There are moments when leadership stops being about alignment and becomes about survival. Ben Horowitz’s distinction between peacetime and wartime CEOs persists because it captures that shift with uncomfortable accuracy.
Peacetime leaders build culture, nurture consensus, and optimise processes. Wartime leaders make hard calls, tolerate friction, and prioritise survival over comfort. The two rarely coexist in the same person, and organisations that mistake one moment for the other tend to pay dearly.
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BlockDAG’s founder, Gurhan Kiziloz, appears to have concluded that his project was being led through a war as though it were peacetime.
The removal of the chief executive and senior management was not framed as a dispute over vision or personality. It was framed as a strategic correction. BlockDAG, a Layer-1 blockchain built on Directed Acyclic Graph architecture, operates in a competitive environment that has grown markedly hostile. Ethereum dominates mindshare. Solana has captured speed-focused developers. Regulatory pressure is intensifying across jurisdictions. Capital is scarce. Attention is scarcer. In this context, organisational comfort is a liability.
According to people familiar with the restructuring, the previous leadership had been effective at building internal cohesion and external relationships. These are not trivial contributions. Early-stage projects require credibility, and credibility often depends on executives who can speak fluently to investors, partners, and communities. But fluency is not the same as velocity. And in a market where survival depends on shipping faster than competitors, the former can become an obstacle to the latter.
Kiziloz’s intervention reflected a judgment that BlockDAG had drifted into peacetime posture while the environment demanded wartime discipline.
From Boardroom to War Mode
The distinction matters because it shapes how organisations allocate attention. Peacetime leadership tends toward inclusivity, process, and risk mitigation. Decisions pass through layers. Stakeholders are consulted. Consensus is sought. These habits serve well when markets are stable and competition is manageable. They become dangerous when the window for action is narrow and the cost of delay is existential.
Wartime leadership compresses authority. Decisions are made faster, with fewer inputs, and executed without prolonged deliberation. The tolerance for internal disagreement shrinks. The focus narrows to outcomes that directly affect survival. It is not a pleasant mode of operation. But it is often the only mode that works when the environment turns hostile.
Kiziloz’s career suggests familiarity with both modes. At Nexus International, the gaming group he founded, he built a business generating close to $1 billion in annual revenue without external capital. That trajectory required patience, discipline, and careful capital allocation—peacetime virtues. But it also required aggressive market entries, rapid pivots, and a willingness to concentrate resources on high-conviction bets. When Brazil opened its gambling market in early 2025, Nexus moved within days while competitors spent weeks securing approvals. That was wartime behaviour.
BlockDAG’s leadership reset suggests Kiziloz concluded that the project had accumulated too much peacetime infrastructure for a wartime environment. The response was to dismantle it.
The Competitive Battlefield
The Layer-1 blockchain space is not forgiving. Ethereum remains the default for developers seeking security and network effects. Solana has carved out a position as the high-throughput alternative, attracting projects that prioritise speed over decentralisation. Newer entrants face a brutal reality: attention is finite, capital is constrained, and most projects fail not through dramatic collapse but through quiet irrelevance.
BlockDAG’s technical proposition—combining DAG-based parallel processing with familiar security assumptions—is credible. But credibility alone does not guarantee adoption. Execution speed, developer outreach, and ecosystem development all require organisational focus that peacetime structures often diffuse.
By removing senior leadership, Kiziloz concentrated decision-making authority and shortened the distance between strategy and execution. The project shifted from a corporate posture to a founder-led build. Whether this proves sufficient to compete against entrenched incumbents remains uncertain. But the logic is clear: BlockDAG cannot afford the luxury of consensus-driven deliberation while Ethereum and Solana continue to consolidate their positions.
The Cost of War
Wartime leadership is not without risk. Concentrated authority magnifies founder error. Internal dissent becomes harder to surface. Partners and contributors accustomed to familiar leadership may hesitate. The absence of formal checks can invite scrutiny, particularly as projects mature and seek broader institutional engagement.
There is also a reputational cost. Sudden executive removals unsettle confidence. Markets interpret such moves as instability, even when the underlying logic is sound. Kiziloz’s decision has drawn criticism precisely because it broke with the reassuring conventions of corporate governance.
Yet the alternative risk is equally severe. Many blockchain projects fail not through dramatic crisis but through organisational drift. They retain their executives, their committees, and their roadmaps, but lose the capacity to execute. Development slows. Communities disengage. By the time leadership is questioned, relevance has already faded.
Kiziloz appears to have judged that BlockDAG was approaching that trajectory. His response was to replace the boardroom with a war room—to trade consensus for control and comfort for speed.
The General’s Burden
The Horowitz framework offers no guarantees. Wartime leadership can produce exceptional focus or catastrophic overreach. The same concentration of authority that enables rapid decision-making also eliminates buffers against poor judgment. Generals win wars, but they also lose them.
What is clear is that Kiziloz has positioned himself as BlockDAG’s general, not its chairman. He has assumed direct responsibility for outcomes and eliminated the layers that might otherwise absorb blame. In an industry where founders often hide behind governance structures and advisory boards, that willingness to stand exposed is notable.
Whether BlockDAG survives its current competitive war will depend on execution, not intention. But the reset itself signals how the war will be fought: with founder authority, compressed decision-making, and an explicit rejection of peacetime norms.
In crypto, as in conflict, you do not ask a general to be diplomatic. You ask him to win.
