"Hi there. I am RM. I read on someone else's blog it's always good to set the scene for what you are about to read, because most readers haven't read what came before. So here we are.

I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas. But I spend most of my professional time to help early-stage teams to evolve raw ideas into minimal lovable products.

So this blog—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory or capture insights from helping teams out there. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.

If you want to work with me reach out to ramon@we.co

Working in and across crypto, I usually get this feeling – yeah, this is the future, it’s already here, but it’s just, "not really that well distributed yet." That’s the comfortable default, the one we all seem to hum towards when we talk about onboarding the next generation. But I’m starting to wonder a bit if that whole mindset, that well-worn thought, is starting to fall a bit short, maybe even missing something fundamental.

Over the last few weeks, diving for a project request deep into crypto's current state, talking with a huge breadth of teams, this nagging feeling has grown. While the challenges and aspirations often sound similar, I’m starting to wonder if most of us, the ones supposedly in the thick of it, are kind of missing what’s actually happening right now. Like that German saying, about not seeing the forest for all the trees? In crypto, I originally felt compelled by Cixin Liu's Dark Forest metaphor – the lone actor / predator. But I always thought that was a bit limited, too focused on the hunter, forgetting the forest itself might be aware, conscious even. And that’s the crux: I’m beginning to suspect most of us are so plugged into our crypto space that we can't truly see how this whole ecosystem has evolved, way, way beyond our current expectations. What I want to say is, I think parts of crypto are already far wider distributed than we realize, just not in the neat rows we imagined planting.

This isn't a totally new thought for me. I’m working on my dream side project, a zine about "Play Theory" – my attempt to define something complementary to "Game Theory." Game Theory is about optimizing inside existing rules; Play Theory, for me, is about what happens when new, unscripted forms of interaction emerge. And sifting through old notes for that, I stumbled upon this idea of leapfrogging: tunneling straight to a similar, but completely different, outcome.

I saw this play out, from my own naive, biased perspective, back in 2014 in Hong Kong. Working with other locals, I found it fascinating how they’d grown up with the internet. My story was desktop, then regular phone, then smartphone. But a huge part of people there seemed to have straight-up leapfrogged right to the end game. If you skipped those beats, you didn’t have some of the baggage, some of the ingrained concepts. That sometimes meant not getting all the references, sure, but it also meant approaching things with a bit more of an open mind.

There's something about this idea: the future isn't just unevenly distributed; it articulates itself unevenly. That’s the core thought I’m wrestling with. I’ve long been curious about how progress happens, why it sometimes seems to slow down. It’s easy to blame bureaucracy – and I do believe there's truth to that – but it doesn’t give you the full picture. It made me think about bureaucracy as a form of tradition, of legacy. And there’s definitely in all of us often a form of nostalgia. The good old times that got things right. I’m guilty of that too. But the more I think about it, I see it also as a bit of a trap. Time and again, history shows these moments where we leapfrog. Take a shortcut through a wormhole to straight up alternative reality. Outcomes can be good or bad, that’s not the point, but it changes the trajectory.

So, I want to dive into two aspects where I start to wonder if we, as the chronically online hyper-involved closely connected crypto twitter community, might be misunderstanding things. And misunderstanding, for me, isn't always bad; it's an invitation for new interpretations.

First, user experience. I told myself, try a new app every other day, just do things on-chain. And to my surprise, the user experience, in contrast to what the conversation in my known public squares feels like, is a lot more disconnected on where we already are. Chain abstraction, wallet abstraction, mini apps, agents – they seem way further along than I thought. There are enough great examples already that make you forget there's crypto in the background. And it isn't usually about hiding crypto for the sake of its "toxic" appearance; they often embrace crypto and its superpowers full-heartedly, but simply for a way easier user experience or different new outcome.

The thing is, I realized a lot of this collides a lot with my OG-primed mindset of what crypto and its values are. While the designer in me is all for better usability, the crypto fundamentalist in me continuously cringes in exactly those moments. Because I feel this goes against my values on transparency, etc. That cringe is interesting, though. It's like a signal. I am the old man screaming at the cloud.

Second, and this is where things get really fuzzy, are the use cases. They seem not exactly to be the thing I imagined. Yes, they’re kind of what I thought, but they’ve developed slightly differently. It feels like the last few years I was more or less overall directionally right but seemed to get the manifestation quite a bit wrong.

