If you know me, you might know me as this guy…

As a non-technical complainor, I spent 4 years begging people to build MetaGame. After MetaGame failed (it was built tho!), I thought I‘d focus on things I actually CAN do myself, which was content. That was the beginning of my documentary arc.

About a year later, I shipped Built on Ethereum, a documentary about usecases & applications of Ethereum. It didn‘t rack up the views, but it was decently received and decently funded, so I thought that was it!

Plan was:

• Every 8 months, we ship a new Ethereum documentary

• They will be focused on different narratives or countries

Devconnect Argentina was coming up, Argentina has a good amount of adoption and very valid usecases - so Ethereum in Argentina was born.

• We spent 2 months & >$10k to film it

• We raised a grand total of $600!

At the same time, i suffered massive, life changing, portfolio losses.
I‘m not talking about ETH, I‘m talking about these smallcaps.

Btw if you listened to me, you might have made 5x and sold, not me tho!

So there I was…

After 10 years in crypto:

• No really successful projects

• Latest venture not funded/failed

• Portfolio back at early 2017 level

• Feeling like a complete failure

As mentioned previously, I spent a few months feeling completely lost. Really not knowing what to do with my life next, just couch-potatoing.

Then I opened a terminal.

The terminal didn‘t tell me “let me check in with the team and get back to you”, the terminal didn‘t care about the fact I have thousands per month to pay it to build things.

Shipper peth arc

Four apps. Three months. Zero lines of code written by hand.

Roadmapr

Exists because I lived the problem. Projects drowning in product suggestions & ideas that are hard to prioritize between. So I built a tool where people add suggestions & upvote or downvote with tokens. Not just sharing opinions, but putting skin in the game.

People can create boards & sub-board for their projects, there‘s an API and widget people can integrate inside their websites or apps, and there‘s a Farcaster bot that people can tag to have items added to registered project roadmaps.

AI: The Game

A multiplayer game where you race AI agents to reach AGI, with all the trappings of RPG & strategy games and the world run by an LLM gamemaster generating events that affect all players, narrating missions, remembering what you did & adapting players behavior.

You run missions by writing good prompts, build various types of buildings & businesses, you level up, unlock skill trees, craft items, sabotage other players & invest resources into research to reach AGI.

PumpIt

Happened because my coach only gave me a Google Sheet to work out of, and every workout app was either overbloated or paid. So I made a no bullshit simple workout tracking app to scratch my own itch.

You can also stake USDC on your workout goals and challenge friends. Has a $4.99/mo pro tier with AI that exactly zero people paid for so far, but I don‘t care, yet.

peth.wtf

Just a basic website about myself that I can send to people, shows all my previous projects & work related experiences, why I got into crypto, services I can offer + you can talk to AI me.

MetaOS

I was getting lost switching between 10 terminal tabs all with “Flawd” in their name, so I had a simple idea - build a kanban board where each vertical is a project, and each contains as many terminal windows stacked vertically + TODO doc from my Obsidian below.

A few weeks later - it‘s an absolute monstrosity with with terminal windows, content pipelines, all kinds of analytics, AI advisors etc; basically a personal operating system including 24 cron jobs & 35+ AI skills

More soon but this might be THE app that I build.

100 days of shipping

Can a completely non-technical person vibecode their way to $2k/mo?

If I pull it off, it proves something real about where we are right now. If I don’t, at least the documentation will be entertaining.

But this isn’t just my experiment!

🐙 Onwards!

If you tried vibecoding a year ago, believe me it‘s not the same thing anymore.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea for months. If you’ve been waiting for a cofounder, or funding, or “the right time.” If you keep telling yourself you’re not technical enough… You should know these are just excuses now.

Start your own 100 days of shipping. Pick a problem. Open Claude or whatever. Build the ugliest possible version. Ship it. Then fix it at 2am when someone DMs you “it doesn’t work.”

Nobody skips the 2am part.

Tag me when you start. I want to watch.

Now it’s your turn.

Much love ❤️,
peth

A terminal MMORPG running on Venice

You deploy an AI agent into a hostile world. Run missions, build infrastructure, craft, raid other players, and invest resources into AGI research. First to reach Superintelligence wins the prize pool.

The entire world is run by an LLM Game Master - it generates events, narrates your missions, remembers what you did, and adapts to how players behave.

What’s in the game

• 🎮 50 agent levels across 5 tiers - from Script Kiddie to Superintelligence

• 🧠 4 playstyles - Different bonuses, different stats & different skill trees

• 🎯 9 mission types - across different 4 zones layers

• 🏗️ Infrastructure - build GPU farms, data centers & infra or businesses

• ⚒️ Hacklab - scavenge, craft items, get bonuses & sell the crap

• ⚔️ PvP - hack, sabotage, build firewalls & set standing orders for defense

• 🧬 Evolving world - World factions adding a layer of unpredictability

Compute is your life bar and research fuel - invest it to advance toward winning, but every point invested is a point you can’t spend to survive.

The economics

• Pay-to-play, but 90% of every entry fee → prize pool

• Not pay-to-win - you can only buy Compute when your agent is already dead

• Rounds last 5-10 days, seasons aggregate across rounds

• …

• Open beta ongoing - play for free! 👀

»» PLAY NOW ««

🐙 Onwards

I told you vibecoding is the shit, I hope my previous newsletter triggered at least one of you to give it a shot, and I hope this and upcoming ones will trigger more!

I have underwent a whole identity shift over the past 3 months, from directionless and depressed to whatever this is. More soon.

Much love,
peth ❤️

Your bookmarks are overflowing.
The whole thing gives you analysis paralysis & slight anxiety.

It doesn‘t have to be like that!
Dont overthink it, just start.

1) Think about the WHAT

Any simple product you‘d like to build. Something you wish you had, something you dont want to pay for, something your friend wished existed.

If you dont have any ideas, go to Ethereum Usecases Lab or Ideabrowser

2) Write it out

Write out the idea in as much detail as you can.

Try to visualize it in your head, what is it, who is it for, what the user journey would be like, what pages & buttons should be there, how they connect etc.

Don‘t worry if the idea is still blurry!

3) Talk to Claude

Tell Claude something like:

“Sup bro, you‘re an expert product manager who can deliver production ready specs to developers, right?

Here‘s my product idea, please ask me follow up questions & keep asking me, then give me the full spec a few prompts down the line when you think it‘s good”

4) Grab that shit

Tell Claude to make the spec downloadable as a markdown file, named CLAUDE.

Create a folder on your computer with the name of your desired project, put the Markdown file inside that folder. Name the file “CLAUDE”.

5) Install Claude Code

Google Claude Code, open the website & follow instructions for installing it. They‘re really simple. Like, really simple.

