The videos and casts were part of Hyperfit, an impromptu commitment club conceived by @nonlinear.eth, who wanted a fun way to incentivize himself to get moving again.

The premise was simple: the three of us would pay 0.02 ETH into a 7-day @hypersub, commit to a workout each day in /commitment, and cast proof of commitment. Do it every day and we get our money back, miss a day and we lose our money.

The outcome was fantastic: we each completed our daily commitment every day, we all got our money back (@nonlinear.eth even gave his share to @phil and me), and we had a blast completing it with each other — and with everyone who replied to our casts on Warpcast and cheered us on.

I have found participating in /firstdraft, another onchain commitment club with financial stakes, to be just as rewarding for the same reasons.

In fact, combining financial incentives (via @hypersub) and the power of community (via @warpcast) leverages both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that — when built onchain — could be a huge unlock for all accountability groups.

Even if the technology is new, accountability groups are not; their history dates back centuries. 

Students of Stoicism would gather in 4th century BCE to discuss concepts and hold each other accountable for living in accordance with stoic principles. 

Literary societies, like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkiens’ the Inklings in the 1930s, regularly met to share and critique each other’s work. 

Temperance Societies, Alcoholics Anonymous, Study Groups. These are all accountability groups.

Throughout history, few of these were driven by obvious financial incentives, but rather by mutual support, consistent reinforcement, and shared commitment to a goal. 

That is, until the late 20th century when accountability groups with financial stakes began to gain popularity. 

Weight Watchers went from free to paid. Gym pacts surfaced in which members would commit to a certain number of visits with financial penalties for non-compliance. Mastermind groups began to charge as participants became more entrepreneurial.

What led to both the growth of accountability groups and subsequently the introduction of financial incentives to these groups? The internet.

The introduction of internet platforms — with community-building tools and online payment systems — made it significantly easier to both create and find groups and to implement, track, and manage financial incentives at scale. 

As a result, there was an explosion of more sophisticated and wide-reaching accountability groups, commitment clubs, and online communities that could all effectively and efficiently incorporate financial stakes.

Now consider if these communities moved onchain, leveraging products like Warpcast and Hypersub as we did for Hyperfit. What would that unlock?

1. Portable, user-owned identity and social graph: you can now try new apps without losing your social connections or history.
   
   This means you can more easily find like-minded people when all of your existing connections and interests can be leveraged to find and form new accountability groups or challenges quickly — as we’ve already seen with the three-person /hyperfit to a 50+ person /higher-athletics challenge to a 200+ person /success channel.
   

2. Interoperability: your identity and activity can now integrate across all onchain apps.
   
   This means your achievements in /hyperfit or /firstdraft could unlock rewards or status in a fitness-focused app (like Receipts) or a writing-focused app (like Paragraph). In fact, /firstdraft and Paragraph are already collaborating on a raffle.
   

3. Programmable incentives and automated payouts: you may now get your funds more quickly, efficiently, and transparently than ever before.
   
   Using @hypersub and @splits smart contracts, paired with @warpcast content (verifiable by Farcaster Hubs), automates payout execution with a clear, auditable trail of all transactions; this reduces operational overhead and human error and potentially even transaction costs. 

While the onchain tech still isn’t ready for mainstream, we should celebrate the emerging case studies from which we can iterate. We should also look to existing commitment contract products as a ripe opportunity for more experimentation.

Take StickK — a first-of-its-kind platform launched in 2008 by two Yale economists that allowed users to create “commitment contracts” for personal goals (like weight loss, smoking, exercise) with financial stakes.

Nearly 15 years later, StickK still exists today with hundreds and thousands of users. Corporations use StickK for employee wellness programs. Academic institutions use StickK for research on behavior change and commitment devices. Features have expanded to include other personal goals and new stakeholders to forfeit money, such as a charity or friends.

Now imagine StickK built onchain. Let’s say you want to create an accountability group to quit complaining. 

Using Farcaster, StickK onchain lets you you connect your FID.

Using Hypersub, StickK lets you create a smart contract-based commitment contract that holds your financial stakes in escrow until goal verification (no complaining) and fund distribution is done (manually for now, automated in the future).

