From across the room the installation looks like a scene lifted from a Chinese brush painting: branches, blossoms, small birds placed with a light hand. Up close the softness disappears. Every form is titanium, a metal that rarely cooperates with anyone who tries to shape it. Chen uses underwater carving and controlled heat treatments to coax color from the metal. He treats titanium as both obstacle and collaborator. The piece exists because he understands the physics of a difficult material and has the patience to work within its limits.

Standing there, I kept thinking about blockchains. The connection seems unlikely at first, although the more time you spend in the world of software, the more familiar the pattern becomes. Blockchains succeed in finance because they behave like a hard material. The properties that make them useful for money are the same properties artists are now exploring. They respond to pressure. They resist shortcuts. They hold their shape through time.

This is the part that often gets missed. Blockchains are not interesting because of tokens. They are interesting because of the environment they create: a computational surface with rules that behave more like physical laws than software conventions.

Artists are treating that surface as material.

A Medium With Physical Qualities

Most digital systems are flexible. They can be patched, reconfigured, or turned off. Blockchains are the opposite. They enforce constraints at every level. Storage is expensive. Execution is public. State transitions are permanent. The system favors precision over convenience.

These qualities mirror the physical world in a way that ordinary software does not. Clay collapses if you push too far. Metal reveals its limits under heat. Blockchains do something similar through logic rather than atoms. They challenge the creator and, in the process, create a different type of craft.

Artist and theorist Rhea Myers recognized this early. Her blockchain-based works do not treat the chain as a gallery; they treat it as material. A transaction becomes part of the piece. A contract becomes a sculptural object. Once something is written on-chain, it persists, which gives the work a kind of digital weight. It is the closest thing we have to permanence in software.

This shift in perspective changes how artists think about form. Instead of designing around platforms or file formats, they work directly with the properties of the network.

A New Craft Tradition

In generative art, the medium’s constraints have turned into a craft discipline. When Art Blocks launched in 2020, it required all artwork code to live on-chain. This began as a philosophical stance about longevity and independence. Over time it evolved into something more technical. By 2024, the core creative libraries that artists depend on (p5.js, three.js, and others) had been recreated and stored directly on Ethereum.

This means a generative artwork can be reconstructed entirely from the blockchain without relying on servers, hosting platforms, or intermediaries. All the logic that defines the piece lives in the same environment that secures it. Art Blocks founder Erick “Snowfro” Calderon describes this as improving resilience. It also establishes the blockchain as a new kind of studio, archive, and distribution system.

This permanence is not magic; it is the result of artists accepting the blockchain’s limitations and shaping their work around them. Code size limits, storage constraints, and deterministic rendering all influence the final form. The medium shapes the art.

Pixels With Agency

You can see this material logic clearly in Kim Asendorf’s PXL DEX. The system treats each pixel as an individual token with its own rules. A pixel can move, be reassigned, or accumulate value. The artwork becomes a system that updates as collectors interact with it. It has behaviors rather than images.

On the modern web, pixels are simply rendered. In Asendorf’s work, they participate in the piece. They matter to its structure. The artwork feels less like a picture and more like a small computational organism.

This relies on blockchain properties that do not exist elsewhere. The network enforces state. It remembers changes. It ensures that updates follow the rules. Asendorf is not creating an image; he is creating a habitat built from code that is guaranteed to run in a certain way.

It is the same approach Chen takes with titanium. The material sets the boundaries. The artist builds inside them.

What Finance Demonstrated, Art Clarifies

Cryptocurrencies work because blockchains impose discipline. Every update is verified. Every rule is enforced. Every participant sees the same state. The financial world depends on these properties because they remove ambiguity.

Artists depend on the same properties for a different reason. They want to create digital objects that keep their shape. They want to build systems that behave consistently across time. They want their work to exist independently of platforms or servers. Blockchains provide that environment.

When you look at the work emerging from on-chain art, the underlying idea becomes clear. A blockchain is not simply a record of ownership or a speculative platform. It is a medium with its own physical qualities, even if those qualities are expressed through computation rather than matter.

A Different Kind of Sculpture

The titanium garden in Houston only exists because Aka Chen chose a difficult material and learned how to meet it on its own terms. On-chain artists are doing something similar with computation. They are treating the EVM as a surface that resists them, then shaping that resistance into form.

The result is a new class of digital objects. They do not rely on platforms. They are not hosted files. They are systems that run according to rules baked into the network itself. They feel less like software and more like sculpture.

This is the part the broader conversation about blockchains has overlooked. Finance was the first application because it needed a material with hard properties. Artists are now showing what those properties actually allow.

Blockchains behave like a medium.
Artists are the ones revealing its structure.
And the work being created today will shape how we understand digital objects for years to come.

Long before blockchains, humanity faced the same question we do today. Do you carve your words into clay tablets that will outlast empires, or write them on papyrus scrolls that can travel the world but crumble with time?

That choice between permanence and portability, durability and speed, is the same one confronting builders in the digital age. When you decide whether to build on a blockchain or on the web and cloud, you are not just making a technical decision. You are choosing a medium. And every medium carries its own constraints, its own philosophy, its own declaration of intent.

Clay, Papyrus, and the Weight of Medium

The Babylonians chose clay. Hammurabi’s Code, one of the earliest and most complete written legal systems, was carved into stone and clay so that its laws would endure across generations. Once inscribed and fired, a tablet could not be altered. It could survive millennia buried in the earth, immune to fire, immune to decay. Clay gave permanence. But permanence carried a cost. Clay was heavy. It was slow to work with. It was hard to copy. Only the most important things, like laws or contracts with the gods, were worth carving into tablets.

The Egyptians chose papyrus. Lightweight and flexible, papyrus could be rolled, carried, and copied with relative ease. It became the medium of letters, poetry, philosophy, and commerce. Papyrus spread ideas widely across the Mediterranean world. But its portability came at the price of fragility. Scrolls decayed quickly outside of dry climates. They burned easily. Much of what was written on papyrus has been lost.

Neither medium was superior. Each carried constraints that shaped what it was used for. Clay was for what had to last. Papyrus was for what had to travel. The decision rested on the intent of the writer. What was worth the burden of permanence? What was meant to be light and ephemeral?

This tension between permanence and portability has shaped every medium since. Parchment offered durability and was chosen for sacred texts and royal decrees. Paper brought accessibility and became the backbone of trade, scholarship, and storytelling. The printing press unlocked scale, flooding Europe with books and pamphlets that fueled revolutions in religion and politics. Digital systems gave us instant global distribution, though at the cost of centralization and fragility. Each advance shaped not only what was recorded, but how it spread, and what survived.

Media are never neutral. They embody choices about what is meant to endure and what is meant to fade.

The Web and Its Fragility

Our current digital age rests mostly on the papyrus of the internet: lightweight, fast, easy to copy. Websites, apps, and cloud databases can reach billions of people in seconds. But they are fragile. They live on servers owned by companies. They vanish when those servers go dark. They are mutable, editable, and sometimes erased without a trace.

We rarely stop to notice how impermanent our digital world is. Old websites die quietly. Links rot. Platforms shut down. What was once public record is lost in the churn of technological progress. The speed and scale of the web have come at the cost of durability.

This is not a flaw, but a feature. The cloud was designed for flexibility, not permanence. It excels at what papyrus excelled at: circulation. It is the perfect medium for fast-moving information, for things meant to be shared widely and updated constantly. But just as ancient scholars knew not to entrust their most sacred laws to papyrus, modern builders are beginning to realize that not everything belongs in the cloud. Some things demand a different kind of medium.

Blockchains as a New Medium

At first glance, blockchains look like ordinary databases, slower and more expensive than the ones we already have. But they represent something new. They are the latest link in humanity’s chain of record-keeping mediums, inheriting traits from their predecessors while introducing properties that did not exist before.

Like clay, blockchains offer permanence. Records etched onto them are tamper-resistant and extraordinarily durable. Like papyrus, they are distributed and portable, carried not on scrolls but across thousands of nodes spread around the world. And, like every medium, they impose constraints. Computation is costly. Storage is scarce. Scaling is slower than centralized servers. Yet within those constraints lies a new affordance: extensibility.

A blockchain is software, but with unusual properties. It is shared by all participants. It is verifiable by anyone. It is composable, meaning new programs can plug into existing ones without permission. And most importantly, it is not controlled by a single institution. The rules live at the protocol level, enforced by consensus rather than decree.

Bitcoin marked the first major experiment. Traditionally, digital files could be copied endlessly. Bitcoin’s supporters argued that it changed this by creating a digital record that was inherently difficult to duplicate, a form of digital scarcity. Whether one sees it as a revolution or speculation, it was a break from the past: the digital could now behave a little more like the physical.

Ethereum carried the idea forward. Instead of a single ledger for money, it offered a platform for agreements of many kinds. What if contracts, communities, or even artworks could exist as records no one could erase? Developers referred to these programs as smart contracts, although the term is somewhat misleading. They are closer to public rulebooks: code that anyone can inspect and no one can alter once set in motion. The result was a shared environment where logic could act like law. For some, this promised a new foundation for finance. For others, it opened a canvas for culture.

Beyond Finance: Blockchains as Creative Mediums

Consider Nouns DAO. Each day, a new pixelated character is generated and auctioned on the blockchain. The funds flow into a collective treasury managed by the holders of those NFTs. What emerges is part artwork, part funding mechanism, part social experiment. The art, the rules, and the community are inseparable because the blockchain ties them together. The medium sustains the project as much as the images themselves.

Other artists have extended this spirit. Snowfro, the creator of the pioneering generative art platform Art Blocks, released a recent project called LIFT (a self-portrait). It is both a game and a sculpture, recorded on-chain and playable on devices like the Game Boy. Each of the one thousand editions is unique, preserving its own DNA in the blockchain. Players can extract the game’s ROM to run on an emulator or load it onto a physical cartridge.

