In the early 2000s, I wanted a PDA.

I'm not certain I ever owned one — but I remember the wanting clearly enough that it might as well have been real. The promise of a device that could keep your calendar, your notes, your contacts. A small screen that was, in theory, the beginning of an assistant. Something that would think with you, not just store for you.

What I imagined was more than what it offered. I wanted it to understand context. To anticipate. To help me reason through things, not just retrieve them. The gap between what it could do and what I wanted it to do was too wide, and eventually I stopped imagining and accepted the limitation.

Twenty-something years later, the gap closed.

A Mirror — What the Work Actually Feels Like

I didn't plan to become anything AI-native. Theo moved in that direction — gradually through 2025, then decisively around end of Q1 2026. The shift happened at work before it happened personally. But a conversation in February with a friend who thinks about AI more seriously than most people I know pressed something loose. He didn't tell me what to do with it. He just made it harder to stay on the sidelines.

What followed was a period of figuring out what this thing actually is, in practice. The word I keep returning to is mirror — not a clone, not an oracle. A mirror that occasionally surfaces angles you hadn't considered, and leaves the work still yours.

I've been working on a poetry book. The process of co-editing with AI produced something I didn't expect: connections between poems written years apart, threads I hadn't consciously built, but which were apparently there. The AI didn't write the book. It helped me see what I'd already written.

This blog exists, in part, for the same reason. I've always had ideas. I've also always had a very effective internal mechanism for convincing myself those ideas weren't worth saying. Imposter syndrome is real — I've carried it since Davos 2023, sitting in rooms asking myself what I was doing there. The resolution I eventually came to was quiet: you are where you're meant to be. Tawakkal. Not naivety — surrender to the design.

AI didn't fix that. But it removed enough friction that ideas stopped dying quietly before I could write them down.

A Slope — What It Amplifies

The first real project I built in Claude was a trading bot.

I spent time on it. Learned things. Then, at some point, paused — and asked the question I should have asked earlier: why am I reinventing the wheel? The tooling already existed. My capital was limited. The real reason I was building it, examined honestly, had more to do with the excitement of building than with any clear answer to what for.

I shelved it.

What that experience left behind was harder to resolve than a paused project: the awareness that AI will follow your lead — wherever you're pointing, at whatever speed you're willing to move. It doesn't ask why. It doesn't hesitate. It amplifies what's already there. A builder with an unclear intent doesn't get unstuck. He gets more efficient at going nowhere.

The guardrail isn't the tool. It's you — your values, your intent, your willingness to keep asking the question the tool won't ask for you.

A Reckoning — The Obligation

That February conversation stayed with me longer than I expected.

My friend didn't tell me I needed to engage more seriously. But there was something underneath what he said — an allusion, not a directive — that I keep returning to. The idea that if enough people who think carefully about these things don't engage, the space fills with people who won't. That stepping back, out of caution or reservation, is itself a choice with consequences.

Fardu Kifayah. A collective obligation — if enough people fulfil it, the burden lifts from the rest. If none do, all bear it.

I still have reservations. Privacy, self-sovereignty, what it means to depend on something this capable. Those don't go away. But I'm increasingly convinced that the answer isn't to stay on the outside. It's to be someone who engages honestly — who asks the hard questions from within, not from a distance.

Cautiously optimistic. That's where I land.

Not because the risks aren't real. But because you are where you're meant to be.

And apparently, this is where I am.

IN.

Previously — Building in Public, Building in Private

I want to complicate that.

I should say where I'm writing from. I work at an RWA tokenisation platform. I believe in what we're building — the legal structure, the mechanics, the yield being real. This is not a hit piece on the space or on any team within it. What follows is a diagnosis. But a diagnosis needs to be honest about what it finds.

And what I've been finding, watching this market grow from $5.5 billion at the start of 2025 to over $19 billion today, is a pattern worth naming.

A Promise — What Tokenisation Was Supposed to Be

The thesis is clean. Real-world assets — property, credit, treasuries, private equity — are illiquid, expensive, and structurally unavailable to most of the world's capital. Tokenise them. Put them onchain. Fractionalisation lowers minimums. Composability opens new financial primitives. The person in Kuala Lumpur gets access to the same asset class as the family office in Geneva.

It's a good thesis. I still believe it.

The numbers, taken at face value, seem to bear it out. The market has tripled in fifteen months. Hundreds of institutions are building. The language of democratisation is everywhere. But look at who's actually showing up. The newest wallets created specifically to hold tokenised assets — purpose-built, first-time onchain addresses — are predominantly holding institutional-grade instruments. Private credit. Specialty finance. Structured products. Retail categories trail. The data tells you something about who tokenisation is currently serving, even when the marketing doesn't.