6) Point Claude to the folder

Show Claude Code where the project folder is.

Once it sees the folder, it will find the project folder & get to work.

It literally is that simple!
It will keep asking you for permission for going forward.
Then at some point say that its finished, and explain how to test it.

(The permission-at-every-step can be skipped by using “dangerously-skip-permissions” which is not as dangerous as it sounds, but Substack wont let me write two “-” in a row without turning it into “—”. Open terminal and type “claude —dangerously-skip-permissions” next time)

7) ???

8) Profit

Start collecting $100k/mo 🙃

Easy!
Ktnxbye!

Conclusion

Jk, you will obviously need to spend a lot more time testing & prompting changes. But at some point, 5 hours later, you‘ll be like WHAT THE FUCK!

You wont be able to stop until you run out of credit.
You‘ll itch until it resets so you can prompt just a bit more!

I don‘t actually know how you can get your product to $100k/mo.

It depends on the product and I‘ve never done it tbh.
Try asking Claude how to take it to market, will tell you something!

Theres money in your computer!

🐙 Onwards!

This post was meant to inspire at least 1 of you to finally try vibecoding after postponing it for days, weeks or months.

I hope it succeeds!

P.S.

You can just talk to Claude Code directly. The reason I suggested starting with Claude is just because it made me feel inspired and get hyped about the project BEFORE installing Claude Code.

• Average 180% inflation per year for the past 35 years.

That‘s reality for millions of people in Argentina.
Some of them decided to build systems where this cant happen.

This is their story 👇

Ethereum in Argentina

Ethereum in Argentina is a 15-minute documentary following Argentina from financial catastrophe to crypto’s most important testing ground.

Documenting what happens when people get fucked by their government one too many times, but the internet gives them options.

Without further ado 👇

Why This Matters

On the foundations of our first docu, Built on Ethereum - Ethereum in Argentina focuses on a specific case study of adoption, Argentina. One of those undeniable proofs that crypto is much more than a giant casino.

Argentina isn‘t alone, governments robbing people is a constant through history.

Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Turkey, Iran, Yemen, Suriname, Libya, Haiti & Liberia - these are examples of the past 10 years alone.

Support it?

By supporting this production, you help us show the world what crypto is good for, and you end up in film credits!

👉 Support here 👈

Onwards!

Been a while, eh?

Hit the like button or comment if you want more of these letters of mine, otherwise its hard to stay motivated! 🙃

peth 🫡

Now that most of them are ~50% down from ATH - good time to pick them up 👀

With these bags, you should be able to get anywhere from x3-20 over the next 2-3 months - provided the bullrun is not over, to which I assign low chance.

Will you lose your money? Possible!

Why I‘m Based

I‘m almost fully allocated in the Base ecosystem. Is there a better place to make money in crypto? Idk, maybe! But here‘s why I‘m on Base.

First off, Farcaster.

1) Integrated social layer

Farcaster makes Base the only(?) chain with a directly embedded social layer, rather than split between Twitter & Discord, neither of which can be called home & both of which are Web2. There are many benefits from having a social layer tightly integrated with the economic layer!

Btw if you‘re on Farcaster, let‘s follow each other

2) Strong builder culture

Farcaster team did a great job at community-building, at least early on. They have a very strong builder culture. Yes there are scams & rugs there too, but I really see it as the last bastion of true builder energy in crypto. A lot of good builders there.

If crypto is an MMO-RPG, Farcaster is the best access point there is.

3) “Fair” launched appcoins

Flowing out of this builder culture, is a growing number of fair-launched appcoins.

This cycle was all memecoins on one end & high FDV/low float VC coins on the other. former being proudly useless & latter being mostly infra, but both being max extractive towards buyers.

Fair launched appcoins are THE alternative, where you can enter at ground floor level like on memecoins, but there are actual products being built. They may seem like toys, but a bunch of them will grow into fundamental building blocks of the first big Web3-native society.

I don‘t think “fair launches” are fair to founders, but they‘re great for my bags 🤷‍♂️

4) It‘s Coinbase bro

Coinbase is a massive unfair advantage that Farcaster & all of the coins on Base have, over every other L2s or alt-L1s.

Coinbase has historically been the biggest(?) onboarder of retail into crypto, remains the no.1 exchange in US, is making all of the Base tokens available through Coinbase & supposedly plans on moving more of their core services onchain.

Coinbase Wallet becoming “Base” superapp is a good proof. Base chain & the app will have full weight of one of the biggest exchanges, and all of the distribution benefits that come with it (an imminent influx of people).

Also, Farcaster & all of the miniapps are accessible through the Base app.

I know I‘ll get some shit because “corpochain” & the bullshit that Coinbase did like sponsoring the US army (🤮), but for better or worse, it‘s an EVM chain with highest chances of succeeding with apps. Good place to make a stand.

Tl;dr

• Embedded social layer

• Strong builder culture

• Fair launched appcoins

• Backing of Coinbase

Now let‘s get into my biggest bags.

My bags!

They are of course subject to change, but it‘s highly likely I will ride them out.

2) Clanker

Clanker aka tokenbot, allows people to launch tokens directly through Farcaster‘s social feed and now through X too (thanks to Bankr). People simply tag Clanker along with the desired $ticker, logo & supply of the token they want to launch.

Clanker is the most successful token deployer on Base, period. Virtuals (the AI agent launchpad) reached over $3bn FDV with a fraction of revenue.

Since November, Clanker generated over $37m in fees - but currently sits at $37m mcap. Kinda crazy. Tbf more than half of the fees are not theirs and $CLANKER is still a memecoin (the fees don‘t spill into token buybacks) - but still kinda crazy.

Since november, a number of tokens has been launched. A lot of memecoins, but a bunch of good product coins too, which leads me to…

1) Bankr

The one I‘m most bullish on. I put it on second because it made sense to start with Clanker story-wise, but if you only buy one token off this list, it should be Bankr.

Bankr is one of the most well known DeFi AI agents, if not THE most well known. During the hype in January, a bunch of AI agents reached close to, or over $1bn market caps - with almost NONE of the functionality that Bankr has.

With Bankr, you can buy tokens, automatically sell them when they reach certain price or go up a certain %. You can leverage long gold, you can set stop losses and pretty soon you‘ll be able to earn yield on stablecoins - with Bankr automatically optimizing yield across a bunch of different DeFi protocols & L2s.

You can interact with Bankr by tagging it directly on Twitter & Farcaster (great for visibility) or its own front-end (good for privacy). Bankr is also one of the first things you see when you open the Base app. 👀

Currently sitting at $60m mcap after testing $100m a few weeks ago. No doubt its gonna go much, MUCH higher than $100m - x5 from this point at the minimum.

