The crypto industry has been around for about 15 years, and many people have identified recurring patterns. One pattern I’ve noticed is what I call the crypto innovation cycle.

This cycle began with Bitcoin and consists of four phases.

Phase 1 — Invention

In this phase, a new paradigm is invented. This idea typically reimagines something traditionally done differently, but crypto enables it to operate without centralized control. Phase one is always met with extreme skepticism as people struggle to grasp the core invention.

Phase 2 — Evangelism

In this phase, core believers promote a narrative about how the invention will change society. Early adopters recognize the invention’s potential and craft stories to explain its value to the masses. This leads to the rise of subject matter experts who proselytize and educate others about the invention.

Phase 3 — Adoption

In this phase...

Imagine taking the team game of soccer and making it remote:

• Each player plays on a small VR mat in their home.
• The ball is tracked by cameras and sensors.
• Players wear VR headsets to play.
• Some haptic feedback simulates touching the ball.
• An audio system coordinates everything.
• Virtual stadium backgrounds provide the field environment.

You can probably think of many more examples, but this is how proponents of remote work sound to an inventor creating something new.

There’s an ongoing debate about the benefits of remote work, with one company praising it while another calls it a failure two days later. When you’re building a startup, you and your team are inventing something new. At the top levels of company buildings, you’re operating similarly to a professional sports team in how you coordinate and execute on your vision. Asking high-performing startup teams to invent remotely...

I presented a design concept called Token Actions that makes crypto easier to use by removing the concept of dapps and attaching actions directly to tokens. Token Actions are extensible, so they work on groups of tokens as well as individual tokens. We are going to cover 6 advanced Token Actions to see how users would interact with more complex DeFi protocols.

Borrow

Use ETH as collateral to borrow LUSD. LUSD is an overcollateralized stablecoin.

Farm

DEGEN + ETH pair that rewards you in AERO tokens. AERO is the governance token for the Aerodrome decentralized exchange.

Pair

Lock SHIB and ETH in a pair. This facilitates self-custody trading by providing liquidity for users to swap their tokens for yours

Pool

MAXI + BASE + TRIO + LUCKY + DECI pool. This operates similarly to an index, maintaining a ratio of the elements in the pool for the Maximus DAO perpetual contracts.

Every application in crypto starts by showing you a list of tokens. The problem is that these apps leave it up to the user to figure out what actions can be performed on those tokens, identify the protocols that enable these actions, and find the correct (and safe) websites to interact with the protocols.

The current interaction model is:

Token → Dapp → Protocol → Action → Token

This model is unfriendly to new users who may not know the best protocols to use. It also forces users to switch contexts from the current token they’re viewing to finding a dapp, and then locating their tokens after multiple steps.

Token Actions solve this by reversing the interaction model, focusing on the token and the actions...

In 2013 when I first got into Crypto, the main program you used was a wallet and it was very simple. You send tokens and look at your balance. Since Bitcoin was the only token I was holding, I really didn’t need anything more than a balance.

By 2016, more and more coins were gaining popularity. All of a sudden you were holding multiple tokens like Dash, Monero, and Litecoin. This meant that you had to go from one asset to multiple assets. During this time, sites like CoinMarketCap became really popular.

2017 really changed everything with the explosion of ERC20s. Now that anyone could make a coin, there were new coins popping up faster than any centralized service could keep up with them. The main thing going for ERC20s was that they were still just tokens that had a balance and a price on a centralized exchange.

In 2019, Uniswap v2 changed everything again. Now, every ERC could...

This is a timeline of the Farcaster meme coin scene.

Warps (Nov 2023) https://warpcast.com

This is a Farcaster/Warpcast native token that emerged around the time when other platforms were creating offchain points systems. Companies are adopting this approach as a way to circumvent paying royalties to Apple and Google, as well as to avoid scrutiny from the SEC for selling a security.
Other examples similar to warps include Blast Points, Rainbow Points, friend.tech Points, Rabby Points, etc. All these types of points cannot be traded on decentralized exchanges, and their use is completely controlled by the issuer.

Crypto natives dislike this since crypto was invented to remove middle men and counterparty risk.

$POINTS (Ethereum — Dec 2023) https://points.cool

In response to these companies creating offchain points systems, a person named Mathias on Farcaster introduced an onchain...

A lot of people have been asking for my thoughts on the ETF and what I think it will do to the price of crypto.

To get the answer, we need to travel back to 1978 when Congress passed the Revenue Act. This bill included Section 401(k), which provided employees a tax-free way to defer compensation from bonuses or stock options.

In crypto, the mechanics would be:

Stake • Hold until 59½ • Early End Stake Penalty of 10%

The reason this is significant is that regular Americans are handing their money over to administrators who are buying assets. This means that even if your neighbor thinks crypto is a scam, there’s a chance they are indirectly buying. To understand how this ETF will impact crypto, we need to consider two questions:

1. Where do 401(k) administrators deploy the money?
2. What happens to the assets that receive this money once it gets there?

Stock Market

Answer 1: In the...

Measuring the New Power Metric

Have you ever considered what truly determines your ability to influence the world around you? Beyond wealth and status, there lies a concept poised to redefine personal empowerment: the Sovereign Ratio.

The Sovereign Ratio is a metric that quantifies your capacity to act independently and shape your environment. It’s a balance between being bound by external forces and standing sovereign amidst life’s chaos.

At the heart of the Sovereign Ratio are six core pillars:

• Economic Stability: Your financial freedom and resilience.
• Political Influence: Your voice and power in civic affairs.
• Social Connectivity: Your network’s strength and your societal impact.
• Emotional Equilibrium: Your psychological well-being and emotional intelligence.
• Health Stability: Your physical health and access to healthcare.
• Educational Foundation: Your knowledge base and...

The battle for consumer’s attention is increasing and winning products will be the ones that provide relevant and accurate suggestions.

In the late 90’s there were over 20 search engines categorized by different dynamics and chracretists. Some were manually curated and others used web crawlers to create a graph of links between websites. Regardless of the technique used to build the search index, users of the engines were responsible for typing the question they wanted to answer for. Today we know that the winner from the last 20 years of search is Google.

As we transitioned through the early 2000’s, search was infused into every product. Napster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube all built amazing companies around allowing users to create, share and search content. Today more than half of the world is online increasing the number of content creators, bots, and...