My guest this week has many passions, many of which align closely with how I see development and growth in the crypto space and beyond. Noak Lindqvist brings a refreshing perspective to Web3, combining over two decades of corporate consulting experience with his current mission as a blockchain entrepreneur.
What makes Noak's insights particularly valuable is his pre-crypto career trajectory. While many in this space jumped straight from college into DeFi, Noak spent 20+ years at Accenture helping Fortune 500 companies optimise their operations. This corporate background gives him a unique lens on blockchain's potential and its limitations. Now, he's channeling that expertise into solving some of Web3's most fundamental challenges: establishing digital identity without compromising privacy, creating genuinely stable currencies, and mobilising blockchain technology for social impact.
Our conversation covered everything from the philosophy of money to the technical details of verifying humanity online. Here are five key insights that stood out from our wide-ranging discussion. You can listen to our conversation in full at the embedded link at the bottom of this article.
Looks like we’re back to putting the quote right in the heading. But I think that Noak beautifully summed up what we’re building here. For those who feel I’ve thrown them right into the deep end, here’s a quick catch-up of these 3 epochs of the internet:
Web 1 was effectively a bunch of forums, where information flowed from the publisher to the reader.
In Web 2.0, we added more media, photos, music and video. There was a social component too, where we built communities that would interact and engage. Information flowed in multiple directions, and users became publishers.
Web3 is where it starts getting a little more loosely defined. We know it’s happening right now, but it’s a quite a while yet before we can quantify what makes this unique. We know it’s different, but we’ll know what truly sets it apart only with the benefit of hindsight.
We do know that Ethereum is Web3, and enables Web3-type things. Memecoins on Solana, yeah that’s Web3. Farcaster? 100%. We have scarce digital collectibles and the freedom to launch our own tokens, but it’s all being built within this social layer, using ideas that we’re already familiar with.
This internet-native money has utility beyond a place in my bank account. What’s a few hundred dollars more to spend on my card vs. The potential to participate in a global, real-time, 24x7 economy with so many like-minded people. And the potential to significantly grow that too.
The groups and forums of the 2010s are the token-gated & premium subscriber places of today. As far as rumination on what Web3 truly is, I think Noak hit the nail on the head. This money layer is completely revamping the dynamics of online communities.
"Web3 is web two plus money.”
Noak hosts the weekly GreenPill TO meet-ups where we chat about the greener side of our tech. We use words like ‘regenerative’ and ‘solidarity’ because the profit motive isn’t as much a driving force here. We speak ideas and how initiatives are using this technology to uplift people and societies. There are lots of exciting projects, but the association with crypto makes people hesitant. Why?
Many people tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to crypto. They want to help, but they associate crypto with scams and poor behaviour. They’d rather go through different channels. Especially if they’re more reputable. It doesn’t matter that some charities have huge overheads, resulting in fewer funds actually reaching the people in need. It’s a matter of trust.
And, whether we like it or not, traditional finance (tradfi) entities still rule the roost. Our funds originate somewhere from that neck of the woods. These are cut-throat investors in it for the returns. They’re supporting their banking interests but are also dipping their toes into the ‘next big thing.’ And ‘crypto for good’ isn’t something that meets their ROI criteria.
As a result, the whole ‘crypto for good’ movement is just a rounding error within the wider footprint of economic activities in this space. I believe that good results will beget more investment, driving more results. We can snowball this to astronomical heights, but it’s all about quantifying the value being driven. That’s another whole Pandora’s box, but we know what we need to do.
"There's so many projects that are doing so much good in the blockchain world. Carbon capture, regenerating forests, planting mangrove trees. There's such a long list of good projects in crypto, but they're all limited by this problem you mentioned of stigma and of getting money."
KYC, or Know Your Customer, is a dirty word to many in crypto. A large part of the appeal of this technology was as a refuge from Big Brother’s disregard of your personal space. But if you want your crypto to one day contribute to your bank account, it’s a series of hoops that you need to clear.
Crypto exchanges all over the world hold my private data. I willingly gave it up in order to trade shitcoins that weren’t available on the exchanges I used at the time. There’s absolutely a non-zero chance that this stuff is floating around the dark web, ready to be purchased by the highest bidder. My question is simple - when did it become ok for us to so wholeheartedly trust companies with information that they didn’t really need in the first place?
These are private companies who have no obligation to keep your data safe. The only thing stopping them from selling your user profile onward to other parties is loosely-enforced laws. Why should they have this access in the first place? Couldn’t I use a different KYC approval system run by a trusted third party, who has agreed to safeguard this information?
And this is where I think Cubid, Noak’s “Proof of Personhood” platform, comes into play. It offers precisely this secure environment that enables app developers to know that certain conditions for their users are valid, without knowing the exact information. The quotes below cover a few examples of how this works.
"We only need to know that you're human, not exactly who you are.”
"You can share the fact that you are over 18 without showing your birthdate."
"App developers can verify their users, but never see more than they need to."
