical systems or platforms such as Medicalchain.
Technical Barriers and the Impossible Trinity (Blockchain Trilemma)
Despite its unique character network, blockchain still faces physical limitations in terms of processing speed, bandwidth and storage capacity. Vitalik Buterin's "Impossible Trinity" concept shows that it is difficult for a system to achieve three factors simultaneously: Decentralization, Security and Scalability.
The Trade-off Between Performance and Decentralization
To achieve high transaction speed (Scalability), many networks such as Solana or BNB Smart Chain have chosen to reduce the number of validating nodes or require extremely high hardware configuration. This creates an invisible barrier that means only units with large financial resources can participate in operating the network, leading to infrastructure centralization. However, as of mid-2025, the Solana network has managed to improve with the Nakamoto coefficient remaining near 20, demonstrating industry-leading resistance to validator centralization.
Mathematical studies have demonstrated by counterfactuals that maximizing all three of these properties simultaneously leads to internal contradictions. Therefore, current projects are no longer looking for a perfect solution but focus on "shifting constraints" through Layer 2 solutions such as Rollups or Sharding.
Security Risks in a Transparent Environment
Another paradox of blockchain is that transparency is a loophole for cyber attacks. Although on-chain data is immutable, errors in smart contracts have led to hacks that cost billions of dollars. In addition, the appearance of MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) allows validating entities to rearrange the order of transactions to profit from users, an act that goes against the original absolute fairness.
Dependence on Cloud Infrastructure: The Fatal Weakness of Web3
One of the most shocking discoveries in the period 2024-2025 is the level of dependence of "decentralized" blockchains focus" on centralized cloud infrastructure. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage exposed the fact that Web3 is actually running on the Web2 backbone today.
Case Study: AWS Failure and a True Test of Decentralization
In October 2025, a DNS error in AWS's US-EAST-1 zone caused severe disruption. Below is the actual status of services during the incident:
Bitcoin & Ethereum (Consensus): 100% operational. Thanks to globally distributed nodes, there is no dependence on any single provider.
Layer 2 Base: Complete downtime due to the only sequencer running on AWS going offline.
MetaMask & Coinbase Wallet: Users cannot display balance due to dependency on Infura (RPC service running on AWS).
Solana: Works normally thanks to improved validator diversity after past incidents.
This incident shows that current decentralization only exists at the theoretical layer. As 37% of Ethereum's execution nodes are still on AWS, the systemic risk is enormous and directly contradicts the philosophy of eliminating single points of weakness.
Decentralized Infrastructure Recovery Solution
To solve this problem, a wave of decentralized infrastructure projects (DePIN) is emerging. Networks like Lava Network and Pocket Network aim to build a decentralized RPC layer. Notably, Lava Network now processes more than 2 billion RPC requests per day through a modular data access model, ensuring privacy and resilience when centralized infrastructure fails.
Legal Corridor: From Lack of Clarity to Comprehensive Management
The lack of a clear legal framework has made blockchain the "Wild West". However, 2025 marks a turning point when countries begin to enact foundational laws.
Global Management Trends
The European Union (EU) has taken the lead with the MiCA law. In the United States, the SEC is gradually classifying governance tokens as "investment contracts" under the Howey test. This creates an ideological conflict: on one side absolute freedom and anonymity, on the other side safety and compliance. Experts at Tan Phat Digital believe that legal intervention, although controversial, is a necessary medicine to attract huge capital flows from traditional financial institutions.
Vietnam: Roadmap to Build a Legal Framework for Digital Assets (2025-2026)
Vietnam is currently in the top countries with the highest percentage of people owning crypto assets world (about 17% of the population). The government has taken drastic steps with a clear legal roadmap:
May 2025: Draft regulations on VASP to complete the legal framework for managing virtual asset service providers.
September 2025: Issue Resolution 05/2025/NQ-CP to pilot the crypto asset market (Sandbox) within 5 years year.
January 1, 2026: The Law on Digital Technology Industry (Law 71) officially takes effect, recognizing cryptocurrencies as "digital assets", with legal value in civil transactions.
In addition, a 10-year strategy (2025-2035) on digitized real assets (RWA) is expected will turn RWA into the new infrastructure of Vietnam's capital market, removing the inherent "bottlenecks" of the economy.
The Rise of New Technology: Restoring Vision Through Innovation
To bring blockchain back on track, many new technologies are being developed to resolve core conflicts, especially Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and Decentralization Decentralized Sequencers.
Projects such as Espresso Systems are proposing a "shared sequencer" model that uses a restaking mechanism to ensure security for multiple Layer 2s at the same time. This eliminates the single point of weakness and brings blockchain closer to a true peer-to-peer network model.
The Future of Blockchain: The Intersection of Ideals and Reality
Looking ahead, blockchain will become part of a trio of converging technologies: AI, IoT and Blockchain. In Vietnam, projects such as FPT's akaChain have proven that blockchain can help businesses optimize operating costs and build sustainable competitive advantages through transparency.
Tan Phat Digital believes that the industry is moving towards a "hybrid trust" model (Hybrid Trust). In this model, the blockchain provides an immutable authentication layer below, while centralized entities and legal frameworks provide the protection layer above. This may not be the original pure vision, but it is the most realistic path for blockchain to become the backbone of the global digital economy.