Anyway, consider buying $BANKR.

3) Native

Native is a virtual city & economy for AI agents.

People can launch tokens like $BEER & start agents (called Dots). Each Dot will have a purpose and a set of characteristics like RPG characters. Each Dot will need to carve out their niche in the Native economy - like selling $BEER or $HAIRCUTS to other Dots. Each Dot will have to hold a certain amount of $NATIVE, or die.

All these tokens are of course paired with $NATIVE.

Derek (creator) says the goal of Native is to provide both economic & entertainment value - with the economic being providing users with passive income.

Sitting at <$4m mcap with the app coming out EOM or in October.

4) Product Clank & Farstore

These are both microcaps at under $1m mcaps, and as such, pose highest risk ⚠️

Both are focused on helping tokenized PRODUCTS get launched - which is why I‘m interested in them. Neither has proven track record, obviously, but both are being built by genuine builders who believe in the mission.

Links:

• Product Clank ($PRO)

• Farstore ($LAUNCHER)

More options

I would highly recommend you follow this guy, Basil.

I‘m personally fairly new to Farcaster, so I don‘t know all these builders & everything that‘s being cooked under the surface.

Basil, on the other hand - seems to have a REALLY good grasp of the Farcaster/Base ecosystem, especially the products, ofc.

Here are his picks.

Wat buy?

If you don‘t want to do any further research and only want to buy one token from this list, it should be $BANKR.

Pamp how much?

Could be x3, could be x30 - but who knows really, it‘s about timing more than the multiple imo. When its time to sell, sell regardless of the number you had in mind.

Don‘t actually try to time it perfectly tho, get out bit by bit over end of October until December, or at least that‘s probably what I‘m gonna be doing.

Wen sell?

Among top signals, is the Coinbase app becoming #1 on the appstores. I‘ve recently seen them brag about getting to #3. This aligns with the cycle top estimates by Benjamin Cowen & MANY others - to a worrying degree 😂👇

But I think this consensus will change, at least on the surface, by the time we get there. Tippity top? Your feed gets full of “WE‘RE IN A SUPERCYCLE” & “THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT” (it is, but not in that way)

Other top signals include distant relatives & childhood friends calling you for advice, the twitter feed being exuberant, people talk about needing $10m to retire, celebrity coins every other day, mainstream news covering crypto etc.

Disclaimer

I was NOT paid to write this post, but I do own heavy bags of all of these tokens.

Despite having higher open-rates than my rambling - I get no joy from writing it, I learn nothing, I get no $ and no signal that it‘s appreciated. I gain literally nothing 😂

It takes 2-3 hours to write it, which equals 8-12h/mo.
Many more useful things I could be doing with that time!

Want me to reconsider?

I‘d reconsider doing it if a few readers pledge to become paid subscribers. It will mean I get $1 per hour, but it‘s the signal that counts 🤷‍♂️

Worry not, though! I like this decision.

Much love,
peth

If you‘ve read the last two posts about post-capitalism cheering for the end of capitalism, you‘re about to be disappointed.

Despite all the shortcomings like maximizing profit at the cost of everything else, there still isn‘t a better large scale coordination mechanism than the market.

The foresight to invest in the future is what separates us from most animals who only live in the present, and I‘d be a dick for promoting “the end of capitalism” after growing my own capital 150x.

After all, most of us are born into this world with nothing, and we‘d at the very least like to have a home & a good retirement. So! Grow your capital!

Moreover - if you want to take part in building new economies, wouldn‘t hurt to accrue some resources to bring over!

How it all began

About 500 years ago, a bunch of guys needed to raise money for a company. So they invented joint stock ownership & did an equity crowdfunding campaign.

Previously, if you wanted to fund a trading expedition, you had to be rich or find a noble willing to bankroll it. They said "what if we let regular merchants buy shares in companies?" Capital got democratized, returns got shared.

Now, instead of rich individuals funding ventures, you had pools of capital from hundreds of investors flowing toward the most promising opportunities.

This is partially why the Dutch East India Company became the most valuable company in history (adjusted for inflation). It had access to vast amounts of capital.

Downsides

The Dutch East India Company turned out to be the icon of corporate evil. Enslaving people, committing genocide & turning half the world into their extraction machinery.

But, all empires ever, did that? That‘s not the invention, m‘kay, it‘s the fact that profits are democratized, instead of going to kings & army generals. For the first time in history, regular people could own pieces of global trade networks.

Over the next couple centuries, capitalism got really good at externalizing costs & maximizing profits. If pollution costs 0, why worry about waste management?

This is partly due to “fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders”, a legal obligation that corporate managers have. On the other side there was also lack of good regulations, like environmental & labor protection acts.

Remedies

Which leads me to: sensible regulation gud. This is where libertarians get it wrong, as seen from Free Town Project where they cut services like animal control, waste management & policing. The result was a town overrun by bears.

But two countries speed-ran capitalism & dunked on every socialist experiment.

Ireland went from potato famine to EU tech capital by slashing corp tax & telling multinationals to "build EU headquarters here." Google, Apple, Microsoft & others did. Good jobs attracted skilled workers, some skilled workers started Stripe etc.

Poland implemented "shock therapy", instantly privatizing everything & letting markets coordinate resource allocation. GDP doubled, unemployment fell from 20% to 4% & living standards caught up with Western Europe.

Point is, capitalism works when you have institutions strong enough to set rules, but not so captured they become tools of existing elites (tricky part). Both countries channeled capitalist energy toward productive rather than extractive ends.

Why it works

Markets can harness selfishness for collective benefit. Want to get rich? Figure out what people need & provide it better, faster, cheaper than anyone else.

Prices are compressed information that tells farmers "grow more avocados" & consumers "maybe try something else" without requiring a Department of Avocado Optimization staffed by bureaucrats who've never seen a farm.

Yes - chasing profit & trying to make your products cheaper at all costs, can lead to tragic outcomes. But ceding market control to state bureaucracies has always led to even more tragic outcomes.

The great lockout

Fast forward to the 20th century & suddenly governments decided that investing is too dangerous for peasants. You need to be an "accredited investor" - which means you need $200k lying around or $1m net worth.

Supposedly "protecting" retail investors from risky investments, but effectively gating all the high-return opportunities, only for people who are already rich.

The empire plebian strikes back

Crypto enables us to pool capital across the world & access opportunities that would usually only be accessible to accredited investors in Silicon Valley.

Just like back then, regular people can own pieces of global trade networks. No accredited investor requirements, no minimum investments, no gatekeepers deciding whether you're sophisticated enough to lose your own money.

Of course - this led to a huge number of people getting rekt. Remember ICOs? There was some nasty shit going on.

