The recent $2.9 million crypto scam case in Utah has made headlines again—the scammer falsely claimed investment experience, fabricated outrageous high-yield promises, and was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison. It looks like an ordinary financial scam, but upon closer inspection, these types of cases have been replayed too many times in the crypto space.

The root of the problem is actually one: the entire industry relies too heavily on verbal promises from individuals or institutions. An "expert," a "big V," or a "project representative" can attract hundreds of millions of dollars with just a few words. This trust system itself is fragile. When someone decides to scam you, the breach happens faster than the establishment of trust. Even more painfully, after each incident, the reputation of the entire ecosystem takes a hit.

Interestingly, it is also within this industry that some projects are trying to rebuild trust using completely different logic—no reliance on endorsements, only code speaking for itself.

Take Lista DAO as an example. You won't see lofty promises there; instead, you'll see verifiable smart contract code. Its recently launched RWA product is a typical example—bringing the yield of U.S. Treasury bonds directly onto the blockchain. What does this mean? It means your annualized interest rate is not a "high probability" told by a sales representative but real-time, verifiable data. Not convinced? Check the on-chain records yourself.

More importantly, the decision-making process. Major upgrades are not decided by a CEO’s whim but through the veLISTA model, where community members vote. The entire process is recorded on-chain, making cheating difficult. It’s like upgrading from "trusting a person" to "trusting a transparent system."

Fraud prevention has also been thoroughly improved. Traditional scams are most effective because of opaque fund pools—once money flows in, no one knows where it goes. That doesn’t work with protocols like Lista DAO. The entire logic of lending and staking is automated by smart contracts; how funds move and what the collateral ratio is are all on-chain, clear and transparent.

Another detail worth noting: it uses traditional financial assets with high credibility, like U.S. Treasury bonds, as the foundation. This effectively tags the entire protocol with a "trust label from the real economy." It’s not about creating trust out of thin air but transferring existing trust onto the blockchain.

This doesn’t mean people are unimportant. Instead, it shifts the role of humans from "building fragile personal credit" to "setting rules and innovating products." These are two completely different roles.

Comparing these two pieces of news is essentially looking at two evolutionary paths of the industry: one is the collapse of trust under the old paradigm leading to legal sanctions; the other is actively establishing trust through technological transparency in the new paradigm. The latter may sound abstract, but in practice, it means: code replaces verbal promises, algorithms replace human uncertainty, and open verification replaces closed commitments.

Lista DAO’s exploration in multi-chain expansion and credit lending is fundamentally about expanding the boundaries of this "programmable trust." The more scenarios it can be applied to, the less space there is for reliance on personal credit. The evolution of the crypto world from "trusting people" to "trusting code" may be hidden in these details.