WRITING

crypto’s endgame.

The holidays are around the corner, so time to prep some answers for noisy relatives. 

The other day I was interviewed by a university researcher about crypto culture. One of her questions was about our *why*. Why do we build these immutable, permissionless technologies? 

Before I answer, a little side quest: 

Crypto is not FTX. Crypto is not Celsius. Is crypto Luna? 

Confession time, I didn’t know what Luna was before it went into shambles, just that I didn’t trust 20% APY on fiat. I’m not an American citizen, so I couldn’t use Celsius, and I don’t trade much on CEXes, so no need for FTX. 

I also don’t find any of these three projects or companies particularly interesting. They don’t have anything to do with my personal *why crypto*. 

On to the *why*. For me, crypto is (1) prepping financial, communication & governance infrastructure and (2) experimenting with new forms of finance, communication & governance. 

There’s no killer app in crypto (yet). At first sight, there’s no apparent need for any of the stuff we’re building, especially not for those residing in stable, developed nations. But maybe there will be one day, and perhaps while we’re running all these game theoretical experiments on the future of finance, communication & governance, we will discover something new.  

What could that be?

—> more transparent systems within existing governments where budgets & their spending can all be inspected on-chain. The same goes for companies & NGOs.  

—> new governments in the cloud, think network states, or think country X is being physically invaded by country Y, but decides to continue its existence in cyberspace

For this, we need more than just immutable ledgers to do the accounting work; we also need decentralized storage, communication & governance systems. Something that cannot be shut off, neither by the good guys nor by the bad guys. For me, that’s web3. 

I’ve no idea where the idea on web3 took the wrong turn, and it became jpgs and VR mini-games. And I don’t know when people started thinking that crypto is equal to gambling on centralized exchanges, but all of this has very little to do with my personal *why*. 

Talk

Digital Discourses – The Future of Internet

The internet is broken. While Web 2.0 is rampant with surveillance capitalism, the next phase of the internet will have decentralisation at its core. How would Web3, with blockchain as its backbone, be different? Could it lead to a more cooperative web? What is the future of the internet? Here’s my talk for Goethe Institut Jakarta, the Center for Digital Society and Engage Media.

Talk

Incentives IRL and the quest to own your data

Helium invited me alongside Matthew Fontana from Streamr, Danny O’Brien from the Filecoin Foundation and the Hivemapper founder Ariel Seidman to talk about how to incentivize the sharing of data through tokens. We discuss the different tokeneconmical models that help boosting data ownership and give an overview on the growing data economy landscape in Web3.

Allgemein

Unlocking new “x to earn” use cases with Data Unions at ETHcc

At my favorite conference: ETHcc in Paris!

Surf to earn, drive to earn, bank to earn are just a couple of use cases the Data Union paradigm unlocks. By selling user data with their explicit consent and splitting revenues between users and builders dozens of new “x to earn” use cases become available driving user growth in Web3, giving users a share in the data economy and onboarding them to crypto.