Original author: Meow (Jupiter co-founder)
Original translation: Nicky, Foresight News
TL;DR: The article proposes that Web 4: Social Currency will become the next stage of the evolution of the Internet. Its core is to liberate the right to create currency from the hands of governments and financial institutions, and give the community the ability to independently design, issue and manage currency. Here are the key points:
Core proposition
Democratizing Money
Web 4 will replicate the user-generated content model of Web2, but apply it to the field of currency: billions of people will become creators, distributors and users of currency.
Money is no longer limited to government fiat or a few assets, but is evolving into a diverse set of tools that reflect community values (such as addressing climate change, supporting local economies, etc.).
Money as social technology
The essence of money is a tool for coordinating social behavior, and its function goes far beyond economic exchange. By designing the rules and incentives of money, the community can promote collective actions (such as environmental protection, fair distribution, etc.).
Bitcoin is the first successful case: its asset value and social mission (financial sovereignty) reinforce each other, proving that currency can serve as both a speculative asset and a link to social movements.
Abundance thinking replaces scarcity logic
Traditional economics assumes that currency competition is a zero-sum game, but Web 4 advocates the coexistence of diversity: the success of one currency can enhance the credibility of other currencies (such as Bitcoin giving birth to Ethereum and other ecosystems).
Currency diversity corresponds to human cultural diversity. Each currency remains scarce in specific scenarios (such as community tokens), but the overall system can be expanded infinitely.
Positive transformation of speculative energy
The speculative nature of the crypto market has been redefined as “the fuel that starts social currencies.” Early speculators provide liquidity and trust foundations for new currency networks, driving their transition to practical scenarios.
For example, DAO and NFT community experiments have verified that tokens can be tied to specific goals (such as art co-creation and local development), going beyond simple asset attributes.
Key changes
Technology stack transformation: Web3s off-chain financial tools (such as exchanges) will be migrated to the chain to achieve true programmability of currency. Decentralized governance and transparent rules will replace centralized institutions.
Universal coinage right: Anyone can issue currency through code and community consensus without relying on banks or governments. This reshapes the power structure and makes the economic system closer to individual needs.
Social embeddedness of currency: Tokens are deeply bound to community identities (such as fan tokens, environmental contribution points), and usage scenarios are naturally integrated into daily life rather than being limited to investment.
Challenges and Vision
Short-term obstacles: User experience (wallet management of multiple tokens), governance framework (preventing abuse), and interoperability between traditional finance and the on-chain world still need to be broken through.
Long-term vision: Web 4 will give birth to a currency ecological rainforest - millions of community currencies will coexist and solve problems that have failed traditional systems (such as the gap between the rich and the poor and information islands) through competition and collaboration.
Final prediction: Just as social media has disrupted the media landscape, social currency will reconstruct the underlying logic of finance and society - currency is no longer a given tool, but a canvas for human collective imagination and collaboration.
The original text is as follows:
Web 4: Social Currency
Note: This article brings together the core ideas I have been thinking about over the years - from my first exposure to economic theory in high school, to my participation in social network construction in the Web2 era, to my continued exploration in the encryption field today.
Web 1: Internet, Web 2: Social Media, Web 3: Blockchain, Web 4: Social Currency
Unlimited Currency
Each stage of the Internet has represented a new frontier of human connectivity, empowering us to reimagine how society coordinates. Now, with the advent of Web 4, we are liberating the concept of money itself, revolutionizing how we collectively define, create, and use money.
Just as Web2 democratized media, shifting power from centralized institutions to billions of individual creators, Web 4 will democratize money creation. Billions of users will become creators, distributors, and everyday users of a diverse range of currencies. Money in Web 4 will be as different from traditional fiat currencies as a TikTok video is from a BBC broadcast, providing communities with unprecedented creative expression in finance.
While most people think of money as government fiat, this singular perspective is historically anomalous. Throughout history, communities have independently created expressive and adaptable forms of money to solve their unique social coordination problems — from Yap stone coins to medieval tally sticks to local tokens during the Great Depression. Web 4 will reshape the historical diversity of money, returning money creation directly to communities.
In Web 4, money will return to its roots as a social technology. Communities of all sizes will create currencies that directly reflect their values, philosophies, and goals — whether it’s spreading a meme or solving world hunger. By designing their own currencies, communities can achieve unprecedented collaboration and alignment around shared goals.
Money has always been a powerful tool for creating incentive alignment, rallying groups across borders, languages, races, and religions. In Web 4, successful social currencies will become universal aligners, seamlessly serving as the currency of choice for communities large and small, amplifying the impact of collective action beyond traditional divisions.
