Blockchains didn’t fail to reach the mainstream because of gas fees or wallets. They failed because we taught the world to see them as casinos. Every interface, every button, every word we chose pointed people toward one conclusion: this is a place to gamble.

But blockchains were never just about money. They are a new kind of computer—a multiplayer, persistent, permissionless substrate for building things we’ve never seen before. And yet, everything we’ve built so far has been shaped by a narrow frame: wallets, exchanges, tokens, charts. The interface is stuck. And with it, so is the imagination of what this technology is for.

This essay isn’t about UX. It’s about context. Because until we change how blockchains feel to interact with—until we shift the metaphor from finance to play, from speculation to presence—we will never escape the gravity of our own limited design.

I. The Frame Shapes the Function

The metaphors we use aren’t decorative. They define what we build—and what we fail to imagine.

When we call Ethereum a “settlement layer,” we design products like banks. When we call them “wallets,” we imply safekeeping, balances, transactions—not instruments, passports, or avatars. When we talk about “yield,” “burn,” and “liquid” anything, we’re not just using jargon—we’re teaching people to treat blockchains like a stock market simulator.

So it’s no surprise that to most people, crypto looks like one big casino. It sounds like one.

But blockchains aren’t just about money. They’re about memory. About mechanisms. About coordination and expression in a shared digital space. They're programmable environments with physical properties: permanence, scarcity, composability. Software that resists change. Objects that cannot be faked or revoked. That’s not finance. That’s architecture.

And if we shift the metaphor—from “tech stack” to “medium,” from “app” to “interface,” from “user” to “participant”—a much broader design space opens up. One where people don’t just transact—they play, build, collect, perform, and co-create.

This isn’t a cosmetic shift. It’s foundational. It moves us from asking how many users we have to asking what kinds of worlds are possible?

II. Pulleys, Levers, and Gears

If blockchains are a new medium, then cryptoeconomic primitives are its moving parts.

A bonding curve isn’t a product. A multisig isn’t an app. A mint function, a staking pool, a DAO voting module—these aren’t features. They’re levers and pulleys. Simple mechanisms, each doing one thing well. But when you connect them—when you nest a few gears inside one another—you get clocks. You get markets. You get games, artworks, and protocols that run without asking permission.

This modularity is one of the most misunderstood strengths of crypto. It’s not that you’re building a “dApp”—you’re composing a system from parts that are legible, remixable, and interoperable. Every deployed contract is a public utility, waiting to be extended, repurposed, or subverted.

Projects like Nouns DAO don’t just mint NFTs. They encode governance into the mint itself, turning art into a funding mechanism for culture. Loot didn’t launch a game; it launched a design space for hundreds of them. Even something as playful as Farcastles, which began as a text-based war game on Farcaster, becomes meaningful when you realize each "!attack" command is a ritual. A player-generated action that nudges a persistent world forward.

These aren’t financial apps. They’re interactive sculptures. Software with gravity—persistent, self-sustaining, expressive. And they only make sense when you stop thinking in terms of dashboards and start thinking in terms of rituals, characters, and systems.

III. Onchain as Environment

A website is content. A blockchain is context.

Smart contracts don’t vanish when a company pivots or a server crashes. They endure. They accumulate. They invite. Once deployed, they become terrain—part of a shared digital environment others can explore, build on, and extend.

The artist 0xFFF’s World Computer Sculpture Garden captures this beautifully. Each artwork is a smart contract. The gallery is a contract too—dynamically querying and rendering the exhibition onchain. There is no backend. No CDN. Just Ethereum, HTML, and the permanence of code. It’s a museum made of mechanisms.

Or take hyperstructures, Jacob Horne’s term for protocols that are unstoppable, free, expansive, valuable, and credibly neutral. These aren’t apps. They’re public infrastructure, designed to live forever. They don’t just offer functionality; they offer a foundation—like roads, or gravity, or air.

These digital objects behave more like hardware than software. They persist in time and space. They carry state across contexts. They can be composed and upgraded. They don’t live inside apps—they travel between them. Think of them as game cartridges of meaning: portable, programmable, and enduring.

To build onchain is not to ship a product. It’s to terraform. To create persistent, participatory environments where anyone can enter, interact, and leave a mark. Where identity is not a login, but a character. Where ownership is not speculation, but presence. Where every smart contract is not a backend, but a piece of public architecture.

IV. Rethinking the Interface

If blockchains are environments, then the interface is the invitation.

But today’s interfaces are still designed for extraction. Wallets. Marketplaces. Charts. Buy buttons. Dashboards. We’ve built vending machines for speculation, not playgrounds for participation.

What if, instead, we designed rituals?

A mint could feel like opening a pack of cards. A vote could feel like raising a banner in a town square. A music NFT could behave like a cassette tape—flip sides, degrade over time, or unlock remixes when played together. A DAO doesn’t have to look like a governance portal. It could look like a band. A garden. A tavern. A roleplaying game.

These aren’t gimmicks. They’re interfaces that make context legible. Ritual interfaces remind users that they are participants in something alive. Something that reacts. Something they shape.

We’re exploring a new creative medium using tools designed for investing. That’s the real gap.

Context isn’t just a design decision. It’s a cultural one. It defines what people think the technology is for. And when we shift the context, we don’t just change the interface—we change the meaning of the medium itself.

V. The Context Shift Is Already Happening

The good news? We’re already seeing the frame start to shift—not through better infra, but through better metaphors.

Zora no longer looks like OpenSea. It looks like Instagram. It didn’t just streamline minting—it reframed it. You don’t list. You post. You scroll. You discover. You collect like you would curate a moodboard.

Paragraph reimagines NFTs not as JPEGs, but as essays, ideas, publications. Minting becomes publishing. Collecting becomes reading. The interface orbits around thought, authorship, and audience—not floor prices.

Farcaster and Lens are turning social feeds into native onchain surfaces. Every cast isn’t just a message—it can be a command, a play, a vote, a mint. The feed itself becomes a programmable interface. A stage. A battlefield. A forum.

None of these advances are just about usability. They’re about reframing. And once the context shifts, the same underlying primitives—minting, voting, collecting—suddenly feel like building blocks of culture, not transactions on a ledger.

VI. The World We’re Building

Most people don’t care about the price of their mugs or whether they can flip them on eBay. They just want tools that are useful, meaningful, and embedded in their lives. And yet, we’ve built an ecosystem where every touchpoint—from the UI to the language to the mental model—tells them blockchains are only for trading.

We need to change that.

This isn’t a call to abandon DeFi. It’s a call to build beside it. We don’t have to invest in construction companies to use roads. We don’t need to hold equity in Apple to find iPhones useful. Crypto doesn’t have to be an asset class to be infrastructure.

The next evolution of blockchains won’t come from throughput or tokenomics. It will come from contexts that feel different.

Because interfaces don’t just make technology usable. They redefine what the technology is for.

The desktop metaphor reframed personal computers from academic calculators into corporate productivity tools—turning folders, files, and trash bins into metaphors anyone could understand. The news feed transformed websites into social arenas. And smartphones made computing feel casual, immediate, and ambient—always available, always within reach.—every app just a tap away, always on, always present.

And blockchains? Blockchains are waiting for their interface moment.

Let’s build the interfaces that make this shift feel inevitable. Let’s give people a reason to care, a space to create, and a frame that finally fits.

Because when the interface changes, the meaning changes. And when the meaning changes, the world follows.