Take DeFi. We started thinking about it as a replacement for the existing financial system. Or at least that was a core motivation. We invented, or better, replicated a lot of existing concepts through a crypto lens. Lending, borrowing, trading – all good. But it does make me think of my early app days; it feels like a form of skeuomorphism, us replicating what we had before to make it familiar. But then, somehow, the most activity isn't really happening in the products that neatly replicate what we had before, just with crypto. What’s winning, apparently? New casinos. Or, as I wrote for my other blog, maybe memes aren't just casinos but more like a new form of e-sport. The reality seems to be that the idea was to create a better financial system, but a lot of users leapfrogged to a different conclusion.

If you’ve been in this space as long as I have (first touched it in 2016, full-time during the pandemic), your mind is very much driven by crypto's origin story. Our early DeFi feels like those first App Store apps – using the new environment but with an old, non-mobile-first view. The true monster apps that made mobile what it is – Uber, Tinder, Snapchat, etc – felt so much different. They weren't just digitizing old objects or cramming desktop metaphors onto small screens. They were native. I think something similar is happening in crypto.

I was truly mind-blown by WeChat when living in Shanghai in 2016. Chat-driven interfaces, mini-apps, QR codes, direct payments – it felt like an alternative mobile internet future that evolved organically, not out of the legacy I had to deal with. "Legacy" there was my previous experience and knowledge.

That same thing, I think, is happening in crypto right now. You need to squint a bit, or better, zoom out with an open mind. As a crypto fundamentalist, someone who entered this space because the internet needs to be open, persistent, community-owned, interoperable, composable, permissionless – leading to transparency, censorship resistance, innovation, individual agency, freedom – I’m personally often stuck seeing all those things together, trying to live up to all of that.

The reality, though, is that crypto has leapfrogged to some of that, but also beyond it already. Talking with traders made me realize they're not thinking the same way. My crypto-twitter-protocol-debate brain is different from someone who just embraced tokens as a new game. Memecoins aren't simply casinos for them; it seems more like this e-sport. They don’t think, care about or consider important most of the things I think about; they took an aspect of crypto and built an entire experience and idea around it. This means a disconnect between the legacy and idea I have and how they see it. It’s easy for me to see this as friction, or worse, as them taking something dear to my heart and Frankenstein-ing it. But that doesn’t seem entirely fair. It’s like that mobile experience in Asia I experienced – they jumped to a different place because they didn’t have my legacy concepts. In that sense, there’s something to say crypto is winning, but "we" (as the crypto twitter community) might have lost in that sense – our ideas are directionally right, but we’re missing how people coming in now adapt it and leapfrog ahead.

What does this mean in practice? It’s not just that tokens are separate from what I consider crypto. Those who see trading as an e-sport aren't thinking that much about the technology as we do. They’re asking: what’s the best Battle Royale right now? Like Fortnite or CS:GO, some games have powerful communities that draw new users in, but better games can emerge all the time. They’re there to play. TPS matters, like frames per second, but it’s not all that matters. They populate the same space and come for the play not the Unreal Engine, but it might be me who has the limited perspective.

I think crypto grew up massively, and in the past, we all may have thought too holistically about it. A conversation about the future of the sequencer made me realize I’d never thought about it as a creative opportunity for new mechanisms, because I tend to think through crypto solely through all I know by now. What’s truly happening is builders and communities are taking parts of our space and running with it. These parts are often still aligned with our ethos but seem foreign at first glance because, well, why don’t you care about the rest as much as I do?

Another example: Stripe and financial institutions embracing stablecoins. I always thought the future would be stablecoins, maybe CBDCs. But digital payments are just getting more crypto-like: pay in whatever, receive whatever, a solver takes care of it. Stripe doesn’t really talk about crypto the way I do, but they’ve fully embraced parts of it. I’m overly simplifying, but there’s truth here: blockchain payments "won," but similar to trading as e-sport, it didn’t shape up exactly as we envisioned.

It makes me think of how we believed the future was flying cars, not shared robotaxis we call on our phones. Directionally right about travel evolving, but the articulation was off. The future is fuzzy that way.

The more you play with crypto apps, the more you see it: we’ve been directionally right but missed out on it collectively because we view it too holistically. The future seems to be communities and builders taking aspects of our stack and building entire experiences around them. Finance wasn't replaced directly; it evolved into a form of e-sports for many. Crypto payments are going a similar way. Directionally, we were always right; we just couldn’t see the forest for its trees.

If this is true, then progress will happen not through holistic improvement but through even more fragmentation and specialization. I often think about that meme – half of all consumer products were just Craigslist categories. Something like this feels like it's happening in crypto. New builders aren't looking at crypto the same way I do anymore. They take specific pieces, combine them, and evolve them completely differently. This is how finance became e-sport, how stablecoins become e-commerce. And it will probably happen to our other ideas and concepts too. The forest is growing, wild and unpredictable, and it's far more diverse than any single gardener, including me, could have planned.

I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.