Web3 has built an extraordinary speculative machine, creating a huge network of assets, but it has not really been integrated into the daily lives of ordinary people. In Web 4, we need to direct this power of turning stones into gold to a meaningful end - not only to create speculative assets, but also to create a social currency that is deeply integrated into daily life and actually used by billions of people.
Web 4 abandons competition driven by scarcity and zero-sum thinking and embraces abundance and currency diversity. Millions of social currencies will coexist, competing fiercely around memetic appeal, practicality, and credibility, but ultimately reinforcing each other. The success of one currency will increase the belief and usage of other currencies, forming a resilient ecosystem of mutual trust.
Web 4 will realize the original vision of cryptocurrency — but in a different way than Satoshi imagined. Instead of a single global decentralized currency, there will be millions of culturally resonant specialized currencies, governed autonomously by their communities.
Ultimately, Web 4 reveals a profound paradox about money:
Money must be scarce, but the monetary system can be infinite.
Table of contents
The evolution of the Internet
Web1: The Internet
Web2: Social Media
Web3: Blockchain
Web 4: Social Currency
Analogy with Web2
Transition from Web3 to Web 4
Focus on speculative energy
Unlimited social currency
Abundance Thinking
Fierce adaptive competition
Symbiosis paradox
Rethinking Infinity
Gathering Everything
Social Currency System
The social nature of money
Money as a social technology
Bitcoin: The Prototype Social Currency System
The urgent need for a new currency
Returning to the social core of money
Universal coinage
User Generated Currency
Social transformation trajectory
Encryption Vision
Acknowledgements
The evolution of the Internet
Each stage of the Internet marks a revolution in the way humans connect and promotes the reconstruction of the possibilities of social coordination.
Web1: The Internet
Web1 established the technical foundation of the Internet through technologies such as HTTP, HTML, browsers and servers, built the economic foundation through e-commerce, and built the social framework with experimental platforms such as BBS and forums. Although the early construction of broadband, financing structures and payment networks gave rise to bubbles, it greatly reduced communication and transaction costs, laying the foundation for subsequent applications.
Web2: Social Media
Web2 is built on Web1 and has completely changed the way humans communicate, transforming the public from passive consumers to creators, distributors, and trend setters, giving rise to new social, economic, and political possibilities. Media, a core organizational element of modern society, has shifted from centralized control to user-generated content (UGC), achieving decentralized creation, distribution, and consumption. This change is not only a technological upgrade, but also a reconstruction of the power structure, making media a participatory creative process.
Something extraordinary happened: billions of people went from passively consuming content to actively creating it. Every person had the potential to be a creator. Communities formed around shared interests rather than geographic location. Power shifted from institutions to individuals and networks. For the first time in human history, the fundamental act of expression became democratized as never before.
Web3: Blockchain
Just as Web1 laid the technical foundation for information exchange, Web3 builds the core infrastructure of decentralized value and liquidity - blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges and stablecoins. With the enrichment of the technology stack (including on-chain space, fiat currency entry, value anchoring framework), transaction costs approach zero, paving the way for social adoption. The practice of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana being accepted as currency within their communities shows that cryptocurrencies can indeed become mainstream currencies. Although experiments with DAOs, NFT communities and decentralized social networks are limited in scale, they have verified the possibility.
However, Web3 still faces major limitations: most assets are stored in centralized exchanges, and the user entry threshold is high and the experience is poor. The core utility of current cryptocurrencies (stablecoins, blockchain technology, and basic DeFi) has failed to truly change the financial lives of users. The vision of the past has become a casino - we have built a world of speculative assets that adapt to the economic, financial, and political frameworks, but have only laid new tracks on the old order.
Web2 gave us a voice, Web3 gave us assets, but neither has shaken the old world order. Now let’s move on to Web 4.
Web 4: Social Currency
The next step in the evolution of crypto is also a new stage in the evolution of human coordination and currency - social currency.
Just as Web2 democratized content creation (turning billions of consumers into creators), Web 4 will democratize money creation, turning billions of users into creators, distributors, and users of social currencies. User interactions in social media (whether intentional or not) have already driven the growth of the human consciousness network through a butterfly effect; social currencies will replicate this model, allowing communities to establish systems of mutual obligations without the permission of governments or financial gatekeepers, and build a new social contract based on transparency rather than institutional power.