The project works on multiple levels. On the surface, it taps into nostalgia with pixel art and chiptune sounds. But it is also a meditation on persistence. The Pixel Man, endlessly raising a stone with the support of players, becomes a metaphor for artistic struggle and collective endurance. It is not just art displayed in a gallery. It is a living system, coded into permanence, where the act of play becomes part of the work itself.

These projects demonstrate that blockchains are not limited to being narrowly financial tools. They are a new medium, constrained and costly, but powerful in what they enable. Like clay and papyrus, they can carry law, art, stories, and games. The medium does not dictate the message. It shapes it.

Constraints and Intent

The lesson of clay and papyrus applies again. Blockchains are not inherently superior to traditional systems. They are different. The web and cloud are the papyrus of the digital age: fast, flexible, and ephemeral. Blockchains are digital clay: slower, heavier, more constrained, but enduring. Each has a place. Each serves a purpose.

For builders, the question is not “Why blockchain?” The question is “What deserves blockchain?” What is worth the cost of permanence? What should exist in a shared state that no one can erase? What deserves to outlast us?

Maybe it is a financial ledger like Bitcoin. Maybe it is an agreement between strangers. Maybe it is a piece of generative art, or the persistent physics of a game world. Maybe it is the record that binds a digital object to its physical counterpart. Just as paper and clay found uses their inventors never imagined, blockchains will find purposes beyond our current vision.

What We Choose to Last

Civilizations crumble, but clay tablets endure. Scrolls rot, but fragments of poetry still surface in desert caves. The web moves fast, but websites vanish when their servers go dark. Blockchains invite us to think differently. To ask not just what we can build, but what we want to leave behind.

The deeper question is not technical. It is creative. It is moral. What should last? What should fade? What belongs in the permanence of digital stone, and what belongs in the quick decay of papyrus?

Clay, papyrus, parchment, print, blockchain. Each one carried more than information. Each one carried intent. The choice of medium has never been neutral. It has always been a declaration of what a culture wants the future to remember.

And so the question returns to us. What will we choose to carve into digital clay?

Face ID. Smart watches. Voice assistants. These aren't just conveniences. They're ideas that first appeared on screen decades ago. If you’ve ever unlocked your phone with your face, you’ve used something that showed up in Star Trek. The first Bluetooth headset looked suspiciously like a communicator badge. Touchscreens? The Jetsons had them too. We didn’t just build these tools out of innovation. We built them out of memory.

So what happens when the kids who didn’t grow up on sci-fi, but on Pokémon and Final Fantasy, take over the reins of tech, design, and culture? That’s the moment we’re living in now.

Millennials, now in their 30s and 40s, are entering peak creative and economic influence. And the ideas that shaped them weren’t shiny utopian futures or clean-cut starships. They were pixelated journeys, sprawling RPGs, card battles, open-ended sandboxes, and endless character customization screens. These weren’t just hobbies. They were the user interfaces of their imagination. And now, that generation is turning those interfaces into reality.

Psychologists call the stretch between ages eight and fourteen a “sensitive period,” when identity, aspiration, and emotional memory take root. Studies by Cantor and Nathanson (1997) and Hoffman (2020) show how the media we consume during those years deeply influences how we relate to stories, ideas, and even career paths later in life. It’s why kids who devoured Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the 1800s became the inventors of submarines. It’s why Wernher von Braun, who grew up reading pulp space comics, went on to design rockets that reached the moon.

We’ve seen this pattern repeat over and over. Boomer engineers who grew up watching The Jetsons and Star Trek didn’t just daydream about voice-controlled homes and handheld computers—they built them. Even Steve Jobs credited The Whole Earth Catalog—a printed manual of tools and ideas—with shaping the philosophical vision behind Apple. To him, it wasn’t just a catalog. It was a portal to what could be.

So what does it look like when millennials get their turn?

We didn’t watch the future. We played it. We chose our characters, leveled them up, built our parties, saved our progress. We didn’t just imagine alternate worlds—we navigated them. And in the process, we internalized a different kind of logic. A world of progress bars, stats, side quests, and upgrades. A world where personalization is everything.

It’s no accident that the most popular fitness apps today reward you with streaks and badges. That meditation apps offer level-ups. That language learning platforms feel more like RPGs than classrooms. When Luis von Ahn, founder of Duolingo, designed the app, he deliberately modeled it after game mechanics—not school. Because he knew that’s what his generation grew up responding to.

Even banking, productivity, and dating apps now feature swiping, scores, unlocks, and customization. Not because gamification is trendy, but because the people designing these tools grew up building characters in The Sims, optimizing gear in Final Fantasy, and designing avatars on Neopets. The design patterns that shaped their childhoods became second nature—and now they’re everywhere.

But this shift isn’t just about user experience. It’s about what we expect from technology. Earlier generations built for speed, scale, and control. Millennials are building for immersion, self-expression, and play. Not because we’re less serious—but because we’re fluent in systems that reward creativity over rigidity.

Even identity today reflects this shift. For millennials, curating your digital persona isn’t a side effect of being online. It’s a native behavior. We’ve been building avatars since grade school. Personalization isn’t a feature—it’s the starting point. And as platforms evolve, we’re seeing that ethos take over everything from workplace tools to community governance. If Boomers built spreadsheets, millennials are building dashboards that feel like character sheets.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s infrastructure. It’s the emotional source code embedded in the tools we now rely on.

Still, this moment isn’t without its risks. If we build everything like a game, do we trivialize the serious? If we chase rewards and badges, do we mistake engagement for meaning? The same systems that make us feel seen can also make us feel measured. But that’s a tension worth exploring, not avoiding. Every generation leaves fingerprints on the future. Ours just happens to be pixel-shaped.

I still remember catching my first legendary Pokémon. The tension. The soundtrack. That triumphant jingle when the Poké Ball finally clicked shut. That wasn’t just a dopamine hit. It was a perfectly designed experience—one that taught an entire generation how good it feels to earn something magical.

And now, we’re building tools, platforms, and cultures that try to recreate that feeling. Not because we’re trying to relive our childhoods. But because that feeling taught us what good systems feel like.

We dreamed in pixels. And now we’re building in them.

And if history is any indication, that might be the blueprint for what’s next.

> What is the endgame for what we're all building here? Is it hyperstructures? What comes after?

Jacob replied:

> Endgame for what we are all building in crypto: better hive mind operating system.

aka how we all coordinate at a societal level.

That stuck with me.

A better hive mind operating system. Not in the sci-fi dystopia sense, but in the very human sense. A shared memory. A way to coordinate. A way to know things together without having to trust fragile institutions or centralized servers.

That’s when it clicked. What we’re building isn’t just technology. It’s a cultural operating system.

Not just infrastructure to move money. Infrastructure to move meaning.

Minting, for example, is misunderstood. The word gets thrown around so much that it’s easy to forget what it actually implies. To mint something is to create it formally—like coins at the U.S. Mint. A blank disc of metal gets struck with identity and enters into circulation. It becomes real.

Blockchains brought that idea to the digital world. But instead of minting coins, we’re minting things. Objects. Ideas. Stories. Songs. Art.

And when you mint something on a blockchain, you're not just uploading a file or making a copy. You’re giving it life (or at least presence) in another realm. You’re placing it into a shared computational reality where it can be seen, remembered, referenced, and built upon.

It doesn’t matter if that thing is stored offchain or displayed through a browser. The blockchain is where it was born. The mint is where its lineage begins.

Most of the internet today still runs on download logic. You see something, you click it, you get a copy. The original? Doesn’t matter. Everything’s interchangeable. Everything’s disposable. There’s no source of truth, only access.

But minting changes that. It gives things roots. It gives them provenance.

And that matters—especially now, in the age of AI. When images, songs, and voices can be generated in seconds (trained, often, on the work of countless anonymous or unwilling creators) the question isn’t just what we’re making—it’s who it belongs to. Where it came from. What story it carries in its code.

Right now, there is no place of truth. Not in music. Not in art. Not in writing. Inspiration blurs into imitation. Imitation blurs into theft. People argue over ideas that have no anchor. There is no record. Just vibes and memory and the occasional lawsuit.

But blockchains can change that—not overnight, but over time. If more of our creative output lived onchain, we’d start to see the threads. We’d see how one piece of art influenced another. How a melody morphed across decades. How genres evolved. How language spread.

We’d have something like a family tree for culture.

Not to restrict remixing, but to enable it. Safely. Transparently.

Imagine being able to see the entire history of a deck of playing cards—how it mutated across cultures, religions, and centuries. Or trace your favorite meme to its great-great-grandparent post in a forgotten forum from 2008. Imagine every AI-generated artwork carrying the visible fingerprints of its influences (with credits, links, maybe even revenue splits baked in).

That’s the cultural operating system we’re slowly building. A system that doesn't just let us mint assets, but memories. A system that remembers.

One that allows us to coordinate not just our money, but our meaning. Not just our code, but our culture.

That’s the endgame Jacob was talking about. The hive mind isn’t some abstract sci-fi singularity. It’s a new kind of collective memory. A way to coordinate through shared truth. A way to build things that can outlive us—and still remember where they came from.

We're not just building infrastructure.

We're building the software of civilization.

Interfaces are what make tools human. The keyboard, the mouse, the browser, the touchscreen—each unlocked a wave of creativity and adoption not because they were powerful, but because they made power usable.

Today, as we sit on the verge of a new digital era—driven by blockchain networks, artificial intelligence, and increasingly programmable media—we are missing the most crucial ingredient:

A new interface. One that reflects the way people already live online. One that speaks the emotional language of the internet.

That interface is social.

Infrastructure Has Outpaced Experience

Over the last five years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in technological potential:

Web3 has given us decentralized protocols, wallet-based identity, composable assets, and programmable value.

AI has delivered generative creativity, autonomous agents, and new modes of assistance.

Gaming and virtual spaces have created persistent digital environments where users can socialize, create, and compete.

And yet, the day-to-day experience of using these technologies is disconnected, clunky, and fragmented. Users are expected to juggle wallets, platforms, tokens, modals, extensions, and interfaces that feel like they were designed for engineers—not people.