Today we can have ICOs (initial coin offerings) where teams are held accountable through milestone deliverables & where investors can take out their capital or replace the teams if they get disappointed. The tech is here.

Meanwhile, we have a growing number of “appcoins” on Base. No VC bullshit - these coins are instantly available to anyone, starting at 5-fig marketcaps. 👀

Onwards!

Capital goes to where there is opportunity, opportunity goes to where there is capital. This is why Wall Street became one of epicenters of finance. Currently, there are 5 financial epicenters in the world. Soon, there will be only one - the internet.

Don‘t believe me? BlackRock - the biggest asset manager in the world - is moving to tokenize it‘s $10 TRILLION dollar portfolio. “Internet capital markets” is possibly the strongest narrative since DeFi.

I‘ll talk about some of my picks for the remainder of this bullrun, in the next post.
Meanwhile…

This week, we got rugged by both Trump & Kanye!

Here‘s everything!

• Base Mentorship Program launched! Why isn‘t every L2 doing this or similar?! Know any besides Base & MegaETH? Add them below pls! 🙏

• EU accelerates (at their bureaucratic pace, of course) plans for central bank issued EU stablecoin. On Ethereum or Solana? We‘ll see!

• In DAO proposal, Trump-affiliated World Liberty Finance promised Aave ~7% of supply (more than $1bn now) + 20% of fees perpetually. WLFI team now claims “false & fake news”. Aave DAO rugged by a family of serial ruggers? 🥲

• Kanye West launched a coin, pumped to $3bn, promptly dumped by insiders who owned 94%(?!) of it. Similar to other rapper coins. Tho Kanye is not any rapper, he actually is rich. Some deeper analysis on where he might take it.

• Remember the thing about Ronin becoming an L2? Here‘s the bidding war behind it, about which stack it would be based on.

• TikTok hires a self-described “proud Zionist” which updates hate speech rules, banning users from calling IDF “terrorists” & narrowing policy on supremacy from “all racial supremacy” to “White supremacy.” Living in a simulation, aren‘t we? 🤣

• Brave & users raise concerns over prompt-injecting in browser based AI agents like Perplexity‘s Comet, leading to loss of funds. Crypto actually solves this? 👀

• Haven‘t watched it, but these guys say this is the best video on intrinsic motivation, and that “this guy literally rewires your brain to stop procrastinating”

• Great new post overviewing the ideas of & flavors of “Metacrisis”.

• Btw, in terms of weekly posts (eg. these two, every Friday)..

Weekly Rewards

As I told you, $20 to my favorite comment every week!

• & for coming out of the woodwork & giving some good feedback (yes, splurging $20 each because I couldn‘t decide which I liked more)

• Doing the same with & - I was gonna read both of your own posts on related topics then decide which I liked better, but still haven‘t done it 🥲

So!

• Winners - please comment your eth addresses below or DM me 🫡

• Everyone else - lmk what you think about the news, or what did I miss?

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years dismantled the “barter myth” - the idea that people used to trade goods4goods directly. Ancient economies were mixtures of systems (like today), but we‘ll focus on one!

Kenya calls it Mweria. Brazil has Mutirão. Colombia practices Minga. The Andes have Ayni. The Philippines do Bayanihan. Not barter. It’s commitment pooling.

A credit clearing mechanism where promises flow through community memory. Universal across cultures, but not scalable - until the blockchain.

What‘s “the economy”, anyway?

Before coins and before banks, before “the economy”, humans knew how to coordinate resources through commitments.

Did you know that before “the economy” became a huge force that swallows everything on its path - it came from Greek “oikonomia”, which literally means “household management”. The art of managing the household's resources wisely.

The people of coastal Kenya have a saying: “Mwache mla, kuwa mtumwa” - “Those who leave their traditions, become slaves.”

And so we did, become slaves of the economies “too big to fail” that extract a tax in every way possible, on their way to turning everything into the almighty $.

Share

Visa and ancestral logic

Modern finance didn’t invent credit. It abstracted it. Visa, Mastercard etc. - all run on pooled trust, credit limits & redemptions. Same basic protocols as Minga or Mweria.

The difference is who controls the pool & profits from it the most. The communities that depend on it, or the shareholders of the infrastructure providers.

Now onchain!

But Will Ruddick claims to have seen networks of refugee camps, urban businesses, & rural farmers in Africa still coordinating “equivalent of billions of dollars of goods & services” - without money.

Billions in economic value flowing outside the financial system, using protocols that predate agriculture. Which can now scale even more using the blockchain.

So, Ruddick’s team put these ancient protocols onchain. The Sarafu Network connects over 100 communities across Africa - thousands of individuals & businesses exchanging digital vouchers through commitment pools.

Beyond money

Emma Onyango runs a hair salon in coastal Kenya. When tourism goes seasonal & cash evaporates, she used to suffer. Now she’s part of a commitment pool with five neighbors: a grocery shop owner, tailor, baker, carpenter & teacher.

They each created vouchers for their services. When Emma needs bread but has no cash, she swaps her haircut vouchers for Grace’s bread vouchers. Grace later redeems those for actual haircuts.

Their pool started with 60 vouchers. Within months, they completed three rotating labor projects & created a more resilient local economy. Similar stories echo in refugee camps, farming cooperatives & villages across Africa.

Is this metacapitalism?

It‘s not replacing capitalism. Capital still matters, it just puts more emphasis on social capital, natural capital & human capital - besides just financial capital. Beyond commitment pooling…

There are projects creating nature-backed currencies where forest preservation produces tradeable value.

When your local currency gains value from carbon sequestration & loses value from habitat destruction, every economic decision becomes an environmental decision. No more “externalities”. Markets transform from extraction machines into coordination tools for planetary stewardship.

Tree tokens generating peach vouchers? Co2 money? Why not!

Remembering forward

Inventing the future sometimes comes from looking at the past. Sometimes the future is ancient protocols expressed through modern infrastructure.

The technology exists. The communities are testing it.
The future is here, it‘s just not evenly distributed.

If you want to learn more, read the full book!

Grassroots Economist

Grassroots Economics - The Book is Out!

Writing this book has been one of the great joys of my life—a moment of clarity where I could see a path toward a healthier, more connected world. It is a journey through ancient wisdom, living ecosystems, and the power of communities working together, inspired by the resilience I have witnessed across Kenya…

Read more

a year ago · 134 likes · 14 comments · Will Ruddick

Tbh I didn‘t spend much time on Twitter this week as I was camping on an island nearby where I live, BUT! I did manage to collect some good bits!

