After Crypto

To say there’s an “after crypto” isn’t calling for the end of crypto or to discredit projects in that space. It’s to say there are potentially groundbreaking and perfectly valid reasons to create tools built around public ledgers that aren’t only about crypto. Our thinking needs to evolve.

Crypto, as we define it today, may end up being the first exploration of a larger structure of public blockchains underlying shared infrastructure, post-platform experiences, and a more collectively owned and governed digital universe than we have today.

It also makes intuitive sense that we’d have digital money that’s programmable. We'‘re programming everything now; mRNA is basically running a program on the cellular level. Many of the current problems in the digital economy -- lack of trust, misaligned incentives, controlling gatekeepers, treating audiences as a resource to be exploited -- arise ... See more

After 18 months of learning and filtering with that lens, there were three changes made possible by blockchains that I couldn’t unsee:

We shouldn’t need to rely on infinite credit cards or the Wayback Machine to tell future creators and generations the stories of our work. Because a blockchain is a giant public ledger, it allows for agnostic permanent storage and provenance that will become even more important the older and bigger the Internet gets.

While most people at the time were focused on its viability as a currency (and many still are), the smart folks were a lot more interested in what its underlying blockchain tech might mean for future business models.

The crypto ecosystem (or web3, or blockchain-based, or whatever you want to call it) is offering a new set of promises of how wonderful it will all be. Most of these promises will not be fulfilled, at least not fully or in the way we expect. But in trying to fulfill them, we will learn new things about what people can do online, and what types of b... See more