Using Farcaster and Hypersub, StickK automatically creates a new channel (/no-complaints) for you once the smart contract is deployed. All goals and progress updates are automatically posted to the channel. Friends can become “participants” or “referees” or “supporters” of the no complaining challenge as the challenge is shared across social platforms.

And so on and so on. As mentioned, the technology is still too nascent for mainstream and the lego blocks are still too clunky for a truly seamless user experience — but I’m confident we will get there someday.

And when we do, I anticipate a similar (albeit smaller) explosion of accountability groups, commitment clubs, and communities with financial stakes.

she always hated public outbursts, preferring meltdowns to be done in the privacy of the bathroom with the door closed and the shower on and no one standing underneath to wash in the water.

"you can't just keep talking your way out of it or cloaking yourself in goddamn therapy talk," he shouts. not at me, no, but at whatever soul is on the other end of his airpods.

i shudder and feel the hair on the back of my neck rise. my skin crawls with the type of nostalgia that goddamn therapy talk would refer to as "negative nostalgia" or "nostalgic depression" or, more succinctly, "trauma," or, if you want one letter shorter, "PTSD."

sir, this is a wendy's, i think, as i glance at the 6:38am on my watch and pick up my pace.

it wasn't too long ago that my — once our — morning walks transitioned into solo walks, during which i either pay too little attention to myself (read: headphones blasting) or pay too much attention to others (read: people watching). there is no in between.

"what's redeeming about this? about you?" he barks. "what do you even add to my life?"

he is asking questions to which he should know the answers better and more intimately than anyone else, i presume.

actually, "i assume" is more accurate since i know nothing about this man and whoever is on the other end of the phone and their relationship together. i only know about mine, or what used to be mine.

"i sincerely hope you're proud of yourself," he says and i can't tell if he's being serious or sarcastic.

in that moment, i desperately want headphones but instead i have the type of brain that is incapable of screening out sensory input.

maybe she's a bitch, i think. maybe she loves to play the victim, i think.

or maybe he's the type of guy who always has to tell his next girl that his last girl was crazy, i think — confidently this time.

i wonder if the the girl on the other end of the call feels rage or remorse or resentment.

i wonder if she feels all of the above or nothing at all.

and i wonder if, when the call inevitably ends, she will feel relief or if it will take her two months like it took me.

One autumn night, I discovered a website of 300 handwritten love letters. I had uncovered a treasure, one that I would cherish and return to for years to come.

As soon as I read the website’s “an explanation,” I was consumed. I scrolled slowly, line by line, through the tiny black words in monospace font in paragraphs so large I would otherwise have skimmed and skipped altogether.

The writer wanted to rediscover a certain kind of intimacy and connection in a society, according to her, that was lacking both. In simpler words, she wanted to train her heart to feel. Like, really feel.

And to feel, she decided to write 300 love letters. 

Each letter was written with a goal to pull out and vocalize the small thread, the invisible string, connecting her to those around her.

Each letter was written to someone the writer knew, but was mailed at random to strangers across the country.

Each letter was handwritten by pen or marker or crayon on a range of media, one even on a piece of toilet paper, but was represented on the website’s user interface in a giant grid of tiny colored clickable squares.

Each letter was color coded corresponding to the type of relationship the writer had with each of the recipients: red and pink for lovers, yellow for strangers, blue for friends, indigo for family, purple for crushes, and so on and so on and so on.

That night, I read every letter.

I clicked through every single little square of every single color. I read every line, handwritten or typed, on every form of media.

Turns out there are actually 400 letters, not 300. She wrote an extra 100 letters because the first 300 left her unsatisfied: “it was only within the last hundred letters that I started really writing to strangers, acquaintances, family, it felt like I just started getting to the hard part.”

And then decided I, too, would write 400 handwritten love letters corresponding to the same exact color code.

I did blues and purples and greens (for acquaintances) and browns (for the people we don't really like) and whites (for ourselves). I did every color except for red and pink (for lovers) because I had only read of them, but had never known one — yet.

I was at the age where yellows (for strangers) delighted me most while indigoes (for family) challenged me most. There were more browns (for the people we don't really like) than whites (for ourselves) and as many purples (for crushes) as greens (for acquaintances).

