After Crypto

The artist and writer Mat Dryhurst often says to blockchain critics: “Tell me what you’re voting for.” If you’re against all blockchain-related tech, then are you arguing for the current state and ownership structure of the internet? What are you arguing for, rather than against?

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.

So long as everything that touches a public ledger is vilified as a scam and part of some dystopian future, the number of responsible people and teams who feel inspired to thoughtfully explore projects that see beyond the constraints of our Web2 systems will be limited.

Blindly dismissing any project that touches a blockchain because it shares the same plumbing as crypto is like missing the forest for the logging industry.

We’re building Metalabel with these primitives because it’s hard for us to see why we would, in 2022, make a web product that would trap a creator’s work in a walled garden, that wouldn’t offer utility beyond our walls, and that wouldn’t share value with the people who create it. These are radical and important goals — radical in a way that many cr... See more

As Vitalik Buterin notes in a recent essay exploring non-financial use cases of crypto, “blockchains are just a really convenient place to store stuff.”

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.

3. Permanent agnostic archiving