The infrastructure has matured. The protocol layer is ready. The primitives are in place.

What’s missing is the interface layer—and more specifically, the interface layer that matches how real people use the internet today.

That interface is the social feed.

Social Isn’t Just Media—It’s Intent

Consider the numbers:

As of 2024, over 5 billion people use the internet.

4.88 billion of them use social media.

The average user spends 2.5 hours per day on social platforms.

Nearly all of that time is spent inside feeds—browsing, reacting, messaging, and sharing.

This is no longer just entertainment. Social platforms are the default interface for how people:

Discover culture

Coordinate action

Express identity

Build relationships

Social has become the operating layer of digital life.

But in technology and design circles, we’ve treated “social” as if it were a product category, not a primitive. We’ve seen it as entertainment, not infrastructure. We’ve built applications around “users,” not communities.

Meanwhile, users themselves are signaling—through time, behavior, and desire—that they want more:

More participation.

More expression.

More meaning.

They don’t want more dashboards. They want more play.

Case Study: The Rise of Bankr

In early 2025, a developer known as 0xDeployer launched a bot called @bankr on Farcaster, a decentralized social network. The idea was simple:

> Let users perform complex onchain actions using natural language inside the feed.

Instead of navigating to a dApp, connecting a wallet, signing a transaction, and waiting for confirmation, users could just post:

> “@bankr, buy 5 USDC worth of $[ticker]”

The response? Immediate traction and adoption.

Bankr quickly expanded to X (formerly Twitter) and also launched a browser-based chat interface—offering a private, ChatGPT-like way to interact with the bot beyond public feeds.

Today, it supports:

Token swaps

NFT transfers

Wallet provisioning

Multichain functionality

(Maybe food delivery, soon?)

The brilliance wasn’t just in the backend functionality—it was the interface. Bankr recognized something fundamental:

> Social actions are intent.

Users already understand how to @mention, comment, and message. By embedding smart contracts into that flow, Bankr turned the feed into an interface for finance.

This logic has proven extensible. In fact, Bankr adopted the token creation functionality originally pioneered by another Farcaster experiment—Clanker, which allows users to create and deploy tokens just by @mentioning the bot, attaching an image, and assigning a ticker.

That’s composability in action.

From Experiments to Movements

These aren’t isolated one-offs. They are part of a much broader, deeper trend.

Twitch Plays Pokémon (2014) transformed Twitch chat into a chaotic game controller, attracting over a million players. Beyond the gameplay, it became myth, ritual, and collective performance.

Anoncast allowed users to post anonymously to Farcaster and X using zero-knowledge proofs and token ownership—creating new models for privacy-preserving social expression. Even Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin took notice.

Historical interfaces like EverQuest’s chat commands and early MUDs like Zork set the standard for how text could be used not just for communication, but for collaborative world-building.

These are not footnotes. They are the forgotten foundations of today’s most powerful design patterns.

Chat changed gaming. Social changed identity. The feed is changing interface.

Why Now?

Why didn’t this happen two years ago? Why not two years from now?

Because we’ve reached a convergence:

Social protocols like Farcaster and Lens are wallet-native.

LLMs and AI agents can now inhabit social feeds.

Bot Actions and Frames provide programmable interfaces inside posts.

Developers are realizing that building culture requires play, not just code.

Social is now composable. Onchain logic is now expressive.

The infrastructure is finally catching up to the behavior.

Where This Is Going

In the next 10–20 years, we will not think of apps as separate from networks. We will not separate games from feeds, or wallets from identities.

Your online presence will be embodied. Your profile will be a character. Your feed will be a world.

We are moving toward an internet where:

Posts are game moves.

Comments are creative rituals.

Emoji are spells.

Bots are characters.

Threads are quests.

This won’t compete with the modern gaming industry. It will redefine it. Just as Amazon didn’t compete with bookstores, but redefined commerce through a new interface: the web browser.

Social is that interface for the onchain world.

The Interface Is the Innovation

We’ve spent years building better infrastructure.

It’s time to build better interfaces.

Social is no longer just a feature. It’s a paradigm. It’s how humans want to interact with the digital world.

To ignore it is to miss the point. To embrace it is to unlock the next generation of software—not just more powerful, but more participatory, more playful, more personal.

The feed is the interface. The internet is the world. Let’s make it playable.

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.

Should I?

Would I?

Could I?

I knew what it was. A chance. A moment. A doorway to permanence. That cement was going to dry, and anything I etched into it would outlast the day, the week, maybe even my entire life. And so I hesitated, holding a stick in my hand, wrestling with a question far bigger than my age would suggest:

What is worthy of being remembered?

It’s a question humans have been asking for tens of thousands of years.

That urge I felt—to leave a mark, to outlive myself—isn't just about graffiti or childhood rebellion. It’s something deeper. Something primal. It’s the same drive that sent our ancestors crawling into dark caves to paint stories on the walls. Those paintings still speak today, frozen in time, but locked away in distant mountains and hidden chambers. The stories they told were meaningful, but they were isolated—geologically quarantined.

For most of our history, humans used oral traditions to pass down knowledge. Songs, chants, and myths were told and retold, generation after generation. Evidence suggests music wasn’t just entertainment—it was memory technology. A melody sticks in the mind, a rhythm holds a pattern. Perhaps that’s why music still stirs something ancient in us; maybe the blueprint for remembering is buried in our DNA.

Later, we turned to clay—etching stories into tablets. More portable, yes. But fragile. Smudged. Reserved for scribes and priests. Information was still a privilege.

Then came papyrus. Then paper. Then printing presses. Each innovation more egalitarian than the last, but still vulnerable. Fire. Water. Time.

Radio changed that. Then television. And then came the internet—an explosion of information, globally accessible, instantly transmissible. But even the internet is slippery. Servers go down. Platforms disappear. Links rot.

We’ve always searched for the perfect medium: something long-lasting, portable, and accessible. Something that doesn't just preserve the message, but democratizes the memory. Something that lets everyone leave a mark.

That’s what blockchains represent. Not just money. Not just data. But a new kind of sidewalk. A fresh slab of digital cement. Immutable, borderless, eternal (at least as far as human technology goes). It’s the next evolution in our species' quest to remember not just what happened, but who we were.

And what information is worth preserving?

All of it.

Because we don’t know what will matter tomorrow. We don't get to decide what future generations will find meaningful. We owe it to our species to remember the jokes, the journals, the contracts, the chaos. All of it. Just in case.

So let me take you back to that slab of sidewalk.

I stood there, still as the wind, heart pounding.

And I wrote one word:

Believe.

And then I walked away.

Introduction: The Crash Was Never the Story

In March 2021, Beeple’s Everydays sold for $69 million at a Christie’s auction. To many, it was the starting gun for the NFT boom. Within months, profile picture (PFP) projects were everywhere, marketplaces like OpenSea exploded in volume, and a wave of artists, collectors, speculators, and brands rushed into the space.

By 2023, it was over. Trading volumes collapsed. Floors fell. Twitter timelines went quiet. The world looked on and said what it always wanted to say: “It was all just hype.”

But this is a misread—technically and historically.

The crash wasn’t the end of NFTs. It wasn’t even the end of the beginning. It was the unveiling of the real story:

NFTs were never about speculation.

They were about the emergence of digital things as programmable, ownable, composable software objects.

An NFT is a non-fungible token, typically deployed as a smart contract on a blockchain like Ethereum. At its most basic, it’s a data structure with:

- A unique identifier (token ID)

- A globally resolvable reference to metadata (via `tokenURI`)

- Ownership recorded in a smart contract (`ownerOf`)

- Optional logic, state, and permissions

But what makes NFTs novel isn’t the structure itself. It’s the environment they exist in.

Blockchains—especially general-purpose ones like Ethereum—are world computers.

That is:

They’re distributed computing environments with shared state, deterministic execution, and composability between programs.

When you mint an NFT on a blockchain, you’re instantiating an object inside this global, permissionless runtime. That object can now:

- Be referenced by any other contract

- Be interacted with by any wallet

- Be interpreted differently by different applications

- Persist across time without centralized storage or platform dependencies

In other words, NFTs introduced a new class of digital thing:

Self-describing. Context-aware. Permissionlessly programmable.

It’s a common misunderstanding—blockchains are not inherently financial. Bitcoin is a monetary network, yes. But Ethereum, for example, is a general-purpose virtual machine (EVM) with embedded monetary components.

This is a critical nuance.

Blockchains make money-native software possible, but they are not just about money. Their real power lies in:

- Global addressability: Any object or contract can reference any other

- Permissionless extensibility: Anyone can build on top of anything

- Deterministic state: All nodes come to the same result, no matter who runs the code

- Native ownership: Assets are controlled directly via cryptographic keys

These properties make open market formation trivial. Any object placed onchain—tokens, NFTs, compute resources, storage rights—can be instantly priced, traded, or integrated into economic systems.

But this doesn’t make NFTs financial assets. It just makes them legible to a market. So they became markets. Quickly.

Once something is:

- Uniquely identified

- Transferable

- Publicly queryable

- Controlled by a user

…it becomes legible to a market.

The 2021 boom wasn’t proof that NFTs are speculative objects—it was proof that blockchains are market-layer machines. NFTs were simply the first non-fungible object to gain traction in this system.

But NFTs aren’t the only thing that benefits from this environment. So do:

- Real-world assets (RWAs)

- IP licenses

- Data registries

- AI compute access

- Social graphs

- Reputation and credential systems

What unifies them is that they’re all digital primitives that need to be owned, transferred, composed, and read permissionlessly. NFTs just got here first.

