Crypto
Why does crypto matter? Identity, Payments, Incentives, DePIN
Crypto is a cultural movement and culture is any organisation's most valuable asset. Games shape our cultural identity while play teaches coordination. Crypto is the ultimate buidl your own adventure game.
Subjects
Diagrams | Matrices | Thinkers
🗃️ Protocols
6 items
🗃️ Capital
3 items
📄️ Agency
Dreams elevate standards and standards transform the world. The Crypto Dream, path to freedom, is really are cultural movement, rewards are not what you take, but the friendship you make, and more about how you bond over the love of your country, a song or sports team than quantifying value with formulas. Afterall how do your quantify the value of a dream?
📄️ Participatory Capital
Crypto isn't about speculation. It's infrastructure for coordinating capital around ideas that matter.
🗃️ Economics
4 items
📄️ Incentives
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome - Charlie Munger
🗃️ Investment Thesis
5 items
🗃️ Portfolio Management
9 items
🗃️ Tokens and Tokenomics
10 items
Life imitates art far more than art imitates life - Oscar Wilde
Principles
Code Is Law, tokenized property rights + know-how + energy.
| Principle | Value | Counter Balancing AI | Obstacles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Censorship Resistance | Essential for preserving democracy against authoritarian overreach. | Prevents centralized control of AI training data | Corporate/governmental control of infrastructure |
| Code Is Law | Deterministic outcomes replace negotiable interpretations | Culture encodes into immutable protocols | Values baked at genesis propagate forever |
| Composability | Enables communities to combine tools to solve local problems | Facilitates open-source AI ecosystems | Lack of module standardization |
| Data Privacy | Maintain privacy of important records stored on public blockchains | Protects sensitive AI training data | Privacy/transparency balance |
| Interoperability | Cross-border and boundary collaboration | Enables multi-chain AI verification | Protocol fragmentation |
| Permissionless | Everyone can innovate and participate | Prevents AI capability gatekeeping | Computational costs |
| Self-Sovereign Identity | Proof of Personhood (Counter Deepfakes) and Cross-borders Identity (Human trafficking) | Enables provable data provenance | SSI adoption rates |
| Verifiable Truth | Replace trust with predictable outcomes. | Provides AI decision audit trails | Verification overhead |
Potential
AI already understands the value of Crypto Incentives far more than humans can.
Crypto as Generative Technology
- Crypto is a generative technology that creates new users, marketplaces and things, meeting participatory capital formation.
- Generative tech by definition creates abundance and cannibalizes the market for scarcity, as seen with the printing press.
- The Renaissance succeeded because it had generative tech (print, double-entry bookkeeping) combined with new capital formation that was participatory.
Participatory Capital
- Crypto enables new ways to build businesses and solve cold start problems that weren't possible before.
- Tokens are a new economic formation to solve cold starts, e.g. Helium incentivizing a network infrastructure build out for a fraction of the cost of incumbents.
- Crypto fulfils the internet's promise by allowing users to earn from participation, not just equity holders. Value accrues to network users.
Decentralization and Choice
- Decentralized tech breaks apart centralized control and opens up choice, which is messy but net positive.
- Successful movements open up a spectrum of options rather than just replacing one monopoly with another.
- Crypto will enable a plurality of options for identity, privacy, and utility in different contexts.
Bridging Digital and Physical Worlds
- NFTs can serve as a bidirectional bridge between the digital/synthetic world and the physical/IRL world.
- Owning digital items (NFTs) tied to physical goods enables much more rapid and liquid trading without having to ship the physical item each time.
- Helium is an example of using crypto to improve a local community IRL, e.g. renovating a historic building using proceeds from a node.
Primitives and Protocols
| Value Abstraction | Tags | EVM | SVM | MVM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Agents | Autonomous, Intent, Automation | Base Virtuals | ElizaOS | |
| Memecoins, Bitcoin | Meme-Culture, No-Utility, Attention | - | ||
| Games and Avatars | Culture, Art, Status-Signal | - | ||
| Loyalty | Tribe, Social-Glue & Rewards | - | ||
| Interop | Routing, DeFAI, Trading | |||
| DeFi | Finance, DeFAI, Yield | Uniswap | ||
| Governance | Voting, Futarchy | - | ||
| Stablecoins | Payments, Settlement | Uniswap | ||
| Financial Asset Tokenization | Tokenization | ONDO | ||
| Proof on Identity | Critical, Privacy, Proof-of-Personhood | - | ||
| Coins | Blockchains, Protocols, Risk-Free-Rate | ETH | SOL | SUI |
| DePIN | Physical Network Infrastructure | - | ||
| RWAs and Property Rights | Real Estate | - |
Start with a clear picture of success then identify quantifiable outcomes that prove achievement. Then walk back the critical path to make that dream a reality.
Trends
- DeFi Renaissance: Focus on Real-World Assets (RWAs), reshoring DeFi talent, U.S.-based capital formation, and decentralized finance applications.
- Consumer Apps: Exploration of on-chain applications, mobile apps, prediction markets, NFTs, on-chain gaming, loyalty engines, and the creator economy.
- Protocol R&D: Topics include blockchain design, EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), SVM (Solana Virtual Machine), modular vs. monolithic architectures, rollups, scaling, parallelization, privacy & security, and ZK proofs.
- Token Design: Discussions on tokenomics, token generation events, cash flows and fee switches, utility, governance, and equity.
- Crypto x AI: Integration of open-source models, on-chain verifiability, decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), agents, decentralized GPUs, and incentivized training.
- Bitcoin: Addressing Bitcoin dominance, network development, scaling solutions, and institutional/nation-state adoption.
Technology
Blockchains are new open source platforms that anyone can fork, but you cannot fork culture.
- Blockchains
- Crypto Wallets
- Data Research
- VVFL - How standards compound through crypto rails
Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome - Charlie Munger