Web 1: Internet
Web 2: Social Media
Web 3: Blockchain
Web 4: Social Monies
Every phase of the web can be understood as a new phase of human connectivity, where humans have been empowered to rethink the possibilities of societal coordination.
And the next phase of human coordination, Web4 will liberate the very idea of money itself.
Web1 created the technical basis for the internet through the establishment of core technologies such as HTTP, HTML, browsers, and servers. It also created the economic basis for the internet via e-commerce, and laid the social framework with experimental platforms such as BBS, forums, and early messaging systems.
The vast build up of the whole infrastructure stack, including broadband, financing structures and payment networks felt excessive at that time and resulted in all kinds of bubbles, but was crucial in driving down communication and transaction costs, creating the underlying foundations for the use cases to come.
Web2, of course, built on the foundations of Web1 and fundamentally transformed human communication, converting the masses from passive consumers into active creators, distributors and tastemakers, creating completely new social, economic and political possibilities.
Media, one of the core organizing elements of modern human society, was transferred from centralized control to user generated content that was created, distributed and digested in a much more decentralized fashion. This democratization of content creation wasnât just a technical changeâit fundamentally reshaped power structures, making media a participatory and creative process.
What happened was extraordinary: billions of people went from passively consuming content to actively creating it. Everyone became a potential creator. Communities formed around shared interests rather than geography. Power shifted from institutions to individuals and networks. The basic act of expression was democratized on a scale never before possible in human history.
Just as Web1 established the technical foundation for information exchange, Web3 has built the core technical infrastructure for decentralized value and liquidityâblockchains, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges and stablecoins.
And of course, the massive amount of value creation also sparked an enormous amount of infrastructure built up across the entire Web3 technology stack - we now have endless options for blockspaces, onramp options, value pegging frameworks. This infrastructure abundance has driven transaction costs to nearly zero, an absolutely crucial ingredient for mainstream social adoption to happen.
The increasing acceptance of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana as monies within their respective communities have shown how itâs indeed possible for crypto currencies to become accepted as monies. On a much smaller scale, we have also experimented with DAOs, NFT communities and decentralized social networks.
At the scale of billions in TVL, and millions of users battling for mindshare and blockspace, we have built a speculative machine fueled by relentless flexing, shilling and charting. This machine is powered by an overwhelming amount of intimate social networks ranging from top VCs and sovereign funds to memecoin cabals across the world.
The major limitations on progress in web3 persist - most people hold their assets on centralized exchanges, friction of adoption persists in onboarding users to decentralized platforms and good first experiences. The most useful part of cryptocurrency now actually preserves the power systems: stablecoins, blockchain technology, and vanilla DeFi with limited to no impact on the financial lives of users. The once-beloved web3 vision has now become a casino.
We have created a massive world of speculative assets that adapt to our evolving economic, financial and political frameworks, but we have only built the old world on new rails⌠flashier, more liquid, but its fundamentals unchanged.
Web2 gave us voices, Web3 gave us assets, but neither gave us power over the old world order. Letâs enter Web4.
The next step for crypto is also the next major phase for human coordination and is also the next major evolution of money since fiat money - social monies.
Just as Web2 democratized content creationâturning billions of consumers into creatorsâWeb4 will democratize money creation, turning billions of users into creators, distributors and users of social monies.
Today, we create, participate and engage in social media, and in the process of this, both knowingly and unknowingly contribute to the human web of awareness via a vast range of butterfly effects. The same will happen for social monies. Communities will forge systems of mutual obligation without permission from governments or financial gatekeepers, enabling entirely new social contracts within and between communities, built on transparency rather than institutionalized power.
Maintaining and using these diverse moniesâwhether onchain, offchain, online, or offlineâwill become completely seamless, much like how cash, digital payments, and credit cards are interchangeable in a developed economy today.
Most tokens will be vapor, just as most content never becomes memes. But that didnât stop social media from transforming the world. Despite predictions that user-generated content would fail due to âlow quality,â its creativity, evolutionary speed, and expressive range made it more widespread and consumed than professionally produced content ever was.