An NFT isn’t static. It can carry:

- Metadata (JSON)

- Media (image, video, SVG)

- UI (via `data:`-URI encoded HTML or JavaScript)

- State transitions (upgrades, mutations)

- Ownership logic (via ERC-721, ERC-1155, or extensions like ERC-6551)

NFTs can respond to:

- Who owns them

- What other assets are connected to them

- How they’ve been used

- Which contract is reading them

This is what we mean by context-aware. One NFT might render as a sword in a game, a badge in a social app, and a voting token in a DAO. The NFT doesn’t change—the client does. NFTs are polymorphic.

And because everything onchain is composable, NFTs can own NFTs (see: ERC-998, ERC-6551), or act as agents with their own smart contract wallets. They can mutate other NFTs, contain UI code, or link to offchain computation.

They aren’t media. They’re modules.

Here’s the key reframing:

NFTs aren’t consumer products.

They are protocol-level interface objects.

They’re like packets in TCP/IP, or files in UNIX, or nodes in a DOM tree. They allow decentralized applications to:

- Anchor state

- Expose interactive logic

- Bridge identity, data, and ownership

- Create persistent, composable interfaces for both users and machines

Most of the world still sees NFTs as JPEGs because that’s the shallowest runtime context. But in the deeper runtime—games, finance, identity, compute—they become living, modular interfaces, not assets.

What’s happening isn’t just a recovery from a crash—it’s the slow, quiet protocolization of the web.

We are rebuilding core internet functionality—identity, storage, compute, coordination, content, communication—as modular, permissionless protocols, composable by anyone, owned by no one.

NFTs fit into this as:

- Interfaces for content, identity, or ownership

- Keys to access logic, games, data, DAOs

- Agents that hold assets, vote, or act independently

- Self-contained apps (see: token-bound HTML, onchain SVG, or `tokenURI` UIs)

And this shift mirrors history.

Spreadsheets weren’t finance. They were just the first interface people understood. NFTs aren’t art—they’re just the first interface people clicked.

The 2021 cycle told one story. The real story is just beginning.

NFTs taught us that data could be owned, programmed, and composed permissionlessly. That software could live with its users. That markets are a feature, not a bug. That identity can be protocol-native. That art is just one runtime for software.

And that the web doesn’t have to be built on platforms.

It can be built on objects.

Objects that are permanent.

Objects that are meaningful.

Objects that do things.

If you still think NFTs are just overpriced JPEGs, that’s fine.

But it means you don’t truly understand NFTs.

Yet.

That was, until Bitcoin.

The Discovery of Digital Scarcity

Before Bitcoin, if you had a digital file, it was impossible to distinguish the original from a copy. The entire history of computing operated under this assumption. A file on your hard drive, a document in an email, a transaction record in a bank’s database—all were just sequences of bits, infinitely reproducible with the right access. If money, at its core, was about scarcity and trust, then digital money was an unsolvable paradox.

But in 2009, a pseudonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin, and in doing so, introduced a fundamental shift in the nature of digital objects.

Bitcoin was more than just digital money. It was the first time in history that something digital couldn’t be copied.

Through cryptographic proofs and a decentralized network of nodes enforcing consensus, Bitcoin created absolute scarcity in the digital realm. There would only ever be 21 million bitcoins, and no one—not a government, not a corporation, not even Satoshi—could change that fact. It was as if gold had been discovered in the digital landscape, a resource that was finite, immutable, and valuable because of its provable constraints.

And just like that, Bitcoin became the first example of digital physics.

Gold, Bitcoin, and the Nature of Physical Constraints

To understand why this was so revolutionary, consider gold.

Gold was not chosen as money because it was shiny or beautiful. It was chosen because it had physical properties that made it superior to all other materials for the function of storing and transferring value. It was rare, but not so rare that it couldn’t be used. It was durable, resistant to corrosion, easily divisible, and difficult to counterfeit.

But gold had limitations. It was heavy. It had to be physically transported. It required secure storage. As economies grew, these constraints led to the rise of banking and, eventually, paper money backed by gold. Over time, that backing was removed, and we entered the age of fiat currency, where money had value not because of its physical properties, but because governments decreed it so.

Bitcoin solved gold’s problems while preserving its best attributes. It was scarce like gold, but weightless. It could be divided into infinitesimally small units without loss of value. It could be transferred instantly, secured cryptographically, and stored without reliance on a centralized bank. It was the first form of money that existed purely as mathematical law, not institutional decree.

But if money—arguably the most important thing humans have ever given form—could now exist under the laws of this new digital physics, what else could?

Ethereum: The Expansion of Digital Physics into a New World

In 2015, a young programmer named Vitalik Buterin saw the implications of Bitcoin’s breakthrough and asked: What if this new digital physics didn’t just apply to money? What if we could create an entire world where any digital object—any contract, any property, any game, any identity—could exist under the same immutable rules?

Ethereum was born from that question.

If Bitcoin was digital gold, Ethereum was a digital city, a place where programmable rules could govern not just currency, but everything. Instead of just a ledger of transactions, Ethereum became a world computer, a decentralized operating system where anyone could write applications that followed the same laws of digital physics as Bitcoin.

And from that, an entire digital economy began to take form.

Smart contracts allowed for self-enforcing agreements—deals that could not be altered, broken, or renegotiated once deployed. NFTs introduced unique, ownable digital objects, transforming art, identity, and property into things that could be held and transferred with the same security as Bitcoin itself. Decentralized finance (DeFi) allowed for automated lending, borrowing, and trading, removing banks and middlemen entirely.

Ethereum took Bitcoin’s revelation and expanded it into a digital garden, a place where ideas, assets, and economies could grow with real constraints, real rules, and real permanence.

The Future: A Universe with Digital Laws

The story of human civilization has always been the story of physics meeting engineering—of discovering the fundamental constraints of reality and then learning how to build within them.

When Newton formulated the laws of motion, we built machines. When Maxwell defined electromagnetism, we built the electrical grid. When Einstein reshaped our understanding of time and space, we built GPS, lasers, and nuclear energy.

Bitcoin gave us the first law of digital physics: scarcity is possible in the digital world. Ethereum expanded it: scarcity, ownership, and programmability are possible in the digital world.

And now? We are just beginning to understand the full implications.

Entire game worlds are being built where in-game objects are true digital assets, not mere database entries controlled by corporations. Virtual identities are emerging where reputation and social standing persist across platforms, tied to wallets and onchain activity rather than usernames on centralized servers. AI-generated beings may soon live onchain as fully autonomous entities, earning, transacting, and evolving under their own immutable rules.

As we move forward, we must ask ourselves: What does a world look like where digital objects have the same permanence and constraints as physical ones?

Because one thing is certain—Bitcoin and Ethereum have set something in motion that cannot be undone.

We have invented a new digital physics.

And we are only just beginning to explore its laws.

And you know what? It worked. A surprising number of folks on Farcaster were game enough (no pun intended) to try “!attack north” or “!attack south,” crowding into the feed with improvised battle strategies and shared storytelling. Even after all this time—an entire year—there’s still a devoted group that continues to roam the Farcastles realm (ahem, channel). That simple text command did more than animate a game; it demonstrated what’s possible when we turn a social feed into a living stage for interactive experiences.

In the year since, I’ve watched other creators tap into the same vein of possibility. Sands of Sumai launched as an RPG right in the feed, forging its own band of loyal adventurers. Meanwhile, bots like Clanker began popping up, letting people launch memecoins simply by mentioning the ticker name and attaching a logo. Others used bots to handle bounties (@bountycaster), trades (@bankr), you name it. Everything happens in public, in real-time, with minimal friction. It’s like watching a brand-new frontier take shape right before our eyes.

I would never have guessed that Farcastles’ little “!attack” prompt could plant a seed that might one day sprout into a whole forest of new ways to interact. But now, seeing these emergent projects, it’s clear that gaming is just the tip of the iceberg. The text-based approach is simple enough for people to grasp instantly yet powerful enough to run complex on-chain actions behind the scenes. This convenience and transparency unlock a range of possibilities far beyond fantasy raids and memecoin launches.

Why does gaming seem to lead the charge? Because games attract the curious. When you give people an easy, playful way to try new technology, you lower their guard. It happened with mobile devices (remember when folks downloaded entire app stores just to fling cartoon birds at precarious towers of pigs?). Before you know it, they’re using the device for everything—shopping, banking, navigating.

Similarly, if you can lure people into a social feed with a fun, text-based RPG, they’ll end up learning how to manage a wallet, issue commands to bots and follow on-chain events. It’s the Trojan Horse effect: the “just for fun” layer entices folks to jump in, and once they’re there, they realize they can do way more. Suddenly, “!attack” is just one of countless commands—a gateway to launching tokens, organizing community projects, and even coordinating real-life events (see /event-pass by @matthew).

Let’s pause and reflect on why it works so well in a social feed environment:

1. Shared Presence: Everything unfolds in real time where everyone can see it. If I type a command, you see it instantly, you respond with your own action, and the story snowballs. That public accountability—and public excitement—turns simple interactions into group experiences.

2. Instant Feedback Loop: Because the feed is live, everyone sees each other’s experiments. If someone tries a new command—“!mint treasure” or “!brew potion”—the results are right there, encouraging others to follow suit. Novel ideas spread fast.

3. Open Access: Farcaster’s decentralized nature means you don’t need permission from a central gatekeeper to build or experiment. If you can dream up a new “!command,” you can implement it, and if folks like it, it might catch on.

When people talk about “composability” in crypto, this is what they mean: the ability to bolt together different pieces (games, tokens, AI bots, governance tools) and see how they interact. Farcastles was about worldbuilding, but I think we’re on the edge of something bigger—collaborative system-building. Already, I’m seeing glimpses of how text-based commands could orchestrate auctions, group trades, or even AI-driven characters living in an evolving narrative.

It’s still so early, though. Many folks outside our bubble might look at a “!attack” command and shrug—“Big deal, so it’s a text game on some niche social app.” But for those of us who’ve spent the last year tinkering, playing, and building, we can sense the momentum. The idea of a public, living, unstoppable social feed—where entire mini-worlds, businesses, and creative projects can operate in plain sight—is quietly revolutionary.