Using these currencies (on-chain/off-chain, online/offline) will be as seamless as cash, digital payments, and credit cards. Most tokens will fail (just as most content cannot become memes), but this does not prevent social media from changing the world - the creativity, evolution speed, and expressiveness of user-generated content far exceed professionally produced content. Similarly, most currencies will be eliminated through experimentation, fraud, coordination problems, or institutional resistance, but each success paves the way for subsequent iterations, forming a cycle of learning and adaptation. The combination of memetic energy and monetary incentives will create the most powerful positive cycle in human history.
The core human needs of money (to connect, to be seen, to be recognized) have been key to the exponential growth of social media; in Web 4, money will be as different from traditional fiat currencies as a TikTok video is from a BBC broadcast — a feature rather than a bug, allowing for greater experimentation, cultural expression, and contextual adaptation.
Analogy with Web2
The impact of Web2 provides a powerful framework for understanding what Web 4 might look like. Like money, media is one of the core organizing foundations of modern society.
Web2 did not eliminate traditional media, but rather coexisted with it and benefited from existing platforms and infrastructure. Similarly, social currencies in Web 4 will coexist with traditional fiat currencies, leveraging their stability and regulatory structures while expanding the boundaries of possibility.
Web2 democratized media creation, breaking the notion that only official channels were qualified to produce content. Web 4 did the same thing with currency creation, democratizing the right to mint coins and transforming it from a privilege of governments and elites to a creative act that everyone can participate in.
Web2 sparked an explosion of user-generated content by incentivizing mass participation through attention, reputation, and financial rewards. Web 4 will replicate this dynamic, driving users to actively participate in money creation rather than passively holding assets. The result will be billions of people participating in money creation as naturally as they create social media posts today.
While most content in Web2 was ephemeral, some became enduring cultural narratives. Similarly, most of the many tokens in Web 4 will fade away, but a few will evolve into stable, enduring monetary systems. Just like user-generated content in social media, many social currencies will fail. However, every experiment, whether successful or not, contributes to rapid learning and evolutionary improvement.
Finally, just a few decades ago — it seemed completely implausible that billions of people would create, share, and engage with content on a global scale. Yet today, we live in a world where everyone is a media creator in some way.
The same thing will happen with money — all of us will participate in the process of money creation.
Transition from Web3 to Web 4
Web3’s technology stack is technical — focused on solving challenges such as consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities, and interoperability protocols. Web 4’s technology stack is a currency creation chain — focused on solving social challenges such as governance, value distribution, trust, and universal coinage.
Web3 mainly runs off-chain, and most users interact through centralized exchanges. Web 4 will move the entire currency paradigm to the chain, achieving true programmability, usability, and composability of social currencies.
Web3 primarily views tokens as assets — investment vehicles, collectibles, or utilities that derive value through scarcity, speculation, or functional benefits, but have limited interaction with everyday life. In this respect, crypto today is more akin to creating stocks than currencies. Assets created by Web 4 also become social currencies — expressions of community, identity, and shared purpose, with value derived from trust, utility, and social embeddedness.
Web3 primarily operates within the existing economic paradigm — adapting blockchain technology to traditional notions of value and exchange. Web 4 reimagines the fundamentals — questioning and redefining, at the most fundamental level, what money is and how it works in society.
Focus on speculative energy
The speculative nature of crypto assets is often criticized as a flaw, but in fact it is a key feature to launch social currencies. In Web 4, we can focus the vast speculative resources of Web3 on creating meaningful, community-driven currencies. Extensive infrastructure built for speculation becomes the key to launching a new social currency system.
Speculation provides the initial energy and capital needed for new monetary networks to get off the ground, just as Bitcoin’s early speculators laid the foundation for Bitcoin’s eventual broader utility. Without this speculative phase, it would be nearly impossible to overcome the cold start problem inherent in creating a new monetary system.
Social currencies will directly address global challenges such as climate change, inequality, disinformation, etc. through carefully designed incentives that are directly embedded into the monetary system. Each community, cause or interest group can now design a currency that clearly aligns with its values and goals.
The real innovation lies in empowering communities to independently shape their own currencies and incentive structures, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Web 4 builds on Web3, leveraging the power of speculative assets to create practical, everyday social currencies that can be used to solve real coordination problems around the world.
The foundations of technology, liquidity, governance, and community building are already in place. What’s needed now is the collective will — to transform speculative energy into a purposeful, impactful social currency that redefines humanity’s ability to coordinate.
Unlimited social currency
When discussing Web 4 with anyone, the main question is always: How to maintain sustainability, usability or maintainability in a world where everyone is trying to create a new social currency?
Rather than answering this question directly, I propose a major and dramatic reframing, starting with addressing the core assumption of scarcity.