Similarly, most monies will fail through experiment, fraud, coordination problems, or institutional resistance. But each success paves the way for the next, creating a cycle of learning and adaptation. Combining memetic energy with immense social monetary incentives will create the most aggressive virtuous cycle ever seen in human history.
The core human nature to connect, be seen and be validated was central to social media growing exponentially and overtaking traditional media.
Money in Web4 will look as different from traditional currencies as TikTok videos do from BBC broadcasts. This isnât a flaw but a featureâallowing for greater experimentation, cultural expression, and contextual relevance.
In this Web4 future, every community, every meme, every cause, and even every individual can have their own form of money - or many forms.
Imagine your wallet filled not with dollars or euros, but with dozens of tokensâeach representing communities you belong to, causes you support, creators you follow, and platforms you use. This isnât a far-off crypto utopia; itâs the inevitable next phase of monetary evolution.
In this world, people will effortlessly switch between different monies throughout their day. Morning coffee might be purchased with a neighborhood token that keeps value circulating locally. A digital subscription might renew with creator tokens earned from your own content. Donations to a mutual aid network will use their purpose-specific currency.
Government monies will not disappear but continue as stronger and more stable anchors of value, given their roots in more concrete sources of power. Theyâll simply become one specialized form of money among many, no longer monopolizing our conception of what money can be.
Creating new money will become as commonplace as starting a social media account. Movements will naturally spawn tokens alongside their formation. Communities or projects seeking resources wonât write grant proposals to external fundersâtheyâll issue purpose-specific currencies reflecting their unique needs and values.
Money will transform into a creative mediumâa means of expression, coordination, and identity. Digital wallets will visualize your economic relationships and the communities youâre building. Just as social profiles became extensions of our identity, our constellation of monetary connections will manifest our values and affiliations.
This monetary diversity will directly reflect the diversity of human cultures, values, and social organizations. Throughout history, communities have expressed their unique identities through art, language, and social structures. Now we will extend this cultural expression into the realm of value exchange itself.
To understand what Web4 might look like, the impact of Web2 offers a powerful framework. Just like money, media is one of the core organizing foundations of modern societies.
Web2 didnât eliminate legacy media but coexisted alongside it, benefiting from established platforms and infrastructure. Similarly, social monies in Web4 will coexist with traditional fiat currencies, leveraging their stability and regulatory structures while expanding whatâs possible.
Web2 democratized media creation, breaking the idea that only official channels are qualified to produce content. Web4 does the same for money creation, democratizing seigniorage and transforming it from a privilege of governments and elites into a creative, participatory act accessible to all.
Web2 incentivized massive participation through attention, reputation, and financial rewards, leading to an explosion of user-generated content. Web4 will replicate this dynamic, motivating active monetary participation over passive asset holding. The result will be billions engaging with monetary creation as naturally as they now create social media posts.
While most content in Web2 was ephemeral, some became enduring cultural narratives. Similarly, Web4âs numerous tokens will mostly fade away, yet a select few will evolve into stable, lasting monetary systems. Like user-generated content in social media, many social monies will fail. Yet, each experiment, successful or otherwise, contributes to rapid learning and evolutionary improvement.
Finally, just a couple decades ago - it would have seemed completely implausible that billions of people will be creating, sharing and participating in content worldwide.
Yet here we are, a world where we are all media creators one way or another.
And the same will happen for money, we will all become part of the process of money creation.
Web3âs stack is technical â focused on solving challenges like consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities, and interoperability protocols.
Web4âs stack is a money creation chain â focused on solving social challenges like governance, value distribution, trust, and universal seigniorage.
Web3 was largely offchain, with most users interacting through centralized exchanges.
Web4 will move the entire monetary paradigm onchain, enabling true programmability, usability, and composability of social money.
Web3 treats tokens primarily as assets â investment vehicles, collectibles, or utilities that derive value from scarcity, speculation, or functional benefits - but with scarce interactions with daily life. In that regard, crypto today is much more similar to creating stocks than creating monies.
Web4 creates assets that also become social monies â expressions of community, identity, and shared purpose that derive value from trust, utility, and social embeddedness.