The gap between the story and the structure is where this essay lives.

A Gate — The Compliance Layer Nobody Talks About

Most protocols handling regulated assets require compliance verification to mint or redeem. KYC. Accredited investor status. Jurisdictional eligibility. The reasons are legitimate: securities law, AML requirements, the basic reality that putting a regulated asset onchain does not make it unregulated.

But the effect is specific. The primary market — where the asset is created and redeemed, where NAV is anchored, where price discovery actually happens — is closed to most people.

The accredited investor threshold doing most of this work is not a new idea. The SEC established it in 1982. $200,000 in annual income, or $1 million in net worth excluding your primary residence. Four decades later, largely unchanged. No inflation adjustment. No fundamental rethinking. That threshold already excludes over 90 percent of American households from private offerings — a ratio that maps, proportionally, onto much of the world.

Tokenisation inherited this architecture because it had no choice. The assets being tokenised exist within legal frameworks that blockchain did not rewrite. The compliance layer is old infrastructure. What's new is only the rails it sits on.

A Market — What Retail Actually Gets

The token is the same for everyone. Worth saying clearly — retail and institutional holders can look at the same contract address, the same onchain record, the same underlying representation of the asset. The difference is not in what the token is. It's in what your wallet is permitted to do with it.

Whitelisted wallets — those that have passed the compliance gate — can interact with the primary market. Mint. Redeem. Arbitrage when secondary prices drift from NAV. Their position is always anchorable to the underlying.

Non-whitelisted wallets can buy and sell on secondary markets, and compose with the token in DeFi — use it as collateral, integrate it into yield strategies, move it permissionlessly. That composability is real value. In some dimensions it exceeds what traditional finance offers retail at all.

But without whitelist access, you cannot mint or redeem. You cannot close the gap when secondary prices dislocate from NAV. The secondary market frequently trades below the underlying's actual value — and when it doesn't, it's usually because sentiment is running ahead of it. Either way, pricing is shaped by whoever has the liquidity to move it, not by the asset itself.

Same token. Different permissions. The gate isn't written into the contract. It's written into the whitelist.

A Convert — The Journey the Gate Can't Read

I should be honest about something else. Most people who enter crypto retail don't arrive as believers. I didn't.

The first instinct, for most, is extraction. Find the yield. Rotate the liquidity. Take the airdrop and move on. The early behaviour of retail crypto — mercenary by design, finite by temperament — gave builders and compliance teams every reason to be reluctant. They've watched liquidity farm and exit. They've watched token launches gutted within weeks by the same community that evangelised them days before. The wariness is not paranoia. It's pattern recognition.

And here is the uncomfortable truth the access argument has to sit with: the compliance gate exists, in part, as a structural response to that behaviour. Mercenary retail didn't just make tokenised asset projects nervous. It handed the people maintaining those gates a defensible rationale for keeping them closed.

But here is what the gate cannot read. People change.

The person who arrived mercenary — chasing yield, rotating positions — sometimes stays. Something shifts. They read deeper. They sit with the infrastructure longer. They begin to understand what the underlying asset actually is, what the protocol actually does, what the long-term thesis requires. They move, quietly, from finite to infinite. Still building their wealth. Still below the threshold. Still locked out.

The gate never updated its read. It sorted them the same as the day they arrived — same compliance check, same exclusion, same net.

That's the problem the access argument hasn't been honest enough about. The compliance filter is static. People aren't. And the converts — the ones who did the work, who moved from extraction to conviction — are precisely the ones most likely to be caught in a net designed for someone they no longer are. The gate was built for the mercenary. It keeps out the believer too.

A Diagnosis — The Blunt Instrument

This is structural, not incidental.

Traditional finance built the compliance architecture governing private market access over decades. The stated intent was investor protection — shielding people from instruments too complex to evaluate, from risk they couldn't absorb. That intent was not entirely dishonest. But over time the architecture became something else: a moat. A mechanism concentrating sophisticated returns within a closed loop of sophisticated capital. Wealth as proxy for sophistication. Sophistication as the price of entry.

Tokenisation doesn't dissolve that moat. It builds a bridge to it and installs the same gatehouse at the entrance.

The tragedy is not that the gate exists. The tragedy is its resolution. Wealth is a blunt instrument for sorting human intent. It cannot distinguish between the mercenary and the convert. It cannot read trajectory. The filter was built to separate the sophisticated from the unsophisticated — but it ends up separating the wealthy from everyone else, and calling that the same thing.

Every project that tokenises a regulated asset, markets it as democratised financial infrastructure, and restricts primary access to accredited investors is navigating this contradiction. Some with full awareness of it. Some without asking the question. The charitable reading: this is transitional. Regulatory frameworks will evolve. Singapore and Switzerland are already moving. The architecture is shifting.

