Everyone complains about how nothing real has come out of crypto.
But what if that was the entire point?
To build fun hyperreal online worlds for play.
Blockchains as a new medium for entertainment
Blockchains provide a massive unexplored potential for fun and entertainment.
This is a cultural phenomenon that has already been playing out organically.
Ethereum is loved not for its tech but rather for its community, the society that spawned around it, the culture that emerged, the sense of purpose it gave to people, the friends people made along the way, the opportunity to build businesses to serve others, the ability to build audiences, to role play someone in a new world, the sense of danger involved and not to mention being an endless stream of drama, gossip, chaos, and fun. Some wanted to be early for the financial upside, others driven by a vision of the world, and many in between, but everyone commonly valued the currency representing ownership of the world: Ether.
Ethereum gave people a game to play that is immersive, social, and significant.
While blockchains today have been hyper-optimized as generalized infrastructure for crypto-enabled use cases such as payments, trading, collectibles, and other passively consumed experiences – Ethereum has found the most success not as a backend for apps but as an entire world that people live in, create in, belong to, and nurture.
The experience of Ethereum is hard to define; it’s strange and new. We don’t have a name or strict label for the experiences that belong to it yet. In an attempt to make sense of it, we may have over rationalized it as a temporary state of crypto, something to shrug off and move past. A period of chaos, weirdness, and exploration, a collective attempt to make sense of blockchains as a new technology. However, with most of 2021’s hype cycle momentum behind us now, crypto’s true nature might just be starting to reveal itself – which is that the experience of participation in the blockchain is the product in itself.
Blockchains act as blank canvases for experiences that break all our preconceived notions of what is possible as entertainment, finance, and computing systems. Crypto blurs all traditional experiential boundaries, providing enabling experiences that sit in between the properties of all three domains.
This explains why any single property of the blockchain, when isolated, has always either struggled to find adoption or generally resulted in a worse system.
Games that are incrementally better when using the blockchain as a database. Financial systems with no native consumer protections. Computers that are expensive to use and difficult to build on. Despite the individual tradeoffs within each dimension, blockchains unlock the opportunity to build deeply immersive online realities that have never been possible.
Blockchains as natural toys for games
People often joke that the experience of participating in crypto is a game, but they’re not wrong. While Ethereum was not originally designed as a game, people have naturally treated it as a toy and open canvas for their respective goals.
For Ethereum, we can think of game points as Ether, which everyone intuitively recognizes as valuable ownership of Ethereum. Everyone plays the game differently, which is analogous to different classes of an MMORPG – the fun is doing things your way and picking your destiny. Some care about generating a positive externality for the world, others want to do so creatively, and some want to do so entrepreneurially. From memecoins to even MEV. And, of course, some only play by button mashing (airdrop farmers). Although everyone chooses their means of participation, they are all connected through a shared world that influences one another.
The constraining physics of Ethereum is the EVM, which requires Ether as gas to write to shared blockspace. Ether acts as the shared canvas that anyone can permissionlessly write with, use, and read from. Ethereum’s economic model is designed to ensure the security and ongoing operation of the world’s physics – with the Ether faucet being staking rewards in exchange for economic security and the sink being gas used to write to the shared blockspace.
Through the emergent recognition of Ether accumulation as the global player goal and the constraints of the digital physics that is the EVM and other system properties such as absolute ownership and address-based agents, the world of Ethereum was instantiated organically through collective sense-making, resulting in fun and drama along the way.
The next great worlds to emerge
Today, ethereum feels like a game that’s run out of content. We can see this with Solana, too. While Sohas successfully created a differentiated culture, both application ecosystems are primarily derivatives of each other and highly incremental due to general-purpose virtual machines and similar economic models or ‘physics’.
This pattern will likely continue as long as blockchains are designed without any significant core differentiation regarding the underlying physics of the world and surrounding economic incentives for how we participate in them.
By recognizing blockchains as a new medium for content and seeing them as games for what they are already, two areas of whitespace are ripe for innovation:
Democratizing participation
Generating immersion
Democratizing participation
Rather than just relying on the core constraints of the EVM as the core state machine through which participants interact with each other, we can focus their interactions into a far more opinionated but participatory set of physics that incorporates elements of skill and luck.
These sets of physics act as human-operable state machines' extensions to the EVM, which have proven to be an incredibly powerful canvas for user generated content.
These physics can be implemented as smart contracts that resemble games: geolocations for players and resources, resource economies, resource spawning and despawning, simple mechanics for end users to write to the world, battle mechanics, health, and inventory. While these traditionally have been released as as onchain games and standalone products, in this case, we can think of them as the physics of a broader overarching experience, which is the entirety of the blockchain instead. These ‘physics’ can also be understood as client agnostic game mechanics that live on the blockchain and can be permissionlessly modded, unlike the EVM.
Another way to implement physics is by modding the blockchain's underlying architecture. An example of this is altering the absolute ownership model of the blockchain to allow other users to permissionlessly steal assets from one’s wallet or where blockspace production is limited to only weekends.
The entire economic model of the blockchain, rather than providing economic security for the blockchain, can be orientated towards incentivizing participation through the physics that defines the world. As a byproduct of participation, players offer something far more critical—social validation and user generated content.
Generating immersion
Crypto feels like it's been “each sold separately”.
Rather than selling the dream of a blockchain or a game separately, there’s an opportunity here to communicate a vision that couples all the above together into one unified experience that is the world itself. By doing so, we can unapologetically tell a story of a new fantastical world that embraces the fun, weird, and chaotic.
By casting a narrative and ‘magic circle’ around the world, we can suspend reality to allow people to role-play and immerse themselves. Rather than the typical narrative tropes such as mass adoption, we unlock creative freedoms that enable us to evangelize the world's existence in a purely lore-oriented manner.
In addition to lore, there’s the opportunity to redesign the entire user journey of participants across all touch points of the blockchain, from the wallet experience to bridging transactions and even the block explorer.
This allows you to craft different device narratives to influence and evolve each interface's relationships with users. An example is framing the bridging experience to the blockchain as an experience in itself—a portal to a new world. These interfaces can continue to empower the suspension of reality.
Only by creating an immersive and differentiated world can you create an environment people feel compelled to build in, create content around, and participate in.
We can give people that role to play and a purpose to fulfill.
The future is fun, playful, and weird
Ethereum was an innovation in world construction, not just a technological one.
We've run out of content, and we’re all searching for the next great immersive world.
They’ll be fun, playful, and weird. Worlds that people wish that they existed.
And maybe you’ll be the one to build that.
These ideas have resulted from endless discussions and learnings from the community.
Thank you to Dhrumil Shah, GVN, ARB, Raf Morado, Rich Metson, Oliver Löffler, Billy Rennekamp, Luke Gibson, Fleet Commander, John Patten, Diana Biggs, and Jay Springett for their time, energy, and inspiration for this piece.