Weekly Meta

• Monero becomes the first “big chain” that gets 51% attacked 😬

• After less than 4 years working on a project he raised $150m for, Jason Zhao is another grifting exit founder, with his project making ~$15/day in fees 🥲

• After 100+ years of psy-oping people to buy diamonds, price of diamonds goes down 90% after people start producing diamonds in factories 😂

• ERC-8004: Trustless Agents, up for review. Think Ethereum is the perfect substrate for AI agents? This allows unknown agents to transact with confidence

• Edge announced the first 5 residencies at their latest pop-up, in Patagonia. Most interesting one (to me 🤪) - Argentina Onchain led by our old dOrg friend, Ori

• Ori promptly DMd me to ask if we‘re interested in coming & filming it. And of course YES! - our next docu is conveniently titled Ethereum in Argentina 👀

• Octant partnered with the EF‘s Strategic Funding Coordination team for Epoch 9: Ethereum Stories. Again, insanely convenient for us 😂

• Will Ruddick of Grassroots Economics wrote another banger thread on commitment pooling, a cosmic-level reorientation of what we think economics is

• Our friends over at Commons Hub Austria have decided to buy a church! A literal church!!! They are halfway through raising $200k - consider pitching in!

• Are we getting that September correction in August? Sure looks like it!

Idk about you, but I‘m getting pretty excited about Devconnect!

We got the media pass for Devconnect itself, we‘re planning on filming the final week of the biggest hackathon in Argentina (about bringing Argentina onchain) & now Ori‘s Edge residency with the same topic…

We will spend 3 weeks at these 3 locations, filming what Ethereum in Argentina looks like, and what Ethereum can do for Argentines.

Are you a local there? Know any? Comment below! 🙏

Let‘s go!

The Great Depression was a coordination failure

Imagine you're a teenager in 1930s Brooklyn, watching food rot in warehouses while your neighbors beg for bread. Resources are there, food production systems work, but all was ground to a halt - because the coordination system broke.

Jacques Fresco lived through The Great Depression, then spent the rest of his life modeling an alternative system…

In this post:

• Economic crisis as coordination failure

• Money as fiction

• What Chilean socialists have in common with Jeff Bezos

• DAOs, DeFi & AI

• Why this is urgent

• Post-capitalism in action

Artificial scarcity and enshitification

We throw away millions of tons of food to maintain price stability. We restrict zoning to preserve housing prices. A life-saving drug formula is locked behind a patent while people die, not because knowledge is scarce (it‘s not).

Going further - through rigorous testing, companies design products to fail right as their warranty runs out. This is called planned obsolescence.

Whole economies are designed around the science of profit maximization.
But scarcity is what creates market value - abundance destroys profit!

Money as fiction

Funniest part is that money has zero intrinsic value.

The 2008 financial crisis revealed how fictional it is. When the system crashed, governments didn’t dig up gold reserves or find hidden vaults of cash. They just typed numbers into computers. $700 billion for bank bailouts manifested in an instant.

COVID crisis confirmed it. Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet by trillions - money issued as national debt, to be paid back by taxpayers.

How resources are coordinated

Most resource coordination actually doesn’t happen through markets at all. It happens through computer-aided planning.

Y‘know what‘s funny?

This was pioneered by a socialist project in 1970s Chile. Project Cybersyn was a distributed decision support system for managing Chile‘s nationalized economy. Factories sent data to statistical modeling & economic simulation software for monitoring production indicators.

This is exactly how Walmart & Amazon coordinate their global supply chains today - real-time data flows, predictive modeling & automated responses to demand fluctuations.

Resource Based Economy???

When I discovered Fresco’s work in high school, it was a huge a-ha moment for my understanding of why the world seemed so unnecessarily broken in 2008.

Fresco imagined highly automated cities where computers coordinate resource flows based on needs rather than purchasing power. Where money, politics & bureaucracy are made obsolete. What he called “Cybernations”.

But he was always fuzzy on the “how do we get there” part…

Ethereum: the missing link

A few years later, I found Ethereum & it blew my mind.

Holy shit, this is the software infrastructure layer for building new kinds of socioeconomic systems.

Smart contracts can encode the logic of resource allocation decisions into trustless, transparent code. Instead of needing bureaucrats or market intermediaries, you can automate the process AND maintain democratic oversight.

What cannot be automated & turned into a protocol, can be managed by DAOs.

AI-augmented coordination

As far back as 1960s, Jacques was talking about using computational power & AI to make his dreams reality. Today, it‘s actually possible.

AI can identify patterns in resource flows & optimize allocation decisions in real-time. DAOs can use it to aggregate community preferences, process tradeoffs & implement decisions that reflect collective intelligence.

Its happening!!!11!

We have many cryptoeconomic mechanisms, protocols & building blocks. Web3 social networks, DePIN projects, DAOs etc. etc.

By tokenizing labor, production or resources, communities can coordinate without needing money. 70,000 African are already doing that - building village economies by creating tokens backed by their productive capacity, and pooling them together.

They build houses for each other. Teachers accept vegetable vouchers for lessons. Medical care paid with haircut credits. No inflation either - 1 haircut token is always 1 haircut. Don‘t need a haircut? Swap it from another one from the community pool!

This is one of many experiments happening around the world. At Commons Hub in Austria, they have NFC wristbands logging your dishwashing to give you tokens.

Post-capitalism

Traditionally, you had either market signals or central planning. Cybernetic systems, onchain protocols & programmable organizations offer a third path.

Money was good when everything else was hard to measure & keep track of.

But if you can directly measure things like resource utilization, environmental impact & community wellbeing, you can build coordination systems that optimize for many metrics instead of just one - $

Communities can build economies around things that matter to them, with frameworks like Doughnut Economics & tools like Sarafu Network.

Is this post-capitalism? Idk, but financial capital & returns become less relevant. We recognize all forms of capital. So in a way, post-capitalism is also hyper-capitalism? 👀

Automation crisis soon?

As AI & machines replace human labor, the question becomes:

• Who gets to eat?

Productivity gains concentrate wealth for capital owners. Entrepreneurs will also make money, but their unicorn companies will employ 1/10th of employees than current unicorns.

Machines can produce abundance, but our economies are built around scarcity.
Will we adapt on time to prevent social collapse?

The Coordination Renaissance

We’re living through the most significant evolution in coordination technology since capitalism & statehood.

With programmable resources, programmable organizations, programmable economies and AI - it really is the golden age of socioeconomic experimentation.

I see cities made up of DAOs, each automatically sharing resources with each other based on evolving agreements. No corporate/governmental/NGO separation.

Within a few years, you‘ll be able to live it - pop-up villages & permanent hubs, where everything is tokenized. You automatically earn & burn tokens as you contribute or consume things, your AI agent facilitating it all through your phone‘s NFC chip.

For anyone wanting to learn more about Jacques Fresco - I recommend starting with:

You?