Six months into her own 400 letter project, sixteen-year-old me felt she had seen it all. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what it meant to feel. And feeling, like really feeling, emboldened her with a sense of comfort and connection she hadn't known before — a confidence that compelled her to stop sending her purples to strangers and instead try sending one to its intended recipient.

“Hi," popped up on her phone a week later.

Alone, those two figures, H and I, contain little meaning, if any. But on that Friday afternoon, they contained the known and the unknown and every emotion in between.

and most romantics will answer that very question with some idealized version of a seemingly glorious sabbath day. always idyllic, sometimes whimsical, but never practical.

i, too, am a romantic. i, too, love to dream.

but, for me, the perfect sunday isn’t one that can be dreamt up.

the perfect sunday is the one you didn’t know you needed until that moment in bed, right before you close your eyes.

the sunday where you wake up early to your arms already stretched over head, grasping at the morning. hello world, they seem to say, as you feel the energy flow through your legs and flex your feet.

you get up. you look in the mirror. you swear off any existential dread. you begin the day.

you grab your toothbrush and turn on your favorite song. favorite is relative because you will play that song on loop for three days and then never listen to it again until three months later. you turn up the volume.

you make small talk about hometowns at the coffee shop waiting for your cappuccino. “rhode island? that sounds like a dream,” you say to the barista. “it is, you’d fit right in,” he replies and you wonder what that means.

you tell yourself they only like you because you drink whole milk in a city that loves white liquids from nuts and oats and anything and everything but a cow. you are being naive, but you know that.

it’s low tide so you decide to take your coffee for a walk on the beach. you stand still for a moment as the water kisses your toes. fuck, you miss him. or her or whomever you can no longer have.

you call your mom. she yaps. you yap, too. hell, you’re both yappers and suddenly you’re at the jetty a mile and a half from where you started without any sunscreen on your shoulders. that’s a good yap, even if you don’t tell her that last part.

on the way back, you run into an old friend. you surf the small swell together for hours and catch up in between waves. the breaks in conversation that would be awkward on land translate to a thoughtfulness and patience only possible in the water. ah, how you love the water.

you are home wiping the sand off your calves when your phone buzzes. “costco?” it reads. you slip on your shoes instead of hopping in the shower.

the three of you browse up and down the aisles, giggling as you avoid the carts and the chaos and any talk about his breakup or her father or your existential dread that you swore off that morning. costco is too sacred of a ground for some topics.

you grab a box of peaches, a bottle of wine, and a bag of avocados. you are convinced you need nothing else, both in that moment and in life. you, you tell yourself, are of little wants and fewer needs. then you see the dark chocolate.

the three of you play that familiar game of tetris as you load up the car. it’s a man’s game, but she’s got it down good. stack the celsius this way, sturdy the eggs that way, don’t put the blueberries anywhere they could spill. 

you realize how much you bought and wonder if someone will make a sly little capitalism remark. instead he mentions his breakup, she her father, and you your dread. there’s something so intimate about passing costo-sized groceries between your hands and into the trunk of a land rover as you melt in the heat together.

once the trunk slams shut, the three of you exhale. you feel good. you all feel good. you feel the same joie de vivre of your early twenties, but now in a parking lot running errands and not at Shore Bar drinking on a sunday afternoon.

“should we go, though?” she asks. “for old time’s sake? maybe,” he schemes. you turn on the new billie and charli song about underwear and roll down the windows.

two hours later, the three of you are not at Shore Bar. instead you sit around her kitchen table with your laptops open because your modern day joie de vivre cannot be separated from the work that you love. c’est la vie.

you slice the peaches and the avocados. you pour the glasses of wine. you sing that father john misty song so off pitch it hurts even your own ears and then you all laugh and laugh and sing some more.

the golden hour sun dances on the walls. the echoes of the drum circle on the beach begin to drown out the click-clack on the keyboards in between sips of sauvignon blanc. you’ve been productive enough, you say to yourselves.

you grab your boards and your headphones and each queue up your own songs. you weave in and out of crowds from westminster to the pier. you realize that you can learn a lot about a person by how they handle the venice beach boardwalk on an august sunday night, even after years of knowing them.