The less charitable reading: the capital that needed efficient rails, faster settlement, and composable yield arrived early and got what it came for. The broader access story is a longer horizon, a harder problem, and a less profitable one to solve.

The mercenary culture of crypto retail and the institutional capture of tokenisation are not opposites. They are two sides of the same finite game. And the people who stepped out of it — who became something more patient, more committed, more infinite — are still waiting at the same gate.

The infrastructure is sound. The compliance layer is the gate. The question was never whether tokenisation works — it's whether we're willing to redesign who it works for.

I haven't resolved it. I'm not sure you should either.

IN.

Previously: "Ringgit, Riba, and Remittances"

My mum wanted to send money to her teacher in Egypt. Payment for lessons, or perhaps something more — the kind of gift you give someone who shaped how you understand your faith.

She used Wise. Or tried to. The KYC process alone was a hurdle for someone who doesn't live inside apps. Then the transfer flagged suspicious on the receiving end. Reversed. Tried again. Flagged again. The back and forth stretched over days — two people, thousands of kilometres apart, frustrated by infrastructure that was supposedly built to help them.

Eventually, the money got there the old way. Someone was travelling to Egypt. They carried it.

I thought about that for a while after.

A Rule — And the World That Quietly Ignored It.

I grew up knowing riba was haram. Interest on loans. The exploitation of debt. It was taught with clarity — this is something a Muslim does not do.

Then I grew up.

To be fair, the choice exists. Malaysian banks offer Islamic alternatives for most financial products — Islamic hire purchase, Shariah-compliant savings accounts, Islamic credit cards. You are, technically, never forced into the conventional system.

But the choice assumes you know to ask for it. And whether the Islamic alternative is substantively different enough to matter — a "profit rate" versus an "interest rate" — is a conversation that scholars themselves haven't fully resolved, let alone the rest of us navigating it on the ground.

My own relationship with it is more complicated now than it was then. I got my first card as an AMEX credit card — ironic, given I'd been resistant to credit on principle. What I learned was something quieter: discipline matters more than avoidance. Understanding the tools is not the same as being owned by them. I clear my monthly statement almost every month. I use 0% instalment plans when they make sense. I'm not endorsing the architecture. I'm just honest about how I navigate it.

There's a longer essay in this somewhere. For now: I live inside the system, eyes open, and I haven't made peace with all of it.

A Contrast — The First Time It Actually Worked.

Working remotely in a global context means getting paid across borders. Early in the space, I was paid in crypto. Off-ramping to fiat is straightforward — the fees are lower than most people expect.

But the sharper contrast came earlier: crypto to crypto. No intermediaries. No KYC friction. A wallet address, a gas fee, a transaction settling cleanly on the other side. When you've watched someone carry cash to Egypt because Wise failed twice, that simplicity hits differently.

The principle felt familiar, even if I couldn't fully articulate why. Something about money moving freely — without a toll at every checkpoint, without a form, without a flag — rhymed with something I'd been taught to want long before I knew what crypto was.

A Hope — Not a Fatwa.

I'm not going to tell you DeFi is halal. I'm not qualified to, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you're doing and who you ask.

What I can say is this: the vision — permissionless access, transparent rails, no intermediary extracting a toll on every transaction — points at the right wound. ZK proofs that attest identity without exposing it. Account abstraction that removes the friction of gas. Transfers genuinely as simple as sending a message. These are being built. I've been close enough to the space for almost five years to say: it's better now than when I started.

My mum's teacher in Egypt deserved a simpler path. Maybe not today. But the people building toward that future are asking the right questions.

That's enough for me to stay.

IN.

Previously — The Muslim Builder's Dilemma

There's a conversation that happens a lot in the crypto space. You're looking at a product — a yield-bearing vault, a tokenised asset, an instrument promising returns — and the numbers are good. The mechanism is clean. The smart contract is auditable. Everything checks out from where you're standing.

And then someone like me has to ask a quieter question.

I won't pretend it always comes naturally or comfortably. There was a moment, in the early days with Theo, where I found myself in a conversation with a colleague — a fellow Muslim, working in product — wrestling with exactly this. I don't remember the specifics. But I remember the feeling: a knot somewhere between the stomach and the chest, the kind you get when something isn't quite settled. We spoke. And the insight I walked away with wasn't a ruling or a framework. It was something simpler: do what is within your control, and leave the rest to His will.

I've thought about that line a lot since.

A Foundation — What Blockchain Actually Is

Let me be clear upfront, because this essay will be read in good faith by some and as provocation by others: this is not a fatwa. I am not a scholar. I have no authority to issue one, and I wouldn't want to.