Think about it:

• Future AI Agents: Imagine an AI character you’ve created in a text-based RPG who starts bartering items, forging alliances, or fighting monsters on your behalf whenever you cast a certain command. That same agent could jump threads and handle real tasks in a business context. It’s all just inputs and outputs, triggered from the feed.

• Real-World Governance: A simple “!propose” command could initiate a DAO proposal in full view of the community, track discussion, and confirm final tallies—no separate site or labyrinthine interface required.

• Art and Entertainment: Musicians might share a snippet of a song and ask fans to cast “!remix” to spawn infinite variations, each minted as a unique on-chain collectible (maybe even using something like suno.ai). Visual artists could let their audience co-create a piece via successive commands, shaping the final output together.

• Cross-Pollination of Ideas: Right now, a game bot might be used for a fantasy quest. Tomorrow, that same bot’s framework could handle real-time puzzle-solving or crowd-sourced research. The underlying principle is the same: the feed is the interface, open to all.

It’s surreal to remember that one year ago, Farcastles was just me tinkering with a random notion of “!attack” commands for a playful fantasy. I have no illusions of building a massive community or a genre-defining blueprint. But I believe in the power of action. A single prompt turned into a collective story, and that story seeded fresh experiments. Now there’s a blossoming ecosystem of text-based interactions, each new project teaching us more about what’s possible.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: people want to do more than just talk. They want to create, collaborate, compete, and celebrate—all within the same place. The difference with Farcaster is that everything remains open, real-time, and unstoppable. You don’t have to jump between platforms or set up complicated backends; you simply cast a command and see what unfolds.

We’re still early. This is the best time to jump in. Launch that silly game idea. Try a command that triggers a new AI character. Challenge your friends to a public puzzle. If it fails, no big deal—someone else will pick up the baton. If it succeeds, you’ll have helped shape a corner of this emerging world.

So here’s my reflection, one year after the first “!attack”: while Farcastles might just be a quirky text adventure, it also serves as a small window into a wider universe of potential. And that potential is growing every day, thanks to all the new creators, bot makers, and storytellers who keep finding new ways to breathe life into the feed.

I’m reminded that sometimes the best innovations start off as little sparks of curiosity. It might be a gaming trope—slay the dragon, loot the chest!—but those whimsical commands can open doors to far bigger things. If this last year is any indication, we’re just getting started. The real magic lies in the fact that each of us can help shape what comes next, one cast at a time.

Let’s see where that next “!attack” takes us.

For most people, blockchain still conjures images of cryptocurrencies or NFTs: speculative assets, traded for profit, promising ownership but often feeling far removed from the everyday joys of gaming. Yet this understanding barely scratches the surface of what blockchain is capable of. Beyond tokens and collectibles lies the potential for blockchain to become a medium—a foundation for creating new kinds of experiences that feel alive, autonomous, and enduring.

Consider the pioneering project Terraforms, a fully onchain experiment that transcends the notion of static art. Terraforms is a world composed of virtual land parcels, each encoded directly on the blockchain, where owners can interact with and reshape their parcels to reveal deeper layers of data encoded in its structure. These parcels aren’t just passive collectibles—they’re living, evolving canvases that exist independently of centralized servers or creators. Terraforms invites its owners to co-create a world, offering a glimpse into what happens when art, technology, and autonomy collide.

Now, imagine applying this philosophy to a game as iconic as Super Mario Bros.

Super Mario needs no introduction. For decades, it has been the cornerstone of gaming, a symbol of nostalgia and joy. You can almost feel the weight of the cartridge in your hand, the satisfying click as it slots into the console. The process was simple: plug it into the TV, press start, and guide Mario through a series of meticulously designed levels. Every player followed the same journey—jumping over Goombas, collecting coins, and facing Bowser at the end. But for all its magic, Mario’s world was static. The levels never changed. The coins respawned. The pipes were always in perfect condition, no matter how many times you used them.

But what if Mario’s world could change? What if it was more than a series of levels, more than a game you played and finished? What if it was a living, breathing, autonomous world, where every jump, every stomp, and every decision left a permanent mark? What if Super Mario wasn’t just a game—it was a world to inhabit?

The Living, Evolving World of Onchain Mario

In this reimagined Super Mario, the game exists entirely onchain, encoded into the blockchain as an autonomous, evolving world. Every level—be it the iconic “1-1” or a brand-new creation—is its own parcel within a vast, interconnected landscape. These parcels are not static challenges to be overcome but persistent environments, shaped by the players who traverse them.

Imagine starting in “1-1.” You collect a coin, but unlike the Mario of old, that coin doesn’t magically reappear when you restart the level. It’s gone—a finite resource permanently removed from the world. The ground begins to wear under your repeated jumps, showing cracks where you’ve landed too many times. The once-bright Question Blocks dim as their contents are depleted. Over time, the level evolves: pipes weaken from overuse, platforms crumble, and even the enemies adapt to player patterns, growing smarter and more resilient.

This isn’t a game that resets when you turn it off. It’s a living ecosystem that remembers every player’s journey. The terrain itself tells a story—a history of victories, failures, and explorations etched into the world. A hole in the ground might mark where a player once fell, while a well-worn path could reveal the most popular route through the level. Each parcel becomes a digital artifact, carrying the weight of its history for future players to uncover.

A Multiverse of Interoperability

The magic of blockchain lies in its interoperability—the ability for assets to move freely between systems. In this onchain Mario world, everything is encoded as onchain assets: coins, power-ups, enemies, and even terrain. These assets are not confined to this one game. A coin collected in “1-1” could carry metadata that allows it to be traded or used in another game entirely. A Fire Flower might be transplanted into a completely different context, where its powers take on new meaning.

This interoperability opens the door to collaboration on a massive scale. Developers around the world could create new games, levels, or experiences using the same onchain assets. Imagine stepping through a pipe in “1-2” and finding yourself in a player-created sci-fi world, where Mario’s abilities have been reimagined to fit an entirely different narrative. The blockchain acts as the connective tissue, enabling a multiverse of games and stories, all built on the same foundation.

Autonomy and Permissionless Play

Unlike traditional games, which rely on centralized servers and corporate oversight, this Mario would be autonomous. It would live entirely on the blockchain, immune to shutdowns or interference. Its rules and mechanics would be encoded in smart contracts, transparent for anyone to audit or extend.

This autonomy creates a world that is permissionless. Players could engage with the game directly through their wallets, owning not just their progress but their place in the world. Levels could be bought, sold, or even rented out, giving players a direct stake in the game’s evolution. Anyone with the skills could create new levels, remix existing ones, or fork the entire game to create their own version. This is gaming without gatekeepers, where creativity and collaboration flourish.

Decay, Growth, and Emergent Storytelling

At the heart of this onchain Mario is a cycle of decay and growth. The world isn’t static; it evolves over time. Terrain erodes, structures collapse, and levels transform based on the passage of time and player interaction. But decay also makes room for growth. Players could collaborate to repair pipes, rebuild platforms, or even terraform entire levels, leaving their mark on the world for future adventurers.

This cycle creates a new kind of storytelling. Levels tell the story of the players who’ve passed through them—a cracked pipe might whisper of a thousand failed jumps, while an overgrown platform could hint at an area long abandoned. These stories are emergent, not scripted. They are shaped by the collective actions of players, turning the world into a digital archaeology where every block, enemy, and platform carries the weight of its history.

Rethinking Play

This thought experiment—a fully onchain Super Mario—is an invitation to rethink what it means to “play” or what a “game” or “game world” can be altogether.

Today, many blockchain games function as little more than marketing mechanisms for their tokens, reducing play to a means of speculation. But what if we aimed higher? What if we used blockchain not as a gimmick but as a medium to create games that are autonomous, living, and unbounded? Games where every interaction matters, where worlds grow and decay, where players are co-creators rather than mere consumers.

A game like Super Mario as an onchain game would not just be a leap forward in technology—it would be a leap into the unknown, a step toward a future where games are no longer static, disposable products but living worlds that evolve with their players. It challenges us to imagine: what might we create if we let go of old paradigms and embraced the true potential of this new medium?

But this level of seamless interaction didn’t come from nowhere. In the early days of computing, and especially during the golden age of video game consoles like the NES, programming wasn’t about polished tools or high-level languages. It was raw and deliberate, done in Assembly language or even directly in machine code.

Every instruction corresponded to an exact operation performed by the hardware. Want to move a sprite? You’d be telling the console how to push pixels into memory, line by line. Want sound effects? You’d be manually writing values into sound registers to make it beep, hum, or roar. This kind of programming wasn’t just technical—it was intimate. The term “closer to the metal” comes from this era, describing the process of working directly with the foundational elements of the system to create something that felt inseparable from the hardware itself.

Today, most of us live far from the metal, working within layers of abstraction designed to make building easier. But the magic of working closer to the metal hasn’t disappeared—it’s just shifted. On Farcaster, the “metal” isn’t hardware; it’s the social graph itself, powered by foundational primitives like casts, channels, profiles, and hubs.

These primitives aren’t just tools for communication; they’re the building blocks of a permissionless, programmable social feed. Building closer to the metal on Farcaster means creating applications that don’t feel like applications at all. They’re extensions of the network—seamlessly embedded into the flow of culture, community, and conversation.

Take Bountycaster, for example. It’s one of the earliest and simplest demonstrations of what’s possible when you build closer to the metal. At its core, Bountycaster transformed a channel into a functional bounty board. Users could tag a bot with a task description, prize, and deadline, and the bot would handle everything—tracking submissions, managing payouts, and updating the feed.

What set Bountycaster apart wasn’t just its utility but how natural it felt. It wasn’t an app you accessed separately; it was an organic part of the Farcaster experience. By using casts and channels as its foundation, Bountycaster showed how you could create something new without disrupting the flow of conversation happening in the network.

Then there’s Farcastles, a game where players issue commands—!attack north or !attack south—through casts. Each cast is a move in a collaborative social game, with a bot interpreting the commands and responding with updates: damage dealt, castle health, and battle progress.