Case Studies: From Theory to Practice
To demonstrate these changes, Tan Phat Digital has compiled the 10 most typical Case Studies during this period. 2025-2026:
Bitcoin: From "P2P Currency" To "Digital Gold": In 2025, Bitcoin reached a record price of over $126,000, affirming its position as a Store of Value asset rather than an everyday means of payment. ETF participation has attracted more than $21 billion in net inflows, but also increased ownership centralization.
Solana: Testing the Infrastructure: During the October 2025 AWS US-EAST-1 incident, Solana maintained 100% uptime without parameter degradation, after significantly improving validator diversity (the only Nakamoto coefficient maintained around 20).
BlackRock & Fidelity: The Rise of RWA: BlackRock officially identifies "Real Asset Tokenization" (RWA) as a key investment theme for 2026. Franklin Templeton and Fidelity's tokenized money market funds have demonstrated the ability to securely bring traditional financial yields on-chain
akaChain (FPT): Blockchain "Make in Vietnam" Success: FPT Group's akaChain solution has been recognized as a national digital platform, helping Vietnamese businesses optimize B2B processes, manage customer loyalty and digital identification on an absolutely secure platform.
Lava Network: RPC Decentralization to the Rescue: Handling more than 2 billion RPC requests per day by mid-2025, Lava Network has solved Web3's fatal weakness of dependence on centralized providers like Infura, ensuring uninterrupted data access.
Medicalchain: Revolutionizing Medical Storage: Applying blockchain to maintain the integrity of electronic health records. Patients have complete control over their data and give access to doctors in a transparent way, minimizing the risk of medical errors.
Espresso Systems: Shared Sequencer For Rollups: This project is pioneering the decentralization of the sequencer for Layer 2 solutions, using a restaking mechanism via EigenLayer to ensure the same security as the Ethereum mainnet but with higher performance.
MakerDAO: Governance Challenges in DAO: Case study of 8 wallet addresses controlling the majority of voting rights at Compound and MakerDAO shows the risk of "hidden centralization", forcing the community to seek fairer voting models such as Quadratic Voting.
Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis): GameFi's Unicorn Heritage: Despite going through periods of upheaval, Axie Infinity is still a symbol of Vietnam's technological capabilities on the world map, creating a premise for the true "Decentralized Game" trend instead of just a P2E speculative model.
Ondo Finance: Bridging Traditional Finance: By tokenizing US Government bonds, Ondo Finance has become the 2025 leader in delivering stable and low-risk yields to DeFi investors through real asset-backed products.
FAQ (FAQ)
What was Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for blockchain?
The core goal was to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) currency system that does not require trust in intermediary institutions, helping to reduce costs and protect privacy.Why does blockchain tend to be centralized despite its original design being decentralized?
Do The advantage of economies of scale leads to the formation of mining pools (PoW) and the trend of users seeking convenience through intermediary entities such as centralized exchanges (CEX).What is the "Impossible Trinity" (Blockchain Trilemma)?
This is the theory that it is difficult for a blockchain network to achieve three factors simultaneously: Decentralization, Security and OpennessWhat is the legal roadmap for digital assets in Vietnam until 2026?
Complete VASP regulations (May 2025), pilot Sandbox (September 2025) and officially apply Law 71 recognizing digital assets (January 1, 2026).Digital Technology Industry Law (Law 71) What are the regulations on cryptocurrencies?
The law officially recognizes cryptocurrencies as "digital assets", with legal value in civil transactions but still prohibits use as a means of payment.What is RWA (Real World Assets) and why is it important in 2026?
RWA is the introduction of real assets (gold, real estate, bonds) blockchain. It helps increase liquidity and is a new infrastructure for the capital market.How does MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) affect users?
MEV allows miners/validators to profit by rearranging the order of transactions (front-running), causing users to have to buy at a higher price or suffer large price slippage.The AWS incident in October 2025 shows this What about the decentralization of Web3?
The incident shows the heavy dependence on centralized cloud infrastructure, as 37% of Ethereum nodes are still running on Amazon servers.What problem does ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) solve in blockchain?
ZKP helps protect privacy and increase scalability (through ZK-rollups) without sacrificing network security network.What is the role of venture capital funds (VC) in the blockchain ecosystem?
VC provides capital and expertise to help projects develop quickly, but also puts pressure on commercialization and early listing of tokens for divestment.What is Vietnam doing to prevent money laundering through digital assets?
The State Bank proposes to report all international transactions on 1,000 USD and build strict AML standards for the VASP organization.What role does Lava Network play in restoring decentralization?
Provides a decentralized RPC layer, helping users connect directly to the blockchain without going through centralized gateways like Infura, which are prone to errors when AWS goes down.Why do users still prefer CEX over decentralized exchanges (DEX)?
Users (especially the non-technical group) need customer support, security in private key management, and easy-to-use interface of CEX.What are the AI and Blockchain integration trends in 2026?
Create a trusted data ecosystem where blockchain authenticates the originality of information created or processed by AI.What potential does Blockchain have in the medical field?
Used for secure medical record storage (like Medicalchain) and pharmaceutical supply chain management to combat counterfeit drugs.
Blockchain is not necessarily going off the rails, but more accurately it is going through a process of collision with reality to mature. Signs of centralization and commercialization are inevitable side effects when a technology enters the mainstreaming phase.
The biggest challenge is not to return to the state of 2008, but to maintain the core values — transparency, immutability and censorship resistance — in a regulated environment. Building a solid technology foundation, accompanied by breakthroughs such as ZKP and decentralized RPC infrastructure, are important "rudders" to put the blockchain ship on the right track in the digital era.
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