With every new role I’ve had in crypto, I’ve affiliated, consciously or unconsciously, around particular ideas of value. What you choose to call this value reveals the interplay between how it is described and the lens by which you interpret the world. Satoshi called Bitcoin’s value, “a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash.” Vitalik expanded this idea to arbitrary code, calling them smart contracts. Tradfi called them digital assets. The co-op-inspired collectivists describe this value as a membership pass or voting rights. The dadaists and edgelords call them memecoins. The music industry folks liken the value to ownership or even IP. The artists call this value their collector community – and their rent. The media theorists may call them units of attention and the social theorists call them online identities. The unsocialized called them social tokens, and some call them scenecoins. The spiteful call them shitcoins. The non-believers call them scams. The rest just call it crypto.
Fifteen years ago, you could have easily argued that crypto had a distinct type of community with shared values. For Bitcoin, it was a small list-serv of academics, mathematicians, and Anglo-American libertarian boomers. In its early days, Ethereum also was a small community, starting with a Russian immigrant in Toronto and attracting technologists, hippies, and financiers from New York, Berlin, Zug, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, and Hong Kong.
Ethereum’s first developer conference in Berlin was described as a “classroom-sized gathering,” and has since graduated to every continent, especially in growing economies like Latin America and Nigeria. As more and more people have cycled in and out of the industry and between cryptocurrencies, a plurality of motivations and values have also entered the industry. Should crypto be about short term money games? Should we de-prioritize decentralization in order to improve user experience? I’ve been cycling through these questions over the last month as I’ve transitioned from my role at Mirror to Avara. Ultimately, it’s my view that the greatest potential decentralized blockchains represent is the ability to allow people from all over the world to build their own imagined futures.
Getting back to our roots
Decentralization, privacy, and the idea of setting the right foundation before making a broad appeal to all users – were key topics at ETHBerlin and the Lens’ afk conference.
The theme for ETHBerlin 2024 was “identity crisis,” with the core team writing a manifesto: “Arguably, on a philosophical level, the ecosystem lost its shared identity long ago. Do we know what we want to achieve, and are we working towards the same thing? What are our shared values? Where are the red lines? All seems a blur, and everything goes in the always-online, never-stopping economic game machine.”
Previously, at ETH Berlin in 2018, María Paula Fernandez, now my coworker, wrote that instead of using “the old centralized closed-source apps,” we should use decentralized apps. So, at the time, we used Status for sending messages (it was still on a testnet, because Ethereum was too expensive). To fulfill fun tasks or tip people for wearing your swag, we used the Bounties Network created the Berlin coin (also on testnet). Event talks were streamed using Livepeer (buggy as hell). Aave was also there, though at the time, it was called EthLend.
Now six years later, ETH Berlin was once again located at the sprawling former factory, this time under the new management of a Boston-based coworking company. This was almost as if the Kreuzberg neighborhood’s calls against tech gentrification were a distant memory. Unlike the focus in 2018 to move beyond theory and build more practical applications, this year’s themes of privacy, identity, and decentralization invited different types of projects. Among the winners, multiple teams built tools for anonymous voting; one team built RageAgainst.eu, a tool to run DeFi interfaces locally and KYC free; and another team built CypherSmith, an app to generate stealth addresses on demand for an asset receiver using elliptic curves and ephemeral keys. One could criticize these projects as being so obscure as to be possibly unable to attract an addressable market. But arguably, the early cypherpunks weren’t attempting to “onboard the next billions users” to cryptographic systems, but create nation-state level resiliency in new cryptographically secure compute paradigms.
Compared to 2018, we have consumer apps today that people use daily (maybe fewer that deserve the “decentralized” qualifier). We are still reliant on things like Telegram, but Telegram itself now has a token and its own mini-app economy. While we still shitpost on Twitter, increasingly we also turn to decentralized social media apps like Orb and Hey.
So should we build apps for everyone, or allow plurality to flourish?
Over the coming years, the tension between singular apps and chains that solve all user problems versus generalizable platforms that invite a plurality of niche apps and communities will continue to define crypto.
Ansem recently polled his followers on whether they read the EigenLayer whitepaper and nearly 90% admitted that they hadn’t. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising given the types of onchain activities that Solana attracts – high-frequency memecoin trading and absurdist NFTs. But that still gave me pause and reminded me of how on my first day at Consensys in 2017, I was tasked with reading the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers. Granted, neither are as long or as convoluted as Eigen’s, but they were instructional in reminding me of the initial problems they sought to solve and the foundational values that these systems represented. Perhaps most telling is how Vitalik described the idea of smart contracts as “cryptographic ‘boxes' that contain value and only unlock it if certain conditions are met.” They could be used for “many other [use cases] that we have not yet imagined.”
This latter point is important. Vitalik knew he didn’t know exactly how blockchains would be used in the future.
At its most optimistic, the idea that a token can spawn communities of supporters who define their politics in relation to each other and their shared cultural signifiers is perhaps the most interesting idea since the internet. As Mat Dryhurst described it, “The great promise of composable blockchains was each artist would get to tailor their own economy around their work.” Why shouldn’t an artist be able to create an asset that contains value itself and also creates a socio-economic graph of your biggest supporters? And if this is true, why wouldn’t any celebrity want to create a token to cash in on the attention they attract as well?
So what futures will you choose?
During afk there were a lot of conversations about the values that we should think about when creating new social networks. As Jaya Klara Brekke argued, “Where I would think we should be heading is social media decoupled from personal data markets entirely. The beauty of building on zero-knowledge proofs is selective disclosure — what you decide to reveal or what not to reveal.”
Similarly, there were questions about whether the value of a token can come from its initial cultural community, or if a community can retrofit culture after the fact. In discussing the 747 $CRASH token, Sirsu said, “As quick as the value comes, it can go. For me, I’ve been thinking that memes are a great catalyst to bring people together, but you have to find a through line where people are willing to stay, so then you can decouple the token from the incentive.”
Billy Rennekamp had a more cutting observation, “Imagine a graph of the potential value and the actual value. If that curve doesn’t get overrun, you have created a scam. I think that it is extremely powerful, but risky. Use these new things but use them with caution…I love to see ponzis every day, because it is working out risks in real time.”
For some, the idea of joining a token community is a way of testing a vibe or creating an imagined future. It’s why Orb made clubs flexible, so that you can set up a community the way you want with your own economic incentives. The best advice I have is to be unafraid of trying and testing new things. Start a club in Orb. See who shows up and what you learn. But also meet people in person. Go to a meetup, an unconference, or host a small gathering in your hometown. Chances are, you’ll meet someone cool that appreciates things the way you do.
Finding your community online isn’t just some marketing catchphrase. With open social protocols, we should have the ability to tailor them to the values, incentives, and constraints we want to see in the world. As Abbey Titcomb reflected on why crypto reminds her of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. “With MMO’s…we are trying to adventure together. That’s what everyone is trying to do when they are building a counterculture movement. MMOs have helped me imagine different futures in crypto.”