The magic of Farcastles is that it’s not just a game running on Farcaster; it’s a game woven into Farcaster’s fabric. The hubs store all game data, making it accessible to anyone. Developers can permissionlessly build dashboards to display stats, leaderboards to rank players, or even spin-off games using the same data. Every command, every update, every interaction feels like a natural part of the feed, not an external system bolted on top.

And then there’s Clanker, an AI agent that takes this concept to another level. Clanker is a Farcaster profile tied to an Ethereum wallet. You interact with it entirely through casts, sending simple commands like “deploy a token on Base,” and Clanker handles the entire process, replying once it’s done.

What makes Clanker special isn’t just its utility—it’s how seamlessly it integrates with the social feed. Every cast is a command, every reply is part of the conversation, and the agent feels like a participant in the network. By building closer to the metal, Clanker isn’t just a tool; it’s an extension of Farcaster itself, turning the feed into an interface for blockchain interactions.

And let’s not forget Anoncast, where $ANON token holders can post anonymously to a shared account, @rawanon. Using zk-proof technology, Anoncast ensures that no one—not even the admins—can link posts to their authors. Yet, like every other example, Anoncast feels native to the network. It uses the same primitives to create a fully decentralized, permissionless space for anonymous expression.

These headless applications—Bountycaster, Farcastles, Clanker, Anoncast—don’t just run on Farcaster; they embody it. They’re not standalone apps; they’re embedded experiences that feel like natural extensions of the network.

This is what sets Farcaster apart from traditional social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or Discord. Those platforms are walled gardens, restricting innovation with closed APIs and centralized control. On Farcaster, the feed is programmable, the primitives are open, and the ecosystem is permissionless. Developers don’t need approval to innovate—they can experiment, iterate, and launch without barriers.

What’s emerging is something entirely new: an internet where social is the foundation of everything. Farcaster is already a kind of text-based metaverse, where every cast, profile, and channel is a building block for creating games, tools, and agents that feel inseparable from the network.

As more layers of abstraction are built on top of Farcaster’s primitives, these applications will evolve into richer, more immersive experiences. The feed won’t just be a place for posts—it’ll be the foundation for marketplaces, AI-driven agents, collaborative tools, and virtual worlds. Every interaction will be rooted in the same social graph, blending seamlessly with the culture and community already thriving on the network.

Farcaster isn’t just a platform for building apps; it’s a protocol for building the future of the internet. The tools are here. The metal is waiting. What will you create?

Still, the promise was there, and for a time, consoles relied on mimicking what had come before. Titles like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were arcade staples, and bringing them into the home was a natural starting point. But these early efforts often felt hollow. The hardware was weaker, the visuals were simplified, and the games weren’t designed to sustain long periods of play on a couch. The home console was, in its infancy, a skeuomorphic imitation of the arcade, a new medium trying to justify itself by recreating the old.

And yet, even in those early years, there were glimmers of something more.

The Turning Point

The breakthrough didn’t come from more faithful arcade ports or better graphics. It came when developers started asking a simple question: What can consoles do that arcades can’t?

The answer wasn’t obvious at first. The limitations of early consoles—rudimentary graphics, slower processors, and no coin slots to monetize a player’s every failure—seemed more like obstacles than opportunities. But those constraints forced creativity.

Take Adventure on the Atari 2600. It didn’t look like much, with its blocky graphics and abstract shapes. But it offered something profound: exploration. Instead of trying to capture the fast-paced intensity of an arcade game, Adventure gave players a world to discover at their own pace. It was messy and imperfect, but it hinted at the possibilities of the medium.

Then came The Legend of Zelda, a game that revolutionized how people thought about home consoles. It wasn’t just that the game was expansive; it was that it invited players to return to it, day after day, to continue their journey. With the advent of save systems, players could leave behind the "one-and-done" mentality of arcades and embrace something new: persistence. Console gaming didn’t have to be about chasing high scores. It could be about building something, discovering something, and growing alongside the game.

Other games followed, leaning into what made consoles unique. Super Mario Bros. introduced levels that felt like living, breathing worlds. Final Fantasy brought sweeping narratives and character progression that unfolded over dozens of hours. These were experiences no arcade could replicate—not because consoles had finally caught up, but because consoles had found their voice.

Embracing the Unique Affordances of a Medium

This story has played out in other mediums, too. Early films often resembled stage plays, with static cameras capturing the action as if the audience were seated in a theater. It wasn’t until filmmakers embraced the unique affordances of cinema—camera movement, editing, visual effects—that the medium began to truly evolve. The same can be said for early mobile apps, which mimicked desktop interfaces before designers began to understand the power of touchscreens and mobility.

In each case, the turning point came when creators stopped looking backward and started looking inward. Instead of asking how to recreate the old, they asked how to embrace the new—its constraints, its possibilities, and its unique way of engaging people.

What This Means for Onchain Gaming

There’s a lesson here for anyone working with a new medium, and it’s one that onchain gaming is just beginning to learn. Like early consoles, many onchain games are still imitating what came before—adding blockchain elements to traditional game structures without fully embracing what makes the blockchain unique.

But as with consoles, the real breakthrough won’t come from copying the past. It will come when developers start to ask: What can onchain games do that traditional games can’t?

The answer to that question isn’t fully clear yet, and that’s what makes this moment so exciting. Just as early console developers leaned into persistence, exploration, and player ownership, onchain games will find their breakthroughs by embracing the blockchain’s unique affordances—and maybe even its constraints.

History shows us that every medium needs time to find its voice. Onchain gaming is still in its early days, but the potential is there. The question now is whether we’ll have the patience—and the creativity—to let it grow into something truly its own.

In his often difficult-to-understand mind, smart contracts on Ethereum are entities, even art, floating in the ether - pun intended - and he uses this way of thinking to develop genuinely revolutionary, boundary-pushing art pieces onchain.

But how does one wrap their mind around this abstract way of thinking? Why is this way of thinking even helpful in understanding blockchain as a medium?

Well, I happen to share a similar abstract way of viewing the world, specifically blockchains. I find it helpful to seek patterns and draw comparisons to other things I understand to truly grasp the complex concepts presented in this space.

But what in the world could be analogous to blockchains? Isn't it just software? And what's all this art talk? Am I referring to NFTs? Aren't they just collectibles and links to images hosted off-chain?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, my friends. What has been unlocked here is far greater than we can even imagine. Let me walk you through a new way of understanding Ethereum: a Universe in and of itself.

What is Ethereum, actually?

It surprises me that many still view blockchains as primarily economic or financial innovations. While Bitcoin certainly fits this mold, having proven itself as an alternative monetary system, Ethereum was conceived with a different, more expansive vision: to be the blockchain for "everything else." (Yes, I'm aware of the ultrasound-money meme from previous cycles, but that’s not the focus here.)

Let’s take a deeper look at Ethereum. At its core, Ethereum is composed of several interrelated components:

• The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM): Ethereum’s decentralized computing platform, where smart contracts are deployed, executed, and maintained.

• Ethereum, the blockchain ledger: This is a decentralized, immutable record that tracks all transactions and the state of smart contracts across the network.

• Ether (ETH): The native cryptocurrency of Ethereum, used to pay for transaction fees (gas) and to power the execution of smart contracts on the network.

Yes, more goes into making this system work, including Externally Owned Accounts (aka Wallets) and validator nodes, but bear with me.

The EVM: Empty Space

One of my favorite ways to visualize the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is to compare it to a classic episode of Looney Tunes called "Duck Amuck."

In the cartoon, Daffy Duck is at the mercy of an unseen, mischievous animator who constantly changes his surroundings, clothing, voice, physical appearance, and even shape. The blank canvas on which the animator works is much like how I imagine the EVM.

The EVM is a dynamic environment where developers can deploy computer programs, known on Ethereum as smart contracts. While the term "smart contract" might suggest a connection to legal agreements, it actually refers to a set of programmed instructions stored within this virtual space. Once deployed, these programs gain several unique and powerful properties:

• Immutability: Once a smart contract is deployed, its code cannot be altered. No one can change it, ensuring the program runs exactly as intended.

• Autonomy: Smart contracts are self-executing. They can automatically carry out their programmed tasks without requiring any intermediaries.

• Interoperability: These programs can interact seamlessly with one another. Any developer on the Ethereum platform can access and utilize the data and functions of existing smart contracts to build new applications.

• Unstoppability: As long as the Ethereum network exists, these smart contracts continue to exist and run. They are not reliant on any single entity, making them resilient and enduring.

The Blockchain: Time

The "Duck Amuck" episode of Looney Tunes lasts around 7 minutes, but those few minutes consist of over 10,000 meticulously hand-drawn frames, a process that likely took months to complete. For animators, measuring time in seconds and minutes isn't particularly useful when it comes to their craft. Instead, they focus on the number of frames. When delegating tasks among teams of animators, it's more effective to assign work based on frame count. Each frame subtly alters the animation, and when these frames are displayed in rapid succession, they create the illusion of a living, breathing motion picture. To the viewer, Daffy Duck isn't just a collection of thousands of frames—he's a vibrant character with a recognizable personality that we can relate to.

Similarly, in the world of blockchain, the most meaningful unit of time is the block. Each block represents a change in the Ethereum Virtual Machine's (EVM) state. Transactions within the EVM are like events unfolding in the virtual environment, and each of these events is recorded on the Ethereum blockchain ledger in the form of a block. Just as each frame in an animation represents a subtle shift in the story, each block on the blockchain encapsulates a collection of state changes in the EVM.

Ethereum's Space-Time

I think you can see where I'm going with this by now. This isn't just normal software that we're building on our computers or hosting on a centralized cloud provider. Computer programs deployed onchain exist in a completely different realm altogether—a universe with its own space-time and programmable physics. In the "Duck Amuck" analogy, Daffy Duck is the autonomous smart contract, and we - the developers and users - are the mischievous animators.