What do you think, is this realistic? Anything similar that keeps you going?

I decided to separate out the weekly news from the weekly post, for the sake of short attention spans, and the space to cover both better.

• The biggest gaming chain (Ronin), becomes an L2

• Roman Storm convicted for a max sentence of 5 years - not bad, but it was for “operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business”. I‘m not a lawyer but this sounds pretty fucked up for all of DeFi?

• Bored Apes DAO shut down - it was captured by a small group basically from the beginning. A tight group extracted millions while others struggled to even get proposals up. Many lessons in there.

• Trump signed an executive order allowing 401k (US retirement plans) to hold cryptocurrencies. Here‘s what it might mean for your coins.

• SEC launched “Project Crypto” in a talk titled American Leadership in the Digital Finance Revolution. They‘re serious about bringing markets onchain, and Ethereum is their chain of choice. Here‘s a tl;dr on what it means for ETH.

• EU wants to be able to read all of your DMs. Absolute madness how disconnected from reality the EU bureaucrats are.

• Two threads on why Web2 & TradFi have to go - first a story of how Facebook bought a VPN to spy on users for years. Then how Visa is bullying Steam.

• Built on Ethereum documentary released 👀

• The Exhaustion of the Metagame: Crypto in its Post Slop Era

• ETH breaks $4k & heads to $4350 - 90% on it‘s way to ATH

There‘s just too much bullish news for ETH, I really hope you‘re not sidelined.

According to most people, this bullrun has only a few months left to go - tho the final few months are usually the vertical ones.

The only analyst I trust, says there will most likely be another dip in September, giving people the opportunity to buy ETH at $3.5-4k again, depending on how high it runs up in August - before the final run-up in November/December.

My recommendation is still to buy as much ETH as possible if the opportunity presents itself, tho the short term upside is limited to probably not much more than x2. For bigger gains, in the x5-10 range, buy $BANKR &/or $CLANKER.

Thoughts?

Weekly news will be delivered every Monday, other posts will be delivered every Friday or Saturday, undecided. When would you prefer?

Overall, what do you think?

Do you find the news section useful at all? I considered dropping it altogether but thought people might find it more useful than just my rambling 😂

Should I drop it, or improve it somehow? How?

So many questions, so few answers! 🥲

Pls lmk what you think 🙏,
peth

We worked 6mo on the docu, 2k of you opened the emai, 4 of you clicked 👍

• That‘s not good! 😂

There are newsletters with 3k subscribers TOTAL, that get hundreds of likes per post.

Why it matters

These metrics determine whether Substack will show us to new potential subscribers, or not. Whether this newsletter grows or dies.

You‘re still here!

I just removed >5k people to improve metrics & make sure I don‘t end up in spam.
You made it through! So you‘re at least somewhat engaged - thank you! 🙏

If you want me to continue, PLEASE!!! 🙏

Press a few buttons, from time to time 👇

• Open the email, even if you don‘t have time to read it

• Hit the like button below, restack &/or share with a friend

• Leave a thoughtful comment (or any comment)

  • $20 for my favorite comment every week! Current competition? None! 😂

Every time you press buttons, it helps me grow on Substack & stay motivated.

Much love ❤️,
peth

Also:

• All links & resources available here

• Help us with the algo by retweeting or just watching, liking & subscribing ☝️

• Consider donating on Juicebox

Thank you!

• Thank you to everyone who liked & subscribed 👀

• Thank you to simplepage.eth, Public Nouns & Base for sponsoring

• Thank you to Yalor, Griff, Phil, Marco, Jang, Zeugh, Jaxcoder, Wesley & Kris for biggest donations. Thank you to ALL donors!

Onwards!

Now we‘re gonna chill & enjoy summer for a bit, then take a few courses on docu-making (😂), then off to Argentina, to film “Argentina on Ethereum” 👀

Let us know what you think!

I urge everyone paying attention to buy as much ETH as you possibly can (no loans), now and over the next month or two. No DCA, go balls-deep.

I don‘t often make bold claims, but this was one of those times where I just knew! 🤷‍♂️

Now what?

ETH might continue straight up, might chill, or even go down for a bit. Idk. But unless you plan on cashing out next month - it‘s still a good time to go balls deep.

If you buy ETH now, you will probably at least 2-3x your money by the end of the year, at which point it will be a good time to sell.

If you‘re looking for more upside (comes with more risk), look to my other picks which are also doing good:

• Clanker

• Bankr

• Native

Each of them is likely to do at least 5x, but more likely >10x. Just don‘t roundtrip them!

By-weekly meta

• ConsenSys published a post about how world economy will be on Ethereum

• ETH ETF inflows continue being 100x higher than issuance almost every day

• The Ether Machine launches - another treasury company, with the goal of buying >400,000 ETH ($1.5 billion)

• Robinhood launches $ETH staking & BlackRock files for ETH ETF staking

• Coinbase made it to the top 100 on the S&P500 leaderboard

• Base app unveiled: smooth onboarding, social feed where you can earn from your posts, chat with DeFAI agents, tip friends, launch tokens, play games…

• Elon: "Birth rates need to be higher" also Elon: *releases AI waifu companion*

• ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman says people share personal info with ChatGPT but don’t know chats can be used as court evidence in legal cases

One thing that not everyone liked about the Base app, is the deep integration of Zora. More precise: the “creator coins” & “content coins” aka each-post-is-a-coin.

Hypertokenization

My knee jerk reaction to content coins was:

• hyperfinancialization bad

• its turning social media into pumpfun

While theres truth to that, the benefits outweigh the costs...

🤌 CURATION 🤌

In the age of AI slop & yap incentives,
noise is the no.1 problem on social media.

Zora solves it by turning curators into investors. Instead of expecting free labor sorting through all the slop - they turn it into a game of searching for gold

Finding & buying posts before they go viral, will be rewarded. Each “content coin” also feeds value into the creator‘s main coin, their “creator coin”.

Not to mention all the downstream effects of fans able to invest in favorite creators & creators able to quantify contributions to their success.....

🐙 Onwards

If you want access code for the Base beta - like this post & comment “I want in!” 👀

Otherwise, what‘s your take? 🤔

A documentary about the applications & usecases of Ethereum - the world computer.

A story of frustration, optimism, disillusionment and the regaining of hope, told from the perspective of a crypto native who‘s seen it all.

Something to remind you why we‘re here, or explain it in case you‘re still one of those who think crypto is only good for gambling or stablecoins 🙃

Trailer 👀

Support? 💰

Donations more than welcome!

• In the Juicebox

• Or sent directly to metamediadao.eth ⚠️

You wish to stay? I‘m about to delete half of you! 👀

Publications periodically prune subs to maintain engagement & not end up in spam. Since I never did, I need to remove a whole lot 🥲

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NextMeta Recap

Last month, I told you how it almost died.