Web3 largely operates within existing economic paradigms â adapting blockchain technology to traditional concepts of value and exchange.
Web4 reimagines the fundamentals â questioning and redefining what money is and how it functions within society at the most intrinsic level.
The speculative nature of crypto assets â often criticized as a bug â is actually a critical feature for bootstrapping social monies. In Web4, we can focus Web3âs massive speculative resources toward creating meaningful, community-driven monies. The extensive infrastructure built for speculation becomes essential for bootstrapping new social money systems.
Speculation provides the initial energy and capital needed to bootstrap new monetary networks, just as Bitcoinâs early speculators provided the foundation for its eventual broader utility. Without this speculative phase, itâs nearly impossible to overcome the cold-start problem inherent in creating new monetary systems.
Social monies will directly address global challengesâclimate change, inequality, misinformationâthrough thoughtfully designed incentives embedded directly into monetary systems. Every community, cause, or interest group can now design money aligned explicitly with its values and objectives.
The real innovation is empowering communities to independently shape their own monetary and incentive structures, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Web4 builds on Web3âs foundation, leveraging the power of speculative assets towards creating practical, everyday social monies used globally to solve genuine coordination problems.
The technical, liquidity, governance, and community-building foundations are ready. Whatâs needed now is collective willâtransforming speculative energy into purposeful, impactful social monies that redefine humanityâs coordination capabilities.
When discussing Web4 with everyone, the main question is always - how can a world where everyone keeps trying to create new social monies be sustainable, used or maintained?
Instead of answering that question, I propose a major, dramatic reframing, starting with addressing the core assumption of scarcity.
Traditional economic theory has always treated monetary competition as zero-sum. For one currency to win, others must lose. This premise underpins the design of our entire financial infrastructureâbuilt for a world of centralized, uniform money controlled by governments and institutions.
But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?
Instead of a scarcity approach, what if there is a world where millions of social monies coexist and strengthen each other. Where the success of one doesnât diminish but amplifies others. This isnât just speculationâweâve already seen this dynamic emerge in cryptocurrency ecosystems, offering a preview of whatâs possible at scale.
Consider Bitcoin. Many believed it should be the singular cryptocurrency, warning that alternatives would dilute its value. Instead, Bitcoinâs success catalyzed an explosion of new currenciesâEthereum, Solana, Dogecoin, and thousands moreâeach serving different communities, solving different problems, and expressing different values. Rather than undermining Bitcoin, these alternatives validated its core premise while expanding the entire ecosystem. Bitcoin didnât lose relevance; the entire space grew exponentially.
This phenomenon reveals a profound truth: in networks built on social consensus, value creation isnât zero-sum. When participants in successful monetary networks carry forward their wealth, knowledge, and reputation to seed new networks, they create virtuous cycles that benefit the entire ecosystem.
The contrast is stark when compared to extractive networks where participants merely take value without contributing to sustainable systemsâthese inevitably collapse, teaching valuable lessons for future iterations.
Donât get it wrong tho, all tokens exist in an intense perpetual contest with each otherâcompeting for memetic fitness, utility value, and credibilityâwhile simultaneously maintaining a deeply symbiotic relationship.
All social monies compete along three critical dimensions:
Trillions of speculative tokens will naturally narrow down to millions of genuinely useful social monies through a dynamic contest. Tokens gain widespread adoption based on their cultural resonance, practical utility, and trustworthiness. This competitive process isnât negative; rather, it positively identifies and elevates the most effective and credible community monies.
Yet this competition paradoxically strengthens the bonds between communities.
The rise of one social money directly increases faith in the possibility of others, particularly those with related purposes. While tribalism and scarcity mindsets might trigger alarm at any sign of competition, the empirical evidence from crypto shows that good, robust, sustainable assets always eventually help everyone else in the ecosystem.
Unlike traditional combat for market share, successful social monies engage in âPlayer Pump Playerâ (PPP) dynamics rather than âPlayer versus Playerâ (PvP). You arenât fighting over a fixed pool of fiat dollars; youâre collectively generating new forms of value together.