The widespread consensus in Web3 is that stablecoins, i.e. cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a fiat currency, are essential to grow our user base. The argument is that people need something stable to understand how much they’re spending or receiving, and it helps if it’s somehow linked to currencies they use in everyday life. But the question is, how stable is the US dollar, really?
Let’s ignore the current market turmoil that’s shaking up the dollar, and consider the purchasing power of a single dollar. What could you buy with a dollar a decade ago? Think of that same item now, how much does it cost? The chances are, a lot has changed in 10 years and this dollar today gets you a fraction of what it could previously. So, the dollar only seems stable from the perspective of the dollar. It’s the original 1 BTC = 1 BTC. Inflation only looks at the rate of how money loses its spending power - the direction is almost always the same. Down.
And look at how the purchasing power of the dollar vs gold has dropped in the last ~100 years. It’s possibly the favourite chart of every bitcoin maxi on earth.
So this leads us to the big questions posited - how can we make a currency that retains its value better than the dollar? It turns out that we didn’t only try it before, but it happened in good old Toronto!
"In Toronto, it turns out we have one thing that's really flat in value, and that is the TTC token, which has been around for about close to a hundred years. The utility of that is still the same... It's not increased in value by thousands of percent from 6 cents to three 30. Instead, what's happened is that the value of the dollar has decreased in value by thousands of percent.”
“I talk about making new money and people think I'm crazy, but there are good examples. And Calgary dollar is definitely one. It circulates, people use it and they can pay two types of government fees.”
The crypto space is full of traders and speculators, but how many forked copies of exchanges to we really need? Where are the apps? Where are the services made possible only by crypto? They’re coming, but it can never be quick enough. I do have a feeling we’ll know when we’ve arrived though. It won’t matter which chain we are building our project on. Why? Because, by then, we’d either have figured out
how to make cross-chain activities truly effortless, or
We would have grown beyond the speculative nature of inviting retail investors to buy tokens in infra projects, because the infra is already set-up. From now on, it’s refinement and optimisation, no wholesale rebuilding, or
A single chain where we’ll be consolidating building. Unlikely, I know, but we’ve seen how power tends to concentrate in the wider economy, and it’s much more pronounced in crypto.
There are so many hyped products that eventually became just another way of doing things. 3D printing was everywhere, and while it was implied that your average Joe would have one, that’s not the case. Nor has 3D printing disappeared entirely either. It simply found a niche of professionals and enthusiasts, whose work with these tools benefitted wider society. Crypto needs to settle into a dreadfully boring part of the workflow so that it becomes unexceptional. We will one day use it because we agree it’s the best way to do a certain set of tasks. We aren’t there yet, and I honestly couldn’t tell you how close we are to achieving this either.
“I think going back to like crypto as a primitive, blockchain as a primitive. We need to make it so boring and so invisible that it doesn't matter if you're using an Oracle or a Microsoft database, you know, no one cares.”
Conversations like these remind us why the crypto space remains so captivating despite market volatility. In an ecosystem often dominated by speculation and profit-seeking, it's refreshing to encounter builders like Noak Lindqvist who are deploying blockchain technology to empower communities and individuals. His vision represents what many of us hoped crypto would become - a mechanism for positive social transformation, not just another path to financial gain.
If you're intrigued by this people-first approach to crypto, Noak is actively bringing these ideas to life through several initiatives:
Proving Humanity Without Privacy Trade-offs: Through Cubid, Noak is developing a multi-dimensional identity solution that combines various verification methods without requiring users to reveal personal data. This could revolutionise everything from voting systems to Universal Basic Income distribution - ensuring resources reach real humans without compromising their privacy.
Reimagining Local Money: T-Coin, or Toronto Coin, takes the bold approach of pegging value to transit tickets rather than declining fiat currencies, while automatically directing transaction fees to charitable causes. It's a practical experiment in what money could become when designed with community benefit at its core.
Building Community Infrastructure: With Toronto DAO and ChainCrew, Noak is making it easier for people to form decentralised organisations that actually work for collective decision-making, not just tokenised speculation.
Prioritising Regenerative Impact: As the organiser of Green Pill Toronto, he's cultivating a community focused on regenerative applications of blockchain technology - from environmental projects to social impact initiatives that might never attract traditional venture capital.
What makes these projects particularly valuable is that they address the fundamental barriers preventing wider adoption of crypto for social good: identity verification without surveillance, stable value that doesn't depend on failing fiat systems, intuitive governance, and truly meaningful impact metrics.
I highly recommend listening to our full conversation to hear Noak elaborate on these concepts in his own words. His perspective reminds us that crypto can still fulfil its original promise of creating more equitable systems, not just replicating existing power structures with new technology. Subscribe to the podcast for more conversations with builders who are approaching crypto's challenges with both technical expertise and genuine care for human flourishing. You can find my Linktree below, where you can listen on your preferred podcast player. Enjoy, and see you on the next one!
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Marv