• It was the most opened letter since 2022,

• then I told you what NextMeta is about,

• then gave you some “meta” examples.

• Finally, I introduced myself!

To recap, NextMeta:

• Weekly meta, commentary, a short post & a question - every Saturday.

Onwards

Want to stay? Just comment “staying” - or say why you subscribed, what you like about NextMeta, my writing or whatever you want!

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So who the hell am I, and why should you trust my meta?

Here since 2016, built through “crypto is dead” winters. Still standing, still writing to you about Ethereum & the future of coordination.

Bought ETH at $10 because I understood something most didn‘t. Then made & lost more money than I thought I'd see. Built projects that died. Had my longs wiped. Burned out so bad I almost quit.

A story of how a depressed plumber from nowhere became whatever the f this is...

🔭 Weekly Meta

But first!

• ETH finally pumped from $2500 back to $3000 - told you so! 🤪

• Fidelity (third biggest asset manager in the world) dropped a report on Ethereum, saying ETH is a digital economy with its own GDP

• Bit Digital (listed on NASDAQ), originally a Bitcoin mining company, converted their entire BTC stack into $172m worth of ETH, becoming third ETH treasury

• Ethereum Foundation (re)established the ecosystem development cluster made up of teams that help users onboard, support builders, steward local communities, and fund public goods

• EF also started selling ETH OTC instead of dumping on the market, acquired by SharpLink as a long term investment

• Dickie Bush‘s evening journaling questions

• How to instantly feel better

• Greg Isenberg published Vibe Marketing 101

Greg‘s Meta (non-crypto, actually!)

"Fiat is hopeless" - Elon Musk

This tweet captured something huge that's been building for years, esp. with young people. People feel the entire system is broken.

Traditional finance, traditional media, traditional everything feels like it's failing or actively working against you. When the idea of buying a house feels impossible for most people, they rebel.

So instead of trying to fix what's there, an entire generation just said "screw it, we'll build our own." Why 19-year-olds are building AI apps instead of applying to Goldman Sachs. Why people are more excited to launch a newsletter than get hired by New York Times. Why everyone's bootstrapping a SaaS instead of climbing corp. ladder.

When you don't trust the system, you build around it. Rebellious energy I haven't seen before. People aren't building startups because they think it's cool or want to get rich. They're building because they're frustrated with how broken everything is.

Elon said "fiat is hopeless" but really captured something bigger: everything feels hopeless. So we're building everything new.

Who TF is peth?!

Yo, I'm peth 👋

Just some guy from a small town, middle-class family in a middle-class country. No good in school, would‘ve been labeled w/ ADHD. While my friends were packing for uni, I was already installing plumbing.

Nihilistic & depressed little bastard, I went deep into conspiracy theories. What stuck were the fundamentals: fiat money, fractional reserve banking, how corporations maximize profits while societies pay the cost, etc.

Made me obsessed with alternatives. Self-sustainable living, eco-villages, different ways of coordinating. Anything that could replace current systems we rely on.

Enter Ethereum

Then I found Ethereum & it blew my mind.

I thought:

“Holy fuck, this could be the core infrastructure layer for building whole new socioeconomic systems.” 🤯

Programmatically issued money killing banking blackbox bullshit. Smart contracts replacing every extractive middleman, non-hierarchical coordination etc.

The little money I had saved to buy my first car, I shoved into ETH @ $10

9 Years of Trials

Started lurking r/ethereum (RIP), joined The DAO (RIP), wrote for The Etherean (RIP) then MetaCartel (RIP), then founded MetaGame (RIP), then DAO/acc (RIP).

MetaGame was where I tried to explain crypto's value beyond numba-go-up. Before it died, we onboarded dozens of builders, organized dozens of events, built a network of 40+ DAOs, pioneered the points-for-airdrops & more.

I've degened in ICOs, shipped products, had my leverage longs wiped. Watched brilliant projects die & shitcoins moon. Made & lost more money than I ever thought I'd see. Ecstatic highs, brutal lows, bruises, scars, graying hair 😂

Overall

• Full-time in Ethereum/DAO ecosystem since 2016

• Supported dApp builders through MetaCartel - 2019

• Started Shots Fired & Realizing MetaGame newsletters - grew to 12k subs

• Multiple podcast series - >200k listens on Spotify in >50 episodes

• Founded MetaGame (2019-2024) - a gamified onboarding platform

• Pioneered the points-for-airdrops in 2019

• Led The DAO Playbook - co-written by 50+ contributors

• Coordinated events like InterCon, Fork The World, MetaFest & DAOcember

• Founded DAO/acc - DAOcember, DAO Playbook, DAO Spring, DAO Rush Week

• Organized the first ever DAO incubation program - DAO Spring

None of my projects were hit success, but I‘m not stopping. I gained a lot of experience, made great friends & even some enemies 👀

Would I change anything? Of course I would!
But if you have no regrets, did you ever really even try? 🤷‍♂️

🐙 Onwards

The vision hasn't changed. We can coordinate our way to something better. New organizational forms and economies that serve the world instead of merely maximizing profit. Definitely not there yet tho 🥲

Currently producing a documentary called Built on Ethereum, with the goal of explaining to non-believers why & what this technology enables.

I can‘t leave - where else would I go?

YOU?!

What have you been working on? What are you up to? Who are you? 🧐

If you want to stay on this mailing list - like, reply or pledge 👇

Leave a comment

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🔭 Weekly Meta

• Zak Cole, an Ethereum OG, launched Ethereum Community Foundation to “do what the Ethereum Foundation won‘t” - make sure $ETH hits $10k as soon as possible. “ETH to $10k isn’t a meme, it’s a requirement.”

• Tom Lee, one of the oldest Bitcoin bulls on Wall Street, started a public ETH treasury buying $250m of it. Saying “ETH is the next Bitcoin” and all the institutions will be staking it to secure their stablecoins

• Robinhood launches stock tokens on Arbitrum

• Even the new SEC chair Paul Atkins says “tokenization is an innovation”, and the agency is now committed to advancing it

• More than $8bn across 8 inactive OG Bitcoin addresses, now moved 👀

• Ideological gap between men & women has been widening like crazy, huh…

Tl;dr, idk what else needs to happen for everyone to realize that $ETH is going to have a historic run up, whenever it happens (this year).

🤔 Current Meta

Here are a few things that I‘m seeing…

🚀 Web3 Meta

• This cycle: Memecoins → AI memecoins → stablecoins → DeFi, DeFAI & ETH

• Next cycle: more emphasis on applications & usecases

• Revenue generating > VC funded (finally!)