Traditional economic theory has always viewed currency competition as a zero-sum game. The victory of one currency must come at the expense of the failure of other currencies. This premise supports the establishment of our entire financial infrastructure, which is built for a unified monetary world controlled by government agencies and centralized control.
But what if this underlying assumption is wrong?
Abundance Thinking
What if, instead of a world of scarcity, we had millions of social currencies coexisting and reinforcing each other? The success of one would not diminish but amplify the others. This isn’t just speculation — we’re already seeing this dynamic emerge in the crypto ecosystem, foreshadowing the possibilities of scale.
Take Bitcoin, for example. Many believed it should be the only cryptocurrency, warning that alternatives would dilute its value. Instead, Bitcoin’s success has spawned an explosion of new currencies — Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, and thousands of others — each serving a different community, solving a different problem, and expressing a different set of values. Rather than undercutting Bitcoin, these alternatives have expanded the entire ecosystem while validating its core premise. Bitcoin has not lost relevance; the entire space has grown exponentially.
This phenomenon reveals a profound truth: in a network built on social consensus, value creation is not a zero-sum game. When participants in successful currency networks bring their wealth, knowledge, and reputation to new networks, they create a virtuous cycle that benefits the entire ecosystem.
The stark contrast to extractive networks that only extract value without contributing to sustainable systems is that these networks inevitably collapse, providing valuable lessons for future iterations.
Fierce adaptive competition
But make no mistake, all tokens are in a fierce ongoing competition for meme fitness, utility value, and credibility while maintaining a deeply symbiotic relationship.
All social currencies compete along three key dimensions:
Memetic appeal: Capturing attention and achieving cultural embedding.
Practical value: Solve practical problems and enhance coordination.
Credibility: Maintaining trust through transparency and governance.
Trillions of speculative tokens will naturally shrink to millions of truly useful social currencies through dynamic competition. Tokens gain widespread adoption based on their cultural resonance, utility value, and credibility. This competitive process is not negative; on the contrary, it actively identifies and promotes the most effective and credible community currencies.
Symbiosis paradox
Yet, this competition paradoxically strengthens the bonds between communities.
The rise of one social currency directly increases the likelihood of belief in other currencies, especially those with related purposes. While tribalism and scarcity thinking may sound the alarm at any sign of competition, empirical evidence in the crypto space suggests that good, robust, sustainable assets always end up helping others in the ecosystem.
Unlike traditional market share competition, successful social currencies participate in a player pump player (PPP) dynamic rather than player versus player (PvP). You are not competing for a fixed amount of fiat dollars; you are co-creating new forms of value.
Bitcoin’s greatest contribution may be exactly what its maximalist advocates never anticipated: demonstrating the validity of monetary pluralism. Despite the “one currency to rule them all” narrative, Bitcoin’s success has actually spawned an explosion of alternative currencies, validating its core premise while expanding possibilities for everyone.
Rethinking Infinity
Shifting from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset requires a profound philosophical adjustment. We are conditioned to believe that monetary fragmentation leads to chaos and that a successful currency must dominate its competitors.
Web 4 invites us to consider the opposite: that currency diversity creates resilience, that specialized currencies solve problems better than general-purpose currencies, and that the success of each currency strengthens all.
In Web 4, successful social currencies will be as different from money as we know it today as social media is from broadcast television. They will not be imposed from the top down, but will emerge from communities with a shared purpose.
By distributing money creation to a global community, we are not diluting its value — we are multiplying it, creating an ecosystem as diverse and interconnected as humanity itself.
The diversity of potential social currencies is infinite, limited only by human imagination and social need. Each social currency maintains scarcity within its own context and community, ensuring its continued value and utility.
Gathering Everything
The final most commonly asked question is — How can one cognitively hold or effectively use large amounts of money?
The answer is that they don’t have to, they will be able to exchange any currency for any other currency with minimal fees, barriers or issues. The power of decentralization means there are no barriers preventing aggregators from effectively allowing users to trade across trading venues, chains and any number of liquidity hops.
It is important to note that this is only possible in a decentralized world and is not possible at all in centralized trading systems, including crypto centralized exchanges. This is another reason why moving users to the chain is one of the key factors in making the infinite currency world happen.
That said, aggregation capabilities are far from sufficient — there are more issues to be addressed around minting power, trust, governance, and credibility.
We need intuitive data and social frameworks that allow for easy coordination between decentralized currency creators and maintainers, governance frameworks that let communities define their own notions of value while maintaining trust, credibility signaling mechanisms that eliminate the need for central authorities, and bridges between traditional finance and these new social currencies.
Social Currency System
From a young age we are taught to think of money as a single concept. Our early education reinforces this. We have “money” in our piggy banks, not “currency.” We learn to count, save, and spend it as a collective entity — “money.”