Bitcoinâs greatest contribution might be something its maximalist advocates never intended: proving that monetary pluralism works. Despite the âone money to rule them allâ narrative, Bitcoinâs success actually catalyzed an explosion of alternative currencies that validated its core premise while expanding possibilities for everyone.
The shift from scarcity mindsets to abundance thinking requires profound philosophical adjustment. Weâve been conditioned to believe that monetary fragmentation leads to chaos, that successful currencies must dominate their competitors.
Web4 invites us to consider the opposite: that monetary diversity creates resilience, that specialized currencies solve problems better than universal ones, and that the success of each strengthens all.
In Web4, successful social monies will look nothing like the money we know today, just as social media looks nothing like broadcast television. They wonât be imposed from above but will emerge from communities with shared purpose.
By distributing the power of money creation to communities worldwide, we donât diminish its valueâwe multiply it, creating an ecosystem as diverse and interconnected as humanity itself.
The diversity of potential social monies is infinite, constrained only by human imagination and societal needs. Each social money maintains scarcity within its own context and community, ensuring its continued value and use.
Last but not least. one of the last most commonly asked question is this - how will anyone manage to cognitively hold or effectively use a large number of monies?
The answer is that they will not need to - they will have the ability to transact any money for any other money with minimum fees, barriers or issues. The power of decentralization means that there are no barriers preventing aggregators from being able to effectively allow users to transact across trading venues, chains and across any number of liquidity hops.
It is important to note that this is only possible in the decentralized world - it is simply not possible in the world of centralized trading systems, including crypto centralized exchanges - and one more reason why moving users onchain is such a crucial ingredient for a world of infinite monies to happen.
That said, the ability to aggregate is far from enough - there are way more problems around seignoriage, trust, governance and credibility to solve.
We need intuitive data and social frameworks that allows easy coordination between decentralized creators and maintainers of monies, governance frameworks that let communities define their own concepts of value while maintaining trust, mechanisms for signaling trustworthiness without central authorities, and bridges between traditional finance and these new social monies.
The exciting part? Letâs build it all ;)
From a young age, weâre taught to think of money as a singular concept. Our early education reinforces this - we have âmoneyâ in our piggy banks, not âmonies.â We learn to count it, save it, and spend it as a collective entity - âmoney.â
This singular framing aligns with financial institutions and government interests. Thereâs a certain authority and control maintained when money is treated as a uniform, standardized system rather than as diverse, separate âmonies.â Consider how central banks and governments work to maintain the unified nature of currency - they want us to think of it as one system, one authority.
The specialized contexts where âmoniesâ appears (legal documents, financial statements, governmental budgets) are precisely the formal, official spaces where authority over money is exercised and documented. This creates a linguistic boundary - the people who control and regulate money get to use âmonies,â while everyday users just have âmoney.â
This, of course, makes money into just a âthingâ and completely forgets the historical nature of monies itself.
Since the very beginnings of civilization, we have always been creating unique forms of monies to serve local needs. Long before governments issued fiat, communities used shells, stones, sticks, salt, and script to coordinate value, obligation, and trust. Money was not standardizedâit was expressive, adaptive, and social.
The Yap islanders of Micronesia used massive stone discs called rai as currency, with ownership transferred through oral history rather than physical movement. In medieval England, tally sticksâwooden sticks marked with notchesâserved as currency for over 700 years, recording debts between individuals and even being used to pay royal taxes.
Indigenous peoples across North America used wampum beltsâintricate beadwork with specific patterns and designsânot just as currency but as a way to record agreements, treaties, and shared history. The belts werenât valuable because of the materials they contained, but because of the social trust and shared meaning they represented.
During the Great Depression, when federal currency was scarce, hundreds of American communities issued their own local scripâcreating monetary systems that kept their local economies functioning when the national system faltered. The Swiss WIR Bank, founded in 1934, operates a complementary currency system that now includes over 60,000 businesses, helping stabilize the Swiss economy during financial downturns.
These werenât primitive precursors to ârealâ moneyâthey were sophisticated social technologies designed to solve specific coordination problems within their communities. The idea that money must be issued by a central authority, backed by precious metals or government decree, is the historical anomalyânot the norm.
