The Professionalism Deficit in Crypto
Retail investors, you have been warned
There’s a pattern I’ve seen play out across multiple crypto projects, and it’s not about technology, funding, or even timing. It’s about professionalism - or more precisely, its absence.
I spent a formative stretch of my career working alongside elite forces operators in the middle east. Whatever your preconceptions about that world, the thing that left the deepest mark on me wasn’t the intensity or the risk. It was the standard. The absolute, non-negotiable standard of accountability, communication, and execution that governed every interaction. There wasn’t room for ambiguity about who owned what. There wasn’t tolerance for sloppy handoffs. Emotions didn’t dictate the conversation - clarity did. You said things exactly how they were, people absorbed it, and everyone moved forward.
That experience recalibrated my sense of what “professional” actually means. And it made everything that came after - building and running multiple companies simultaneously in the UAE—where, at the time, if you missed a payment or bounced a cheque (easy to do when nobody pays anyone, if they can possibly help it), you did not pass GO, you did not collect £200, you went straight to jail—working high-profile security and risk management jobs, managing multi-million dollar film and event projects, overseeing an $11.3M fleet of 74 luxury vehicles in the hands of spectacularly irresponsible clients - all manageable. Not because any of it was simple, but because the operating standard had been set so high early on that everything else was just execution against that baseline.
Then, after a couple of years as a partner at a CleanTech fund and a couple more consulting in that space, I entered the wild world of crypto.
The Horse That Didn’t Want to Drink
When I started consulting for crypto projects, I expected the usual startup chaos - under-resourced teams, unclear priorities, people wearing too many hats. That’s normal. That’s solvable. What I encountered was something fundamentally different.
The teams I worked with weren’t struggling because they lacked skills or resources. They were struggling because they actively resisted the structures that would have made them functional. Operational rigour, clear accountability, systematic decision-making - these weren’t things they hadn’t discovered yet. These were things they had consciously rejected.
The meat of my experience consulting in this space was trying to build operational structure around teams that genuinely didn’t want it. They’d got into crypto to escape those things in real life. The corporate hierarchies, the reporting lines, the performance reviews, the structured decision-making processes - for many of these people, crypto represented freedom from all of that. And they weren’t about to let some consultant reimpose it.
It was very much a case of trying to lead a horse to water and make it drink, and it was not remotely thirsty.
This is the part that I think gets misdiagnosed. The conventional narrative is that crypto teams are “immature” - that the industry is young and these organisations will professionalise over time as they grow. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. What I observed was a self-selection problem. The same anti-institutional impulse that draws brilliant people into decentralised technology actively repels the operational discipline needed to capitalise on what they build.
Brilliance Without Structure Is Just Expensive Chaos
The projects I worked with weren’t short on talent. There were excellent people. The technical foundations were often genuinely impressive. But hardly anybody - and I don’t say this lightly - was overly characterised by the idea of professionalism. There were traders, marketers, developers, people with a general sense of business. But there was no culture of rigour around how decisions got made, how information flowed, or how accountability was distributed.
One project I spent over a year with was navigating a strategic pivot. It should have been a complex but manageable transition. Instead, it became an object lesson in what happens when an organisation lacks the connective tissue of basic operational discipline.
The ecosystem they were inhabiting could itself have really done with guiding lights and real organisation and structure, because it was all a total mess. It made everything exponentially harder. Decisions that should have taken days took months. Debilitating and brutal politics. Dependencies went untracked. Communication happened in fragments. The technology was interesting. The execution environment was borderline non-functional.
And this wasn’t unique to one team. It was a pattern across almost every project I consulted for. Founders who could architect complex systems but couldn’t run a structured meeting. Teams where nobody knew who owned what decision. Organisations where the very concept of process was treated as an imposition rather than an enabler.
The Self-Selection Trap
Here’s a hypothesis for what is actually happening, and why the “they’ll grow out of it” thesis might be wrong.
Crypto, by its philosophical nature, attracts people who are sceptical of centralised authority, formal hierarchies, and institutional control. That scepticism is precisely what makes them good at imagining and building decentralised systems. It’s also what makes them terrible at running organisations.
This isn’t a temporary phase. It’s a structural feature of who the industry attracts. The people most drawn to the vision of trustless, permissionless systems are often the people least inclined to submit to the very human, very trust-dependent dynamics that make teams work - clear ownership, honest feedback loops, structured accountability, the willingness to defer to someone else’s judgement when the situation demands it.
The result is an industry full of extraordinary technology and dysfunctional organisations. Teams that can write elegant smart contracts but can’t agree on a quarterly roadmap. Ecosystems with billions in notional value and no one willing to make a difficult decision and own the consequences.
What Actually Works
I don’t want to overstate my own credentials here, but I have seen what works. And it’s not complicated. It just feels a bit too much like adulting for people who entered this space specifically to avoid it.
It starts with someone being willing to say things exactly how they are. Not with cruelty, but with clarity. The environments I’ve worked in that functioned at the highest level shared one trait above all others: information moved without distortion. Problems were named plainly. Ownership was unambiguous. And nobody confused transparency with hostility.
That directness has always been a gift and a curse - in environments that value it, it accelerates everything. In environments that don’t - it creates friction. I’ve spent the last few years learning to filter that instinct and introduce structure in ways that don’t feel like an attack on the culture. But the underlying principle hasn’t changed: organisations that can’t handle honest, direct communication about what’s working and what isn’t are organisations that will underperform their potential indefinitely.
The Gap That Matters
The crypto industry doesn’t have a technology problem. It arguably doesn’t even have a product-market fit problem - at least not primarily. It has a professionalism problem. And it’s a professionalism problem that’s unusually resistant to solving because the people who need to solve it are the same people who chose this industry partly to avoid solving it.
The projects that break through - the ones that actually capture the opportunities their technology creates - will be the ones that figure out how to marry the anti-institutional creativity that makes crypto compelling with the operational discipline that makes organisations functional. That’s not about imposing corporate structure on decentralised teams. It’s about recognising that accountability, clarity, and rigour aren’t corporate artefacts. They’re human necessities. They’re what allow talented people to actually do the work they’re capable of, rather than losing it to noise, misalignment, and the slow bleed of decisions that never quite get made.
The technology in this space is extraordinary. The gap between what’s being built and what’s being executed against isn’t the most interesting problem in the industry, but it is one of the most fundamental. And it’s almost entirely an attitude problem.
Retail investors, the hype will return. And when it does, remember, you have been warned.
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Super curious to know how you even landed at Consulting for Crypto!