You need to build on an open, decentralized, wild and untamable network… Anything else is too risky!
If you’re building something meant to last, you should build on an open, decentralized network, one that can’t be quietly steered by a single entity or reshaped around any one jurisdiction’s regulatory preferences. Anything else introduces a different, and often greater kind of risk, platform risk.
Some blockchain networks market themselves as “regulation-friendly” or compliant by design. That sounds convenient, but it raises a core question: compliant with whose regulations? These networks operate globally, across dozens of legal jurisdictions that often conflict with each other. Any network that can adapt itself to the policy needs of one government can, and likely will shift in ways that may not serve your interests.
If you’re not the largest or most influential participant in that ecosystem, you have very little control over how those changes unfold. As the network evolves, upgrades may benefit incumbents, politically favored actors, or specific jurisdictions, while leaving others with new constraints or technical burdens. Even if no single entity can change everything unilaterally, systems with centralized governance structures or foundation-controlled roadmaps tend to drift toward the priorities of their most powerful stakeholders.
By contrast, truly open and decentralized networks are resistant to this kind of governance capture. They can still evolve, but no government or corporation can simply “push through” a change to suit its own regulatory agenda. Change requires broad consensus among miners, developers, businesses, and users, making protocol-level compliance updates practically unworkable. This structural resistance keeps such networks far closer to genuine neutrality.
There’s no perfect platform, every system carries some risk. But choosing a network that cannot be easily reshaped to fit a specific jurisdiction’s rules removes one major category of risk: the risk that the ground shifts suddenly beneath you because a central authority rewrote the protocol.
Importantly, this doesn’t prevent you from meeting your own compliance obligations. It simply means those responsibilities live at the application or business layer, where they belong, rather than being enforced deep in the network itself. You get regulatory freedom where it's appropriate, and protocol neutrality where it's indispensable.