At its core, money is fundamentally a social technology designed to solve complex social, incentive, and coordination problems. Itâs a tool that allows groups of humans to align efforts, reward behaviors, and work together toward common goals. When we issue a currency, weâre not just creating a medium of exchangeâweâre crafting a system of incentives that can transform how people relate to each other and their environment.
As such, the true power of money lies in its ability to affect social engineering, far beyond its conventional economic functions. By thoughtfully designing its form, issuance, and the rules governing its use, we can create targeted incentives, foster cooperation, and coordinate actions to address a wide array of complex societal challenges. This often involves creating systems where the currency itself embodies or directly rewards the desired social outcomes.
Bitcoin demonstrates the dual power of crypto as both asset and social money. Its global success wasnât only due to its scarcity but to the profound social cohesion it enabled. What began as a technical innovation evolved into a powerful coordination mechanism for millions sharing beliefs about money, central banking, and financial sovereignty.
The asset value of Bitcoin enables it to function as moneyâa token without value canât coordinate economic activity. But reducing Bitcoin to merely an asset misses its profound social function as a rallying point for an entire movement. The emergence of Bitcoin as money accepted and held by millions worldwide has galvanized and provided a central rallying point, as well as provided the financial incentives and economics for an entire worldwide community to start pushing on a massive social change of overhauling the financial and fiat system.
The OG social money - Bitcoin itself is an excellent example of how to understand the virtuous interplay between asset speculation and community mission, each side of the coin reinforcing the other side. A yin-yang motion towards a social money system that changed the world as we know it.
Our most intractable problemsâclimate change, wealth inequality, healthcare access, democratic erosion, information integrityâhave proven resistant to solutions from existing political, economic, and social frameworks. We need to invent new monies specifically designed to tackle these challenges, creating incentive structures and coordination mechanisms that conventional institutions have failed to provide.
In truth, money at its core is something used within a community or society of aligned individuals to index value, keep it, use it, incentivize contribution with and to build status within that society. Unlike what we have been drilled to understand and believe since we were born, money is a pure social construct that any collective set of humans can create for their own needs to attract new entrants, coordinate existing ones, and incentivize activities toward desired social ends.
In the world of crypto, the traditional definition of money has been rendered irrelevant. Creating tokens with the technical properties of money (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, unit of account) has become incredibly easy. Simultaneously, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and onchain data platforms have transformed any tradable token into a medium of exchange and store of value, regardless of how trivial or short-lived.
All previous boundaries and definitions of money have already become completely pointless. Itâs time to drop useless, outdated, economics 101, government-approved definitions and embrace a new reality: Any token that receives a critical mass of social acceptance and constant usage within a community can be considered a form of money.
This deeply fundamental ideaâthat money is not just fiat, but rather something that any community can create for their own purposesâwill completely and utterly change the way societies form and grow.
Seigniorageâthe rights and profits from creating moneyâis perhaps the most important economic concept that most people have never heard of. This ignorance is not accidental; the power to create money has historically been jealously guarded by governments and financial institutions.
Today, with the advances weâve made in Web3, we stand at the precipice of a profound shift where the privileges of money creation will become universal and decentralized.
One thing that was always clear to me: the fundamental purpose of crypto has always been generating new forms of monies.
However, crypto communities have hesitated to directly correlate crypto with money creation, preferring to think of crypto as technology, products, or assets. This hesitation must end. Otherwise, we will be stuck forever creating assets instead of creating monies that become deeply embedded in the everyday lives of users.
Rather than gatekeeping the concept of money, we must embrace the radical democratization of monetary creation. This requires a shift from thinking about crypto as making products, technology, or even assetsâto understanding the purpose of crypto as creating monies to advance any community or social cause.
Universal seigniorage ultimately means that the power and profit that comes from creating money will no longer be concentrated in the hands of the few, but distributed among the manyâenabling entirely new forms of human collaboration and addressing problems our traditional systems have failed to solve.
Sounds impossible? Social transformation always doesâuntil it happens.