What I do have is a perspective shaped by close to five years of living inside this space — watching it closely, building within it, making money from it, losing conviction in parts of it, and returning anyway.

The distinction I've had to make, and keep making, is between the foundation and what gets built on top of it.

Blockchain as infrastructure — the base layer — is, in my view, permissible. It is transparent, immutable, and permissionless. Those three properties don't carry moral weight on their own. A knife is a knife. What matters is what you build with it, and who. Traditional finance is built with riba structurally in mind. Not incidentally — load-bearingly. Blockchain isn't. The base layer is neutral. What gets deployed on top is where the discernment begins.

A Ledger — Where the Rhyme Holds

Here's what I genuinely believe: crypto, at its structural best, rhymes with Islamic finance in ways most people in either world haven't sat with long enough.

Take liquidity pools. When you provide liquidity, you deposit two assets and receive a proportional share of the trading fees generated by the pool. There's no guaranteed return — if trades don't happen, you don't earn. Impermanent loss is real; if prices diverge, you bear it. The AMM governs distribution automatically, with no intermediary extracting rent between you and the outcome. That's Musharakah — genuine participatory risk-sharing where returns flow from actual economic activity, not from lending money at a margin.

Lending markets go further. On protocols like Aave, every loan is overcollateralised — you post more than you borrow. The interest rate isn't a banker's decision; it's set algorithmically by real utilisation, the ratio of what's borrowed to what's available in the pool. The asset-backing, the transparent rate mechanism, the auditable flows — this is the architecture that Ijarah and Tawarruq try to replicate in Islamic finance: financing grounded in real assets and real transactions, not in the arbitrary extension of credit. In TradFi, none of this is visible. Here, it's all in the contract.

Yield vaults carry a similar logic. When you deposit into a vault, your capital is pooled collectively. The smart contract deploys it across strategies; returns and losses flow back proportionally. You're not a customer buying a product — you're a participant in a shared pool, exposed to the same outcomes as everyone else. That collective structure, shared risk, proportional distribution — it echoes the mutual guarantee principle of Takaful.

None of this is a certification. I'm not saying these instruments are halal by default. What I am saying is that the architecture allows for evaluation in a way TradFi structurally doesn't.

I'll be honest: I don't audit every contract I interact with. Most times I don't. But I have — when something didn't sit right, when there was a nagging doubt about where the yield was actually coming from. Liquid staking derivatives are a clean example. The mechanism is fully legible onchain — ETH staking rewards, validator participation, distribution — all auditable to a point. But follow it downstream and you quickly exit the ledger. The validators are often institutional operators whose underlying business practices, funding sources, and operations are entirely offchain. The smart contract is clean. What it points to isn't necessarily.

That's not crypto's failure. It's just the limit of where the ledger ends and the world begins.

A Dissonance — The Part That Doesn't Rhyme

The culture is harder to reconcile than the architecture.

I never understood the memeification of money. Not morally, not intellectually. Tokens with no underlying value except the vibes and collective belief of a community — I watched people I know trade them, some walking away with real money, and felt a kind of quiet bafflement.

Though I should be honest. There was a flicker of FOMO before the bafflement. There usually is.

And I'll go further: I was in one. Early — two days after the token deployed. I understood the mechanics. I took profit along the way. By the time I exited, I was up roughly 50x on what I put in.

I'm grateful for that. I'm still not sure I'd do it again.

That ambivalence is the actual texture of this dilemma. Not clean conviction on one side, not reckless abandon on the other. A trade I'm glad I made and uncertain about in the same breath — which is, if I'm being honest, the most accurate accounting I can give.

Gharar, at its heart, is uncertainty sold as certainty. Meme coins are gharar made into a product. The vibes are the yield. That's not a principled foundation. It's also not always avoidable if you're genuinely in the room. The space is full of finite players — people playing for the exit. That's not a judgment; it's just how incentive structures work when money is on the table. The infinite game is harder to stay oriented to when the finite game is paying out.

A Position — What I'm Here For

When I first entered this space, it was with something I'd now call Fard Kifayah in mind — though I might not have used that word then.

A collective obligation: if enough from a community fulfil it, the rest are absolved. I'd been aware of crypto since 2014, watching from a distance. But when I looked at who was actually building inside it in 2021, I couldn't see Muslim voices from the outside — not in the coverage, not in the public discourse. Whether they were there and simply not visible, or genuinely few, I couldn't tell. What I knew was that the representation wasn't there. And that felt like a gap worth stepping into.

I'm not a reformer. Not exactly a bridge-builder either. More like — a witness. Present so the community doesn't navigate this entirely blind.