you watch the sun disappear behind the mountains. you look back to the hundreds of people scattered on the shore, gaze fixed to where yours just was, witnessing the same exact sunset but experiencing it entirely differently. wild how that happens, with sunsets and with life.

you skate back. you grill steak. you get ready for bed.

and you feel light and free and full of optimism and hope and everything else you didn’t know you needed until this exact moment in bed, right before you close your eyes.

as a result, substack has become a place for emerging creators to cultivate highly engaged communities that desire the authentic connections and conversations that substack's design seamlessly supports.

so, what's the onchain equivalent to substack?

hypersub.

hypersub is the economic infrastructure for future communities, the financial rail that empowers creators to build their communities through media and channels that best align with any evolving brand.

like substack, it provides a direct creator-audience relationship that aligns incentives between them: creators earn revenue directly from their audience, instead of through ads or algorithms.

unlike substack, it empowers creators to connect with their audiences limitlessly, well beyond text-based layers.

this emerging generation of creators are dynamic and multidimensional. they build community through a combination short-form and long-form content, text- and image-based content, and static and dynamic experiences.

they do not want to be restricted to only one channel or only one medium.

in the onchain future, hypersub guarantees that creators can connect through as many channels and media as they desire since it is, by design, interoperable.

like substack, hypersub gives followers more control over their experience: users choose exactly which creators they want to support and therefore what content they want to consume.

unlike substack, the user-centric feed experience that hypersub offers can be implemented well beyond one app.

imagine toggling on a "hypersub-only" button on a farcaster app or a zora app, on paragraph or drakula or events.xyz or receipts.

like substack, the feed of each of these app would be filled with high-quality content from hypersub creators to whom followers have already subscribed and from whom users derive value.

but what i find most powerful about hypersub is that it enables followers to derive more than just informational value from creators; it enables followers to derive financial value, as well.

through hypersub's rewards model, followers are incentivized to discover and subscribe to emerging creators in whom they believe. followers, therefore, have a vested interest in a creator's growth and success.

this incentive alignment leads to a stronger sense of community and loyalty that benefits creators, followers, and any app that integrates hypersub.

reflecting on this, it is hard to imagine a future in which hypersub is not omnipresent.

now consider what happens when hypersub creators start collaborating with one another... [more next time].

by connecting your personal network of trusted contacts ("strong ties" of your own "small group") to others' personal networks ("weak ties" with another person's "small group"), you would surface a larger network of trusted contacts.

this concept was the design principle for early desktop-based social network platforms:

• Friendster's (2002) key premise: people are separated only by six degrees

• MySpace's (2003) key feature: your "top 8" friends

• LinkedIn's (2003) key differentiation: your "professional" network

• Facebook's (2004) key growth unlock: "7 friends in 10 days"

with the launch of smart phone (2007) and the first mobile-only, visual-first social platform (instagram, 2010), interaction with your social networks could suddenly happen 24/7. usage took off and platforms quickly expanded to include real-time updates (timelines), geolocation (check-ins), multimedia sharing (albums), etc.

social network platforms rapidly transformed into dynamic, media-sharing platforms. connecting as the primary purpose declined, replaced by publishing and broadcasting.

with this transformation, social platforms began to commercialize: design algorithms that prioritize sensational content to maximize user engagement, then monetize that engagement through highly targeted advertising enabled by user data.

as a result, inauthentic content and relentless marketing have dominated these platforms at the expense of meaningful connections or communities.

users (people!) are looking for a place with honest connections and authenticity, and creators (people!) are looking for a place for sustainable growth and community. both users and creators are seeking more genuine, meaningful connections that often are found in smaller, purpose-driven communities.

look at substack, which has gained popularity by focusing on direct relationships between "creators" and their audiences, fostering deeper connections and community without relying on an ad-driven models.

substack's recommended list feature even allows a creator ("strong tie") to recommend another creator's work ("weak tie") and gives users a choice to opt in to a group of creators — bringing us back to the original concept of a social network. in fact, it was the recommendations feature that supercharged substack's growth in 2022 (the launch of its mobile app also helped).

many people assert that paragraph is the onchain substack. i would disagree. the onchain substack is [redacted]. more to come soon :)