Major religions transformed how billions thought about morality and economics, starting as tiny movements before reshaping civilizations. Christianity grew from an obscure Jewish sect to dominating an empire within centuries. Islam spread across continents in decades. These werenât just belief systems but complete social transformations that rewired economic systems and political structures.
Historically, social behaviors deemed impossible become inevitable when three conditions align: technical possibility, social acceptance, and economic advantage.
The adoption of fiat money, the rise of social media, the spread of democracyâall seemed unimaginable before they happened, yet became taken for granted afterward.
When Marco Polo encountered paper money in Kublai Khanâs empire, the concept seemed like financial alchemy to Europeans. How could mere mulberry bark notes, with no intrinsic value, be exchanged for valuable goods? Yet the Mongol Empire had built a sophisticated monetary system based entirely on social agreement.
What appeared magical to outsiders was simply a different conception of what money could be. And of course, this âmagical paper moneyâ Europeans were stunned by is now the absolutely dominant standard of how we transact, exchange and measure the very idea of value itself.
And also of course, the value of the very thing they themselves believed in, fought for, died for back then - gold is also based on the collective belief that it has value.
It has always collective belief all the way down, and the moment enough people believe in the meta, the meta shifts. Thatâs literally why itâs called a meta.
Web4 will follow this pattern. While millions of community currencies may seem infeasible today, they will emerge when technical, social, and economic conditions align. Like all profound social movements, this transformation will begin slowly, then accelerate dramatically.
When it rains, it pours.
In Web4, we will fulfill the original vision of crypto, but with a crucial difference that Satoshi didnât fully anticipate. The revolution wonât come in the form of a single decentralized currency replacing fiat, but through millions of specialized monies created and maintained by communities worldwide.
Like all visionaries, Satoshi was correct about the direction but didnât foresee the exact path the transformation would take.
In Web4, we need to fundamentally reimagine who has the power to create money, establishing completely new ideas around what is considered fair, while building new technical and liquidity systems that cater to the full diversity of how anyone might want to create their own money, and how that value flows through society.
In Web4, communities will forge their own systems of mutual obligation without permission from governments or financial gatekeepers, enabling entirely new social contracts built on transparency rather than institutionalized obscurity.
In Web4, user-generated money will be the standard for how we interact with finance, just like how user-generated content is now the standard for how we interact with media.
In Web4, speculation will become the means to an end, not the end itself. The endpoint has to be the establishment of a decentralized world order where social monies become the norm in all of our daily lives, used seamlessly anytime, anywhere, and with everything else.
In Web4, we will return to the core idea that money is a social technology that can be invented by any group of humans united by any causeâfrom something as simple as propagating a meme, to starting a new project, to creating currencies for addressing our most intractable problems that traditional political, religious, and financial systems are utterly unable to solve.
In Web4, money becomes anything that a community actively uses, trusts, and governs. The old definitions of money no longer fully apply. Community-held and actively used tokens inherently become money through collective acceptance.
In Web4, we will return money to its deeply social rootsâstrengthening connections between us rather than abstracting them away as something that is âgivenâ to us. Money will serve as a creative medium for reimagining coordination and cooperation at every scale, from neighborhood to global.
In Web4, social monies will look nothing like the money we know today, just like how a TikTok video looks nothing like a BBC broadcast. We need to completely recalibrate how we think about and understand money itself.
In Web4, we will understand the incredible alignment, attraction, and community formation powers of money. The interplay between tribalism and money creation will play out in full glory, where new money-social systems flourish beyond imagination.
In Web4, we will take Bitcoinâs blueprint much further than anyone imagined, multiplying it across millions of diverse communities. Rather than competing with each other, successful social monies will coexist, reinforcing a resilient network of interconnected trust.
What Bitcoin has done for financial sovereignty, other monies will do for memes, climate action, artistic creation, local economic development, and countless other communities, no matter how trivial or significant. All weâve done up to now in Web3 is to lay the groundwork for this future. We are seriously, really, genuinely just getting started.
Finally, in Web4, we will affirmatively witness the core paradox of money live and in real time:
Money must be scarce, but monies can be infinite.
And why do we know it will happen?
Because everyone loves money.