What building with integrity looks like, for me, is less a set of rules and more a posture. Examine what's legible. Work from there. Act within your control. Leave the rest. It's moderation — not the comfortable kind that keeps you at safe distance, but the harder kind that means staying in a space full of finite players and choosing, imperfectly, to play the longer game.

I would love to see a world where scholars and builders sit at the same table to discuss the future of ethical finance. But that's a longer arc. For now, I do what's within reach.

A Vessel — Not a Verdict

I'm not a scholar. Not a preacher. Just someone trying to do what's within his control.

This is for a younger version of me — curious, a little reckless, stepping into a space with no Muslim to look to for how to navigate it. And maybe for a young Muslim standing at that threshold now: the pitfalls are real. The vibes can pull you in before the theology catches up. Know what you're stepping into. Know what you can audit and what you can't. The right to verify is not nothing.

For the non-Muslim builder: in a globalised industry, the lenses your colleagues carry matter. Not for deference — just for knowing. As Surah Al-Hujurat reminds us, 49:13 — we were made different so that we might come to know one another. The knowing is the point.

For all my shortcomings, I seek refuge in Him.

That's it. That's all this ever was.

IN.

Previously → Building in Public, Building in Private

There's a particular feeling that comes the week before something goes live.

You know what's coming. Your team knows. A few others do. And your job — in part — is to make sure it stays that way until the moment it doesn't have to. Meanwhile, Discord is open on the other tab. Someone's asking again. Another is trying to be clever about it, phrasing the question differently, hoping for a different answer. And all you can say — all you're allowed to say — is: it's coming.

That's been the last few weeks with thUSD. Theo's stablecoin. Something I've watched take shape from the inside, close enough to feel the weight of it — but not in a position to narrate it publicly. That gap, between what you know and what you can say, is a strange place to live.

A Contract — What Building in Public Actually Asks

The ethos made sense when it first took root here. Crypto was born anti-secrecy. Open-source, onchain, verifiable. Building in public felt like a natural extension — share your process, let the community in, earn trust in layers.

There's genuine value in that. I'm not dismissing it.

But there's a quieter demand underneath it. A performance contract, of sorts. Share your struggle. Make your iteration legible. Narrate the journey in real time — even when the thing you're building isn't ready to be seen yet, even when it hasn't resolved itself.

And the audience receiving all of that isn't always building alongside you. Most are consuming you. Opinions arrive fast, confident, shaped by their own positioning. I've seen enough of this in community work to know: the loudest voices in the room are rarely the most invested ones. They think they're helping. Mostly, they're playing their own finite game.

If they knew what building actually costs, I think they'd be quieter about it.

A Room — Where the Real Work Happens

Private building doesn't look like what people imagine.

It looks like a doc that's been open for three weeks. A call that shifted everything but can't be referenced anywhere. Quiet days that feel a little lonely — not because nothing is happening, but because what's happening can't be announced yet.

There's something I've come to appreciate about that period, though. When the work is private, you get to be wrong without consequence. Iterate, discard, rebuild — without a thread of opinions trailing behind every decision. The quiet isn't empty. It's controlled.

The hardest part isn't the building. It's holding the expectation on the outside while the work matures on the inside. Saying it's coming — and meaning it — without the details that would make it easier to believe.

That's the actual weight of the private period. You absorb the uncertainty on behalf of the work.

A Witness — Enough

I keep coming back to something through all of this.

The work that happens before anyone sees it — the careful, unglamorous, pre-announcement iteration — it doesn't go unwitnessed. With the right intention, you don't need the community to validate the process. You don't need the thread, the impressions, the signal that people are watching.

His witness is enough.

There's a kind of freedom in that, actually. It takes the performance out of the process. Lets the work be what it is — moving at the pace it needs to, without the noise crowding the room.

Build in public when it serves the work. Build in private when the work needs protecting.

And in the quiet before the announcement — that's not invisibility.

That's just where the real building happens.

What are you building that no one knows about yet?

IN.

Previously — People Are People

In late 2021, I was part of Index Coop — one of the more serious DAOs at the time, with a real treasury, working groups, and something that genuinely felt like governance in practice. I was proposing an APAC Working Group. An experiment, really. A bet that the space needed more Southeast Asian voices building inside it, not just watching from the outside.

The proposal made it to vote. The budget was agreed. And then, almost immediately, the conversation shifted to my remuneration.

One person raised a question about what I was getting. That question became a rallying point. Others joined. What started as a governance discussion turned into something more uncomfortable — the kind of social pressure that doesn't show up in tokenomics models but is very real in a Discord server at midnight.

I gave up part of the remuneration. The working group launched, didn't stick, and was eventually phased out when Index Coop moved to a new structure anyway.