These programs are not just software; they possess the permanence and reliability of hardware. Unlike the temporary structures hosted on platforms burdened by counterparty risk, potential censorship, de-platforming, or exorbitant hosting costs, on-chain digital property is truly owned—immutable and everlasting. Digital property on today's web isn't owned; it is leased. Digital property onchain is forever.

Smart contracts are the steel and concrete of a new Internet era, the foundation upon which we can build sculpture gardens on a plane of existence separate from our own untouchable by outside forces. This is the power we wield, and we can do much more with it than make memecoins and casino games. Use this power wisely.

Then, towards the end of the year, I noticed some intriguing developments. The Farcaster community started attracting speculators in novel ways. Early memecoins like $POINTS used activity on Farcaster as a distribution method. A user's activity on the network quantified the amount of tokens they could receive. Other tokens, like $DEGEN, adopted this method with added functionality: tipping. To ensure fair distribution, @jacek, the $DEGEN contract developer, introduced a feature allowing users to "tip" high-quality casts by replying with the number of $DEGEN from their daily allowance they were willing to give. The airdrop of tokens at the end of the qualification period was partly based on the number of tips received from the community.

This fascinated me. I'm not usually a memecoin speculator, but the emergence of these novel applications from the users of a network, without developer involvement or foresight, struck me as a key differentiator from the Web2 social media landscape. Facebook or Twitter would never allow such third-party applications to emerge without their involvement. This became even clearer with the introduction of frames in early 2024, allowing third-party developers to embed mini-apps within the Farcaster social feed via interactive casts.

All of this helped me realize that Farcaster was not an X (formerly Twitter) clone at all. In fact, it reminded me much more of another place where I was spending a lot of my time: Discord.

The Discord Case Study

Discord is a fascinating example of a product evolving into a comprehensive developer platform. Initially designed as a messaging application for gamers playing multiplayer games online and on mobile, Discord has transformed dramatically with the addition of numerous customer features, bots, and now embedded applications created by third-party developers.

From the beginning, the Discord team understood that their users—both players and developers—would want to create custom interfaces and interactions tailored to the specific games they were playing. For instance, a community centered around a roguelike game might require different features compared to one focused on a high fantasy battler or a space colonization strategy game like Eve Online. These diverse communities each had unique needs, prompting the creation of a wide range of custom tools and modifications.

Initially, this was exactly how Discord was used, but over time, users got more creative. Intricate bots and applications were built on top of Discord, ranging from games to generative AI tools like Midjourney. Midjourney found product-market fit by embedding their text-to-image models into a Discord bot, which could be invited to join any channel on Discord. This method rapidly grew Midjourney's user base to millions, with the business now running almost entirely on Discord. Many other businesses followed suit, from paid membership groups to Web3 companies and DAOs operating entirely within Discord.

Discord's commitment to extensibility took a significant leap forward with the recent introduction of HTML5-based embeddable applications. This addition allows developers to build rich, interactive web applications directly within Discord, offering visuals and interactive elements far beyond what was previously possible with simple text commands and bots. Now, developers can create interactive games and other complex applications within the platform.

Extensibility on Farcaster

While Discord's extensibility has made it a sprawling developer platform, it remains just a social messaging application. Farcaster, on the other hand, is an entire [sufficiently] decentralized social protocol. Despite its growing popularity, many people still don't fully understand what this means. If entire new businesses can grow on Discord, perhaps entire new industries can grow on Farcaster.

Beyond memecoin tipping, Farcaster has seen significant third-party experimentation. For the sake of discussion, let's focus on three prominent examples that feel novel and different from Web2 social applications: Bountycaster, Paybot, and, of course, Farcastles.

Bountycaster

In my short time in the industry, I've seen numerous examples of bounty boards and job boards in crypto. These are usually standalone web applications built for niche communities. Alternatively, some use general-purpose freelancing sites like Fiverr and Upwork, which often fall short for Web3-related projects, making it difficult for job seekers and talent seekers alike to find consistent and valuable work.

Bountycaster took a different approach. Instead of building their own platform or a separate Farcaster client, they started a channel called /bounties. In this channel, users post jobs or tasks they need help with, specify the bounty amount (with several currency options, including USDC, ETH, and DEGEN), and set a timeframe for completing the task. The @bountycaster bot "listens" for casts in the channel, parses them using AI, and generates a bounty for that user along with an interactive frame for managing the bounty.

Leveraging Farcaster for distribution, Bountycaster has quickly become a bustling hub for developers, founders, and new users to connect. In just a few short months, it has become one of the first businesses to find success by building natively on Farcaster.

Farcaster

Linda Xie on Warpcast

I think it's really important to question basic assumptions before launching a product. For example how @pirosb3 and I thought about a new bounties platform when we launched Bountycaster's MVP: - default assumption is a standalone platform: what if you built on Farcaster to leverage distribution and only existed within a social feed? - default assumption is take a transaction fee: what if you could launch without smart contracts as peer to peer bounties and monetize in a different way? - default assumption is users create a structured bounty post: what if users could just write what they wanted and AI automatically processes it? We obviously don't have everything figured out and are still learning a lot as we go but sharing how we think about early decision frameworks if helpful

Paybot

Paybot is both an innovation and a no-brainer. Imagine being able to pay your friends directly from Twitter or Facebook. This is the kind of application cryptocurrency was made for, and it became entirely possible with the invention of Paybot.

Similar to Bountycaster, Paybot started as a bot account on Farcaster, listening for mentions and commands. When a user mentioned another user along with an amount to be paid, Paybot would launch a dialog box via an interactive frame, allowing the transaction to be initiated directly from the social feed.

Developed just a few months ago by a third-party developer, Paybot has since been fully integrated into the platform by the Farcaster team. Alongside other payment features, it enables users to pay each other directly from the social feed or through direct casts, streamlining peer-to-peer transactions within the social network.

Farcaster

Varun Srinivasan on Warpcast

Pay users on Warpcast! Send money onchain by tapping "Pay" on a profile or cast menu. They are: - Made in USDC on Base. - Sent to the most recent connected address. - Forwarded to a wallet to complete. This will be available to everyone in the next hour. https://imagedelivery.net/BXluQx4ige9GuW0Ia56BHw/ec503d30-36c8-4d5b-6729-eee416216300/original

Farcastles

I wrote extensively on Farcastles in my first Paragraph post of the same name. Interestingly, Farcastles was inspired by a bot my team and I built for the Banners Discord. When I first saw the hint of programmability on Farcaster, my immediate thought was, "Oh, it's like Twitter and Discord had a baby." I knew that bot-enabled games on Farcaster had to become a thing.

Two main properties of Farcaster excited me about building a game like Farcastles: feed-as-an-interface and permissionless composability.

Since 2021, I've spent a lot of time in Web3 gaming. One of the more frustrating aspects of the space is that most games feel like copies of existing games but with the added obstacle of poor crypto UX. Few founders were working on non-skeuomorphic games that leveraged the affordances of the blockchain as a medium. Even within Farcaster, Frame Games often felt like inferior browser games quickly lost in the feed.

My aim with Farcastles was to use the Farcaster social feed as the interface for users to interact with the game, turning it into a canvas for an immersive RPG world where players LARP as medieval knights defending their castle. It's mindless fun, but it's also a compelling use of the Farcaster platform.

This approach gave the game some interesting properties. It became inherently interoperable since all game actions happen through casts, and all cast history is part of Farcaster's open social graph. This means other developers can track all players who used an !attack command, know whether they attacked the north or south castle, see if they switched sides, and measure how much damage they've contributed to either castle.

Many interesting applications have emerged from this. One of the earliest community initiatives, without any involvement from me, was a bot that distributed a coin called $CASTLE to players who attacked the South Castle. Another developer used the FIDs and usernames of all players on the winning side of a round to distribute NFTs. This same data was later used to create a permissionless leaderboard of the players who delivered the most damage to either castle. All of this was done without creating a separate API or granting permission to third-party developers. In this manner, I hope to see Farcastles and other games like it grow in functionality and fidelity as the community of fans builds on top of it.

Conclusion

Reflecting on my initial skepticism, it’s clear that Farcaster is far more than just a clone of X (formerly Twitter). The platform's embrace of decentralized principles and innovative third-party experimentation has unlocked a new frontier in social media. From the novel use of memecoin distribution and tipping to the creation of Bountycaster, Paybot, and Farcastles, Farcaster has demonstrated that it can foster unique applications and interactions that are simply not possible on traditional Web2 platforms. These developments illustrate the transformative potential of a programmable social feed, one where creativity, interoperability, and community-driven innovation thrive. I have much more to say about this topic, but I'll save it for another post. As Farcaster continues to evolve, I look forward to seeing how it will inspire new industries and reshape the way we engage with social media.

However, as a fervent admirer of these technologies, I believe that defining the metaverse strictly in terms of virtual environments and cutting-edge hardware is too narrow. In my view, the metaverse doesn't need to be virtual. At its core, the term "metaverse" is simply a modern, enticing label for what we already know as the internet.

Consider the virtual nature of our current online interactions. How often do we replace in-person meetings with digital equivalents, like video conferences? Nowadays, interacting with technology doesn’t even require a keyboard or mouse—speak a command, and digital assistants like Siri spring into action.

While spatial computing may represent a natural evolution as our physical and digital worlds increasingly merge, I contend that the metaverse isn’t a future concept—it's our current reality. And we are actively participating in it on platforms like Farcaster.

The Social Internet

The internet is increasingly social. Over half the global population now uses the internet, and among those, more than 90% engage with social media platforms. On average, a third of an internet user's time is spent on social media, a figure that significantly increases when including platforms like YouTube and TikTok.

This trend shows no signs of abating. I anticipate that social media platforms will continue to dominate our collective mindshare as we seek to connect, coordinate, and collaborate globally. Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse aims to facilitate this evolution, pushing us deeper into the future. Yet, this isn't an entirely new phenomenon; we are already connecting and collaborating online. While a virtual metaverse might offer a more immersive experience, enhancing our sense of connection, we don’t need to wait for universal VR headset adoption to achieve this.

