Most grants in the Ethereum ecosystem demand KYC, signaling that sponsors prioritize compliance over developer safety in today's hostile environment. When regulators crack down, VC-backed web3 companies and the Ethereum Foundation rush to fund legal defenses, yet the same entities require full KYC for trivial public goods grants. Besides, many of these 'public goods' projects stay within Ethereum's borders, primarily benefiting ETH bag holders.

Each Uniswap protocol is a masterpiece of its time, but Uniswap Labs chose to operate in the most hostile jurisdiction and rely on a centralized infrastructure to run its frontend, which geo-blocks users by IP addresses and employs blockchain surveillance services like BlockAid that operate on a presumption of guilt.

The Bankless shills sold you off to slave tech and VCs. They position themselves at the forefront of the web3 revolution, but they use banking, paywall their website behind SlaveFi payment methods, run their own compliant VC, advertise custodial exchanges with mandatory KYC, advertise tax paying services and VC-backed slave tech dressed in web3 clothing. They also legitimize state legal systems that operate without consent, applaud state-led crackdowns on fellow degens like Do Kwon and promote stablecoins, which are centralized wrappers for fiat and nation state debt.

Gitcoin is a fully compliant US-based centralized platform that requires KYC, pushes slave passport, uses a socialist implementation of quadratic funding that heavily relies on slave tech, and blocks open source developers if they were born in 'wrong' countries.

Following the 2020 DeFi Summer, the emerging web3 wallet authentication method known as 'Sign-in with Ethereum' began gaining traction across the crypto ecosystem.

Despite being widely promoted by industry leaders as a revolutionary web3 solution, this approach fundamentally relies on the same account-based centralized architecture that underpins traditional web2 platforms. As a result, many VC-backed platforms adopted this authentication method while maintaining their centralized infrastructures, rather than reimagining their architectures to support genuinely open ecosystems.

In this first episode of Dark Vegas Tales, we discuss how VC-backed compliant companies are leeching off the Ethereum ecosystem, and how adversaries are trying to hijack the cypherpunk movement with the slave tech dressed in web3 clothing.