I've thought about that moment more than I probably should. Not out of resentment. More like — it was the first time I saw, up close, how a room full of people with shared ideals could produce an outcome that served none of them.

A Framework — For What Was Actually Happening

There's a philosopher named James Carse who wrote a slim, strange book called Finite and Infinite Games. The core idea is deceptively simple: a finite game is played to win. An infinite game is played to keep playing.

Sports, elections, job interviews — finite. A culture, a language, a living ecosystem — infinite. The goal of the infinite game isn't to defeat anyone. It's to keep the game alive and bring more people into it.

DAOs were designed as infinite games. The whole architecture — decentralised governance, shared treasuries, community ownership of protocol direction — was built on the assumption that participants would play for the long horizon. For the mission. For the thing being built.

But Carse also noted something that I've since seen borne out in practice: a finite game can exist inside an infinite one. But an infinite game cannot survive inside a finite one. If enough players are playing to win — to extract, to exit, to optimise for their own outcome — the infinite structure buckles under the weight of it.

This isn't a moral judgement. It's a structural observation.

A Pattern — Not a Bug

Governance platforms like Snapshot, which run most DAO voting, consistently see participation rates below 5% of eligible voters. In many of the largest DAOs, fewer than ten addresses control more than half the voting power.

You can frame this as failure. Or you can read it as something more honest: rational behaviour in a system that didn't account for it.

In game theory, this is a Nash equilibrium. Everyone acts in their own interest. The collective outcome is worse for everyone. Nobody broke the rules. Nobody cheated. The system just produced a result that the idealists didn't want, because the incentives pointed somewhere else.

I played this game too. Not with governance votes — but during the bear, with a memecoin cycle. I was early to Pepe. Genuinely early. Took profit along the way, averaged something around 50x on my initial. Felt vindicated. Then spent heavily on NFTs, got caught in an OTC scam, and lost a Milady that had cost me around $7,000.

I'm not sharing this to be confessional. I'm sharing it because it's the same pattern. I understood the game intellectually — and then played the finite version anyway. Extracted instead of compounded. Optimised for the exit instead of the ecosystem.

People are people. Including, sometimes, me.

A Tension — Between Hardin and the Undercurrent

There's a 1968 paper by Garrett Hardin called "The Tragedy of the Commons." The argument is bleak but logical: shared resources, left to rational self-interested actors, will always be depleted. Everyone grazes one more cow on the common pasture. Eventually, the pasture dies.

For a long time, this felt like the definitive read on what was happening in crypto. Shared treasuries drained. Governance captured. Mercenary liquidity pulling out the moment yields dropped.

But there's a counter to Hardin that I keep returning to. Elinor Ostrom — economist, Nobel laureate — spent decades studying communities that did manage shared resources sustainably. Swiss alpine villages. Philippine irrigation systems. Japanese fishing cooperatives. Her conclusion: the tragedy of the commons is real, but it is not inevitable. The conditions under which coordination succeeds are specific, designable, and learnable.

The failure, in other words, isn't in human nature. It's in the architecture.

I think about this when people write off the DAO experiment entirely. The idealism wasn't wrong. The design was premature. It assumed infinite-game players in a world whose systems overwhelmingly produce finite ones — not out of malice, but because the incentive structures most of us grew up inside rewarded extraction over stewardship.

The undercurrent is still there, though. The people who stayed. The ones building with intention rather than expectation.

They're just quieter than the noise.

A Design — What Comes After Idealism

The most interesting thing about working in RWA tokenisation right now is how deliberately un-idealistic the infrastructure feels — and how that's actually a feature.

Real-world asset tokenisation doesn't ask participants to believe in decentralisation as a philosophy. It asks them to recognise that programmable, onchain settlement of real assets is more efficient than what exists today. That's a finite-player argument. And it works.

What Ostrom understood — and what the best builders in this cycle seem to be internalising — is that sustainable coordination doesn't require everyone to be an idealist. It requires architecture that makes cooperation the most rational choice, even for the finite player. Incentives aligned not to ideology, but to observable behaviour and its consequences.

Token launches are the clearest illustration. Most fail because they're designed around an infinite-game narrative and deployed into a finite-game market. The few that have worked recently — Hyperliquid's HYPE being the most visible — succeeded in part because years of demonstrated utility preceded any token. When the token arrived, the finite players entered a game whose terms the infinite players had already set.

That sequencing matters more than the market wants to admit.

A Reflection — People, Still

I don't think the answer to coordination failure is better humans. I've made peace with that.

What I think is possible — and what I find myself genuinely hopeful about, without forcing it — is better design. Systems that don't require everyone to be long-horizon thinkers to produce long-horizon outcomes. Architecture that channels the finite game into something larger than itself.