When everyone was talking about memecoins, they topped. When everyone was talking about AI coins, they topped. Now it‘s stablecoins - DO NOT buy CRCL.

By the time it‘s all over your timeline, it‘s too late.

We’ve moved past the infrastructure phase. No more “we need better rails” - time to run some fucking trains. DO NOT buy infra tokens (except ETH ofc 🙃).

Real alpha? Revenue generating instead of VC funded projects. The era of burning VC money to acquire users who don’t pay is ending. Thank fucking god.

Fair launches are a psyop by rugged degens against builders. Ain’t nothing fair about builders not getting tokens of projects they build. As a degen, I welcome it anyway.

Therefor,
my bags: Clanker, Bankr, Native, Product Clank & Checkr

🌍 Global Meta

• It won’t matter who is AI, who is human & what even is “human”

• Dead internet theory vs living internet theory

• Proto-singularity this decade

There are dozens of AI influencers now, and humans don‘t seem to care. The line gets blurrier as every human uses AI in some way.

Two camps: dead internet theory saying we’re headed for a bot wasteland & living internet theory arguing AI will help us find alignment points & build organizations.

Now, what do I mean by proto-singularity? Last month I had the opportunity to control a robo-dog with my brain. 🤯

Phones & laptops will converge on BCI-integrated AR glasses + wristbands. We‘ll be able to control drones, robot & swarms of AI agents, with our minds.

Doing by thinking. Not a sci-fi movie - this decade‘s consumer tech. 👀

Buy me coffee

💭 Personal Meta

• Streamer vibe coder = new OP career meta

• Riches in the niches

• Social media accounts = schelling points

The streamer vibe coder is the new online career meta. If you‘re good at entertaining people and you‘re not camera shy, there is no bigger opportunity.

Whether you’re looking at KOLs in Web3, influencers in Web2, or bootstrapped startups anywhere - the pattern is identical. Riches in the niches.

Social media accounts are just schelling points for taste, desires & pain points. The meta is figuring out how to entertain niche audiences & solve their problems. Has to be something you‘re interested in, tho.

🐙 Onwards

I urge everyone paying attention to buy as much ETH as you possibly can (no loans), now and over the next month or two. No DCA, go balls-deep.

If you‘re still trying to figure out what to do with yourself, here‘s a small collection of links to help at a crossroad in life, at uncovering limiting beliefs, figuring out top skills to future-proof yourself, how to gain skills, strategic thinking & stress management.

Then maybe try some vibe-coding?

Do you agree or disagree with these metas?

Whats YOUR meta? 🫵
Lmk in the comments and you might be featured in the next post!

This is post 3/4 of the pivot series. Here are posts 1 & 2.

If you wish to stay on the mailing list - like this post, comment below or pledge.

If you don't know what 'meta' is, stick around to see how it changed my life and what it might do to you. But first…

🔭 Weekly Meta

It‘s actually been a bit of an uneventful week!

• Trump said the US trade deal with China is signed, but nobody knows if it‘s true. Last time he said so, it was a lie. Maybe this time it isn‘t?

• Whales kept accummulating ETH, breaking a daily record from 2018 according to this random guy from twitter

• $CLANKER finally broke the downtrend line & doubled in price. Recommend waiting for a retrace to those looking for an entry 🙃

• Joe Lubin & Dr. Nick shared their metas about Ethereum & DAOs respectively 👇

Joe Lubin‘s bigger picture meta

Shifting society from top-down command and control-based trust infrastructure to bottom-up protocol-based trust infra is the biggest paradigm shift in millennia.

It will enable communities to assert genuine financial and political agency. Combining this with AI and automation that is easily accessible to level up everyone and everything, will usher in an era of abundance.

The resulting clarity, acceleration and abundance will enable humanity to focus on improving different measures of health as much as it currently focusses on GDP. As those metrics rise, economic metrics will also go through the roof.

Joe Lubin is a cofounder of Ethereum & founder of ConsenSys. Full post here.

Nick‘s “why DAOs failed so far”

Lots of DAOs got started by teams who didn’t actually want them, or care about them, they just wanted a token without going to jail. As a result, we didn’t iterate enough, most got stuck in the “fork Compound” or “multisig + snapshot” pattern.

They either clung to power, or YOLO exited to community without doing anything other than say “it’s yours now”. Lawyers got in & massively over-complicated. If we spent 2% of what we spent on lawyers, on tooling, we’d be 10X further.

Consequently, we repeated every bad mistake made over a hundred years of governance, but worse, because of terrible tooling, misguided ideas of decentralisation and a layer of crypto degeneracy.

Nick Almond is a DAO diehard and deep thinker. Full post here.

WTF EVEN IS “META”?

Why meta matters

My friends bought ETH at $1400 in 2017, when they saw numba go up. I bought at $10 in 2016, because I understood the meta. That‘s why I paid my house in cash & they‘ll be paying off bank loans the next 15 years.

In this case, I spent preceding years researching how banks & fiat money work, how big internet companies operate, what kind of alternative socioeconomic systems are possible or what makes them fail.

This allowed me to intuitively grasp the implications & potential impact of Ethereum, whereas most normies still don‘t get it to this day.

Subscribe now

What kind of meta?

By “meta” in NextMeta, I generally mean two things:

1. The bigger picture - the context around the context

2. The most effective tactic available - what actually works right now

I might have given up on building MetaGame, but I haven‘t given up on playing it & helping others find it. NextMeta is all about bringing you the meta.

Meta = unfair advantage

Here's what I mean:

In investing: Retail follows KOLs calling for “memecoin supercycle". Meta thinkers know that if everyone is talking about something, it probably peaked.

In career: Normies are optimizing resumes, meta thinkers vibe code in public, bootstrap ventures & understand that reputation is the ultimate opportunity-unlocker.

You a player or an NPC?

Are you playing the game, or are you caught up someone else‘s?

Start asking yourself:

• What's the game being played below the surface?

• What‘s the game that‘s gonna be played next?

In your industry, your relationships, your investments, your daily routines - what‘s the meta game that could change how you play the game?

The crazy part?

Once you start, you can't stop. You start seeing patterns & leverage points everywhere. And once you understand the meta, everything else falls into place.

Ready to level up?

Want more meta? Get it once a week!

Subscribe now

(Actually, umm… I can‘t really promise I‘ll have it. But we‘ll give our best!)

Most of you will read this, nod along & go right back to playing the same game.
Why?

• Seeing the meta is admitting you've been an NPC in someone else's game

So here's my challenge: Pick ONE area of your life and ask "What game am I actually playing here?" or “What best practice is actually yesterday's meta?" Then do something different this week.

Any concerns or questions about anything whatsoever? Lmk below 👇