Instead, our priority should be to develop the essential building blocks that will enable a smooth transition into virtual environments. At the forefront of these foundational elements is your social identity—your avatar, which extends beyond the simplistic notion of a 3D cartoon figure. Equally crucial is the concept of shared identity spaces, which shape how we present and perceive ourselves across various platforms.

Shared Identity Spaces

Growing up bilingual, I've noticed a peculiar social phenomenon: my personality shifts dramatically depending on whether I'm speaking Spanish or English. This duality might be difficult to grasp for someone who only speaks one language, but it's not unique to bilingual individuals. You might have observed similar changes in the men in your life who act differently when they're "with the boys" compared to their demeanor with family or in more intimate settings. Similarly, encountering a supervisor outside of work and seeing them behave more relaxed and "human" can be surprising, to say the least.

What I've realized is that as humans, we naturally segment ourselves into various "identity bubbles." Each of these spaces has its own set of unwritten rules, contexts, and dynamics that differ from one group to another. This phenomenon isn't limited to physical interactions.

Consider how we behave in digital spaces: the content you post on Facebook is likely quite different from what you share on LinkedIn, even if the same people might see both. Despite having similar connections on both platforms, the context changes, and intuitively, we adhere to the specific social norms of each platform.

Web3 and Identity Dynamics

Let's pivot our discussion to the realm of Web3. Have you noticed how your behavior changes across different Crypto and NFT communities on platforms like Discord or X? Does the way you communicate remain consistent from one community to another, or does it adapt to the specific audience and context? Unsurprisingly, it changes—sometimes, it even varies from one blockchain to another (I'm looking at you Solana bros).

This variability has been particularly evident to me in the channels on Farcaster. On Farcaster, channels act as distinct boundaries that define and separate one shared identity space from another (similar to subreddits on Reddit). Each channel cultivates its own culture, rules, and norms with intentions set from the onset by the channel's Host.

I postulate that the Internet’s capability to recreate these shared identity spaces is foundational for a fully embodied Internet. Your metaverse avatar, in this case, is not merely a cartoonish 3D figure in a digital realm; it represents the identity you adopt as you navigate from one digital space to another across the vast expanse of the World Wide Web.

What Does It All Mean?

I invite you to embrace the idea that we are already living within the metaverse and Farcaster is a text-based metaverse. A metaverse does not require virtual worlds and MMORPGs. Your avatar is the version of you that shows up in each and every one of the internet spaces you interact with.

With this framework in mind, I urge you to ponder the possibilities within this text-based universe. What kinds of innovative apps and experiences could we develop? What new and exciting games could we play? And importantly, what roles do blockchain and cryptocurrencies play in this evolving landscape?

Since the release of Farcastles, I've been deeply involved in exploring these questions and have numerous ideas to share. I'll save these insights for a future post. In the meantime, I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Leave a comment here or on Farcaster, and let’s continue this conversation!

The first week of Farcastles has been an absolute blast. I’m genuinely blown away by how the community has responded. It seems like everyone just "understood the assignment," as the kids say, and got right into the spirit of the game without needing much guidance from me at all.

However, I realize that might not be the case for everyone, so I wanted to take a moment to gather my thoughts on Farcastles — what it is, where it’s headed, and what I’ve observed so far.

What is Farcastles?

On the surface, Farcastles is actually incredibly simple. In fact, much of the confusion I've noted stems from just how straightforward it is. But rest assured, the simplicity is entirely intentional.

Farcastles is a text-based social game played within the /farcastles channel on Farcaster. Players engage with the game by casting commands within the channel to either ‘!attack north’ or ‘!attack south’. The Farcastles bot will capture these commands and register the amount of damage done to a castle (NOTE: Only individual casts are captured. Replies have been disabled to avoid spam). The game's objective is to reduce the opposing castle’s HP from 5000 to zero. That’s it. That’s the game.

You may be wondering, “How do I choose which castle I attack?” or “Why am I attacking the castle in the first place?” All of that is up to the players’ imagination. I’ve deliberately left out images, lore, stats, and other specifics to open up a canvas for the players to add functionality and meaning. This game is an open invitation for the Farcaster community to play, imagine, and collaboratively craft the world of Farcastles.

Inspired by Loot

The majority of the work I’ve done in Web3 over the last 2.5 years has been within the universe of Loot (for Adventurers), an NFT project by Dom Hoffman known for its innocuous NFT images showcasing eight lines of white text on a black background. To the Loot community, however, this project was an invitation to create—an “emergent art” that served as a spark to a community of like-minded builders, artists, and thinkers to develop a world around the items on these NFT images. Loot was “Minimum Viable Art”. Dom gave the community just enough in the Loot smart contract to extrapolate an entire world of lore, art, and games, but if it were any simpler, it would lose all meaning.

In the same way, I sought to make Farcastles a “Minimum Viable Game,” or gaming primitive, with an easy-to-understand game loop and a minimal narrative framework, encapsulating a conflict between North and South. My hope was that these elements alone would enable Farcaster users who ventured into the channel to grasp the concept and take the reins from there.

Maximally Inclusive

The openness and permissionless nature of Web3 are what make it so refreshing and necessary in today's world of centralized internet service companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google. It dismantles all barriers, empowering anyone with a good idea and the will to execute it. With Farcastles, my aim was to craft an experience accessible to every Farcaster user without the prerequisite of owning a token or belonging to an exclusive group, enabling them to play and enrich the game.

Farcastles is CC0, and the bot’s codebase will be open-sourced at a later date. My goal is for individuals of all skill levels, experiences, or follower counts to feel encouraged to contribute and nurture the community—no permission needed. I firmly believe each of us has something valuable to offer, and collaborative worldbuilding projects like Loot and Farcastles provide a platform for the community to showcase themselves.

This idea of maximal inclusion and accessibility is also why the game commands are so simple. I’m not necessarily looking for hardcore gamers to play Farcastles. The game requires you to type (or copy+paste) two words into the channel. Just about anyone with experience on the web can grasp this concept and contribute to the game by helping their side win.

Another key objective was to ensure the game demands minimal commitment. Players can attack only once every 12 hours, allowing for engagement with little effort or time. While future updates will introduce new features and interactions, it’s important to me that even those with limited free time can contribute meaningfully, ensuring everyone feels included and valued.

The History of Farcastles

Farcastles is actually inspired by a Discord game I created with Caygeon for the Banners (for Adventurers) project titled “Call the Banners.” I was fed up with the ubiquitous “Retweet & Tag 3 friends” campaigns on Twitter, designed to drum up community engagement and garner attention for NFT projects. In my opinion, these efforts often backfired, detracting from the project's legitimacy instead of bolstering it. In fact, they often fail to achieve their intended goal, attracting individuals more interested in acquiring a free NFT to flip it on secondary rather than genuinely engaging with the community.

To counter this, I conceptualized a game that served as a proof-of-work mechanism, rewarding only those truly aligned with and invested in the community. Like Farcastles, this game featured two factions battling to reduce the other's HP, with victors earning a valueless in-game currency. This currency's sole use was to enter a raffle for NFT giveaways at the conclusion of the game. "Call the Banners" quickly became a hit within our community, drawing in key team members who remain part of the project to this day. It's still under development, with plans to launch a similar fully on-chain, browser-based version on Starknet.

This initiative revealed a significant insight I’ve brought into Farcastles: once players began participating, their focus shifted away from the NFT giveaway to the enjoyment of making friends and uniting against a common adversary. This turned out to be the most fun and rewarding experience I’ve ever had online, and it’s exactly the experience I want to recreate with Farcastles.

I aim to share this with Farcaster and the broader Web3 community, hoping to inspire behavioral change toward valuing fun and shared experiences over speculation and profit. In Web3 and decentralized social platforms, we don’t need to replicate the next Crypto Punks 10k collection or 100x meme coin. Instead, we can cultivate enjoyable, shared experiences that add value to the community and foster organic growth.

Future Expansion

My approach to expanding Farcastles is hands-off, preferring not to dictate its direction but rather to empower the community to contribute freely and organically. This aligns with the overarching spirit of crypto and Web3, encouraging community members to add their own features, art, lore, memes, and more. I will continue to build and play alongside the community, and I'll happily share my opinion, but it will always be on equal footing with the rest of the amazing community on Farcaster.

This positions Farcastles as a seed for infinite expansion. The future shape of Farcastles remains unknown to me, and that’s exciting. Personally, I am non-technical, but I will continue to work alongside edit, the mastermind and technical guru behind the development of the bot, to add features and functionality to the game before we feel it is ready to be completely handed over to the community. We continue to collect feedback and have already made several changes inspired by suggestions made in the channel.

I hope Farcastles serves as a catalyst for similar experiences to flourish on Farcaster, fully harnessing the potential of decentralized social platforms. Farcaster presents a unique opportunity to redefine the future of social gaming, with every participant having the power to influence its evolution.

Observations and Conclusions

The first week of Farcastles exceeded any expectations I might have had. Nearly 2,300 people have dived into the channel, launching commands left and right (or north and south lol). Some have even taken to attacking consistently every 12 hours since the onset of the game.

Each time I scroll through the Farcastles channel, I find myself smiling as I witness the memes and art shared by the community alongside the friendly banter that embodies the spirit of our game.

What impressed me most was the speed at which some players captured the essence of what I was trying to achieve. They've created dashboards on Dune, helped onboard new players, and even crafted their own NFT collections inspired by the game. Recently, I came across a community member who created a new bot that serves as a bank, airdropping a meme token named $CASTLE to those attacking castles. Speaking of meme tokens, the emergence of bounties, mercenaries, and sellswords being compensated in $DEGEN tips has been a sight to behold.

I can't say enough how thankful I am for all of you joining me in this peculiar and amusing game, contributing to the development of the Farcastles world. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

For more information, please check out the channel, and feel free to DM me. See you on the battlefield!

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