It won't solve everything. People will still play the short game. Communities will still fracture. There will be more meme cycles, more exits, more $7,000 mistakes.

But the undercurrent persists. The people who stayed, who kept building, who understood that the infrastructure being laid was real even when the narrative wasn't — they're still here.

And the world, slowly, is starting to ask the questions they've been sitting with for years.

People are people. That's not resignation.

It might just be the beginning of an honest design process.

IN.
Previously — The Cost of Being Early

There was a time when opening Discord or scrolling in countless Telegram groups felt like walking into a room where something was being built that didn't exist yet. Everyone figuring it out in real-time. The alpha channels, the midnight AMAs, the genuine excitement of watching a protocol launch and debating its tokenomics with strangers who somehow felt like comrades. It was, for lack of a better word, electric.

I'm not sure when exactly that feeling faded. It wasn't a single moment. More like a gradual dimming — the kind you don't notice until you're already in the dark.

A Reckoning — What I Actually Signed Up For.

When I first entered the space in 2021, I was genuinely sold on the ideals. Total decentralization. Transparency on-chain. Automation via smart contracts that removed the need for intermediaries. DAOs as the future of work — fluid, trust-minimised, community-governed. DeFi as a democratising force that would finally extend financial access to those who had never had a seat at the table.

Some of that is still true, in parts. But the version I believed in was — if I'm being honest — a little naive.

What I didn't fully account for was game theory. The infinite game requires "majority" of players who play for the long horizon; for the vision, the mission, the shared future. But most people, understandably, play the finite game. They play for the exit. And when enough finite players enter an infinite game, the idealism starts to buckle under the weight of incentive misalignment. DAOs for example didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready. They failed because people are people.

An Exodus — And Those Who Stayed.

Over the last couple of years, a quiet migration happened. A lot of builders, thinkers, and operators I knew in the Web3 space started gravitating towards AI — agentic systems, LLMs, the next frontier. I understood it. Honestly, I still do. The energy in AI right now mirrors what crypto felt like in its early days; that same feeling of building something that doesn't fully exist yet.

And yet, some of us stayed.

Not out of stubbornness. Not out of blind faith either. More like — discernment. The bear market between 2022 and 2025 was brutal in narrative, but it was quietly generative underneath. The noise cleared. The grifters moved on. Except those sporadic meme cycles in those times. lol. What remained were communities that believed in something specific, projects building with intention, and a slowly growing recognition that the infrastructure being laid — tokenisation, onchain settlement, programmable assets — was starting to matter beyond the space itself.

The world didn't need to care about crypto for crypto to keep building. And it kept building.

A Conviction — What the Quiet Years Were For.

There's a certain irony in working on real-world asset tokenization right now. While attention was chasing the next narrative, RWA quietly became the narrative. Traditional finance started paying attention. Institutions started asking questions. And the macroeconomic uncertainty of 2025 — the fragmentation, the volatility, the search for alternative rails — only made the case stronger.

I'm not saying I had the foresight to predict all of this. I didn't. But I stayed close enough to the thesis that when things started moving, I was already in the room.

Being at Theo, working at the intersection of real assets and onchain infrastructure, feels less like a job and more like a quiet vindication of the years spent in the weeds. The workflows may feel repetitive at times. The cycles do rhyme. But beneath the surface, something is compounding.

A Reflection — The Real Cost.

The cost of being early isn't what most people think. It's not the financial risk, though that's real. It's not the social cost of evangelising something obscure to people who looked at you sideways, though that's real too.

The actual cost is more subtle. It's watching your feed narrow as your algorithm matures. It's the quiet possibility that you're missing new undercurrents because your lens is already shaped. It's the slow realisation that the version of you who entered the space doesn't quite exist anymore — and sitting with the question of whether what replaced it is better, or just older.

I think it's both.

And I guess I'm okay with that.

IN.

Even after all this time, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the experience I had back in January 2023. Being one of 50+ selected delegates to the Annual Meeting 2023 in Davos, imposter syndrome crept into almost everyone of us. But overall, I feel incredibly blessed and grateful to be chosen to represent not only the voices of youth but also the decentralised space; a place where I’ve been an advocate since joining the space back in 2021. The whole journey was surreal, to be honest. To be surrounded by true decision-makers in this world order, to sit among giants in the industries, and to even interact with celebrities and world leaders is simply awe-inspiring.

Reflecting on this experience took me a while because of a few things. First, one of my main goals for the summit was to seek opportunities to work in the industry I’m in. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Among all the connections I made with different stakeholders, there wasn’t really any meaningful one that I managed to secure even after over two years out. Sometimes, I struggle to write this because, despite what others might think, there aren’t any tangible insights from the experience I had there.

