Crypto is a medium — just like painting. Every medium has its own set of tools, which act as a doorway to infinite creative possibilities. To the painter, paintbrushes are the starting point. They are a source of inspiration, a bridge for the artist to enter a space of curiosity and play.

In crypto, the tools at hand are smart contracts. There are fundamental sets of smart contracts being built today that feel to me like crypto paintbrushes. Here are 3 that inspire me:

1. Splits (e.g. Splits)
   Onchain splits lay the groundwork for piping money naturally across the Internet. By programming splits logic into a smart contract, splits not only remove middlemen from revenue administration, they also unlock the ability to create any number of economic legos. Recoup, Diversifier and Liquid Splits are just a few examples of what these can look like.

2. Token Streaming (e.g. Superfluid)
   This talk by Andreas Antonopoulos really cracked open this idea for me of streaming money. He explains that by making money programmable, we have fundamentally changed its physics. Money is no longer discrete, solid units, but it is more like a wave — a flow constantly in motion. With tools like Superfluid and Sablier, this idea of money as a flow comes to life. We can stream money to each other in real time. This creates interesting opportunities for things like vesting, salary pay and subscriptions — but my instincts tell me that this can unlock far greater creative vistas.

3. Onchain Roles (e.g. Hats)
   Hats protocol is bringing organizations onchain. They do so by treating roles as the atomic unit of an organization, and encoding roles' permissions, responsibilities and relationships to one another via onchain data. This feels like fundamental logic for building coordination networks over the Internet. Exposing this base layer logic feels like an exciting set of tools that can be used to craft new ways of organizing. 

As you can see, I’m not creating a laundry list of the problems these tools may solve. I am instead trying to expose the latent creative energy in each of these tools — crypto paintbrushes for a new medium that can affect things like coordination, distribution, economics, and identity.

Get painting.