A bustling yet vibrant marketplace— the third way beyond cathedrals and casinos.

Nurturing a loud, lively marketplace— a third path beyond the cathedral and the casino
Today, I was out and about, and by chance I read the article “Don’t Let the Casino Swallow the Cathedral.” Jocy, the teacher, wrote it exceptionally well—among the articles I read in 2026, it’s the one with the most real-world relevance.
When I read the part mentioning that “many Chinese teams, around 2023, only raised five million to seven million dollars… that runway can barely support a bit more than two years; now, they either lose their reputation in the crypto industry, or turn around and leave.”
That passage resonated with me deeply.
I don’t know much about the specifics of other teams, but UniSat’s two rounds of financing completed in 2024 are indeed roughly within that range. Whether it’s valuation or total funding raised, we’ve always kept it at a relatively conservative level. Compared with many Western projects that often come with valuations in the tens of billions of dollars and raise tens of millions of dollars, there’s practically no comparison.
But our choice has always been crystal clear: no matter whether the market environment is cold or hot, we stick to a low-power, battle-ready approach of “saving and scrimping—making every penny count.” We focus long-term on delivering high quality and high efficiency, and in practice we continuously close gaps in the team’s capabilities. From the very beginning, we never treated “backing out and leaving” as an option.
As Jocy points out, across the ocean, the crypto industry has been able to keep developing for a long time largely thanks to generations of industry pioneers who invested for the long term—systematically and in layers. That is a truly “cathedral-style” path to building.
By contrast, the reality around us is often exactly the opposite: talent is hard to keep, long-term vision is missing, and the industry gradually degenerates into a game of existing resources. Short-term profit-seeking keeps intensifying, and ultimately forms a vicious cycle that is difficult to reverse. These phenomena are not isolated cases; they are a real reflection of the industry’s structural problems today.
As the article puts it: “When Web3 is reduced to one big casino, when the industry’s mainstream narrative degrades from ‘changing the world’ to a mere wealth game, the best talent will vote with their feet.”
Even the most optimistic builders have to admit: building a truly “cathedral” has never been something you can do overnight.
But the question is—if the cathedral feels out of reach, do we have no choice but to accept “the casino” as the only path?
I don’t think so.
Between these two, there is actually a third path that has been long ignored.
Between “relying on large-scale, continuous investment” and “constantly extracting value, draining the land dry,” we can fully choose to build—at a relatively low cost—a low-power, loud but lively marketplace, one step at a time.
For those who have read “Cathedral and Bazaar,” you might already have a knowing smile. Yes—if the approach is right, building an open-source marketplace that’s full of everyday life and keeps growing on its own doesn’t necessarily require the kind of extravagant cost of constructing a gilded cathedral.
The development path of open-source Linux, the evolution process of the open-source AI model DeepSeek, and open-source Bitcoin wallets and infrastructure UniSat (please let me shamelessly add this)—in essence, all follow a similar logic.
Besides “spending money to build a cathedral,” we can also choose to, as much as possible, rely on and further drive the industry toward more open-source. Let millions of independent developers push their own small carts, and together move a thriving marketplace forward.
Varied and diverse—that’s precisely the source of prosperity.
An open-source marketplace built one brick at a time, driven by real needs, continuously patched and evolved in practice—may not be any weaker in terms of competitiveness and system robustness than a grand but fragile centralized cathedral.
More than that, Vibe coding is significantly lowering the barrier for developers to customize and make targeted modifications on top of existing open-source code. In my view, in the AI era, this open-source movement that’s returning with renewed momentum is no longer just an idealistic declaration of “not caring about the mundane world”—it’s evolving into a genuine form of “code equality”—
Everyone has the opportunity to turn their real-world needs into code that can run and can be used.
And that is the best catalyst for nurturing a thriving marketplace.
Small but sustained progress far outweighs ambitious, reckless attempts that end in failure.
With that, I share this encouragement with everyone.