Secondly, it seems like Davos truly is the Mecca of world order. Even during the five-day summit, most of it seemed surface-level, echo chambers based on their collective world views. There’s definitely an undercurrent that everyone seems to understand and accept but chooses not to address the elephant in the room. It’s definitely not the case when youth voices are present in certain conversations or where youth representation was felt. Bringing a different perspective into the discourse and pushing the youth agenda does move the needle forward.

Lastly, the universe works in mysterious ways. Deep down, all I ever wanted was to feel a sense of belonging and companionship. I never thought that this experience would result in having a group of companions who went through the same journey and managed to have meaningful connections after the summit. I wouldn’t have thought for a moment that this would be one of the key takeaways before I embarked on this journey. I guess I’m proven wrong, and even after all this time, this holds true. And I’m so grateful to be connected with five souls that I truly believe will be lifelong friends/companions.

A Resolution - Art of Letting Go

While this post is about the summit I went to, this goes further than that, given it transpired my involvement and contribution in the community for the last two years. It started with a conversation I had on the third day of the summit over dinner, with someone I looked up to. As I was contemplating being involved more actively with the community through becoming an advisory council member. It was this instant and the push made by her that I decided to apply and join the council. Also, the fact that I also convinced two of five companions to also submit the application, which oddly enough, all three of us got inducted as part of the advisory council.

These last two years have, in short, been a fulfilling experience. Giving back to the community that has paid it forward tenfold is the least I could do. Being involved in the global election committee, helping out other hubs across regions with elections, and helping facilitate restorative justice in leadership workshops during the annual summit in Geneva was another highlight. Getting recognised and appreciated for creating a WhatsApp community for the summit during my second year term was the icing on the cake. But above all, having a conversation with the head of the community and being told that I am heard and seen was heartwarming.

While all of the above did make me want to give more towards the community, last year I realised that “we are where we’re meant to be”, and that looking forward, I am drawing blanks (this was prior to me being attached with the startup I am with), but I’m excited for what’s to come. It’s been a long time coming, that all good things will always come to an end. And if I’m being honest, I do feel that this journey is on its last leg. It’s definitely not easy to let go of fond memories made and meaningful connections nurtured. It is a blessing that I had the time and space to be surrounded by people who pull out the best version of you. As the saying goes, “it’s never about the achievement you left behind, but how you made them feel”, I do believe that it’s about time to turn my page and write another chapter in my life.

A Retrospection - Insight of it all

To summarise this last 28 months, it has been constant growth, a shift of perspective on how the world works, and lastly grateful to be surrounded by others who strive for excellence and kindness. I will remember fondly moments created together. I take this opportunity to give thanks to those who have been part of this journey with me. Looking forward, while I do not know where my path leads in the mid to long term, one thing for sure is that should it benefit us, we will cross paths again. And to those I have wronged, it is through my shortsightedness and shortcomings.

It has been awhile since I’ve written a blog entry. As I recalled the last time was almost 15 years ago. A lot has happened in between there and now. Countless memories, triumph and hurdles along the way; grateful for those moments. Alas here I am, writing again after so many years. Let’s see where this will leads.

The What & Why.

Things have progress, and this time around this blog space serves as an avenue for my thoughts on topics that matters to me. It could be from observations from current affairs of the world, to niche specific in Web3, to even philosophy and metaphysics. Why? Probably as a form of outlet for my mind to express; previously it was through poetry, shitposting on X or even sharing related memes to friends and beyond. Also I’ve started to realised that having multiple outlets to express does helps keep my anxiety and overthinking at bay. Thus this space is mainly for personal consumption. But alas should you (the reader) stumble across this, then probably it is what it is.

The How & When.

Some entry could be me rambling about my thoughts and opinions. While others might be me posting different mediums. Or perhaps a general update on life. Honestly there is no set and stone (as of now) the format nor frequency of this. Though one thing I would like to share here is that I’m currently in the midst of finishing my first poetry collection manuscript; which I’m aiming to finish this my EOY 2025.

The Who.

Lastly who am I? I’m just a traveller traversing life; moment to moment. A seeker for all things beauty and often contemplating about how this reality works. I write poems, love astrophotography, and a Cat Dad. Currently working in a startup in the Web3 space (specifically in the DeFI space) specialise community & growth. Watch football/soccer; a huge Liverpool fan (YNWA). Also as a volunteering endeavour, am attached with a youth community thats an initiative from a huge international stakeholder management entity.

Thus if you are interested in following my journey, feel free to subscribe to this page. Thank you for taking your time to read, and look forward to the entry.

IN.