This single framework is consistent with the interests of financial institutions and governments. When money is viewed as a unified, standardized system rather than a diverse, separate “currency,” a certain authority and control is maintained. Consider how central banks and governments work to maintain the uniformity of money. They want us to view it as one system, one authority.
The specialized contexts in which “currency” appears (legal documents, financial statements, government budgets) are formal, official spaces where monetary authority is exercised and recorded. This creates a language boundary—those who control and regulate currency can use “currency,” while everyday users only have “money.”
Of course, this turns money into a mere thing, completely forgetting the historical nature of money itself.
The social nature of money
Since the beginning of civilization, we have been creating unique forms of money to meet local needs. Long before governments issued fiat currencies, communities used shells, stones, sticks, salt, and written symbols to coordinate value, obligations, and trust. Money is not standardized but expressive, adaptive, and social.
The Yapese islanders of Micronesia used huge stone disks called rai as currency, with ownership transferred through oral history rather than physical movement. In medieval England, tally sticks—wooden sticks with notches—were used as currency for more than 700 years, recording debts between individuals and even for paying royal taxes.
Native Americans used wampum belts—intricate beads with specific patterns and designs—not only as currency, but also to record agreements, treaties, and shared history. The value of these belts lies not in the materials they contain, but in the social trust and shared meaning they represent.
During the Great Depression, when federal currency was scarce, hundreds of American communities issued their own local tokens — creating a monetary system that kept local economies going when the national system failed. The Swiss WIR Bank, founded in 1934, operates a complementary monetary system that now includes more than 60,000 businesses, helping to stabilize the Swiss economy during the downturn.
These were not primitive predecessors to “real” money — but rather complex social technologies designed to solve specific coordination problems within their communities. The notion that money must be issued by a central authority and backed by precious metals or government fiat is a historical anomaly rather than the norm.
Money as a social technology
Fundamentally, money is a social technology designed to solve complex social, incentive, and coordination problems. It is a tool that allows groups of humans to align efforts, reward behaviors, and work together toward common goals. When we issue a currency, we are not just creating a medium of exchange, we are designing an incentive system that can transform the way people relate to each other and to their environment.
The real power of money, therefore, lies in its ability to influence social engineering, far beyond its traditional economic function. By thoughtfully designing its form, issuance, and the rules of its use, we can create targeted incentives, foster cooperation, and coordinate action to address a wide range of social challenges. This often involves creating systems where the money itself embodies or directly rewards desired social outcomes.
Bitcoin demonstrates the dual power of crypto as both an asset and a social currency. Its global success is attributed not only to its scarcity but also to the profound social cohesion it facilitates. What started as a technological innovation evolved into a powerful coordination mechanism for millions of people sharing the belief in money, central banks, and financial sovereignty.
Bitcoin’s asset value enables it to function as money — a token without value cannot coordinate economic activity. But reducing Bitcoin to a mere asset ignores its profound social function as a rallying point for the entire movement. The emergence of Bitcoin as a currency accepted and held by millions of people around the world has mobilized and provided a central rallying point, and provided the economic incentives and economic mechanisms for the entire global community to begin to drive large-scale social change and overhaul the financial and fiat monetary systems.
The Original Social Currency — Bitcoin itself is an excellent example of how to understand the virtuous interaction between asset speculation and community mission, with both sides of the coin reinforcing each other. A yin-yang movement towards a social currency system that changes the world as we know it.
The urgent need for a new currency
Our most vexing problems — climate change, wealth inequality, access to health care, the erosion of democracy, the integrity of information — have proven resistant to solutions from existing political, economic, and social frameworks. We need to invent new currencies specifically designed to address these challenges, creating the incentive structures and coordination mechanisms that traditional institutions have failed to provide.
In fact, money is essentially something used within a community or society to align individual interests, maintain value, use value, incentivize contribution, and establish status within that society. Contrary to what we have been taught and believed since birth, money is a purely social construct that any human collective can create for its own needs to attract new members, coordinate existing members, and incentivize activities to achieve desired social goals.
Returning to the social core of money
In the crypto world, the traditional definition of money has become irrelevant. It has become extremely easy to create tokens that have the technical properties of money (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, unit of account). At the same time, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and on-chain data platforms have turned any tradable token, no matter how trivial or ephemeral, into a medium of exchange and store of value.
All previous monetary boundaries and definitions have completely lost their meaning. It’s time to abandon useless, outdated Econ 101, government-approved definitions and embrace the new reality: any token that achieves critical mass social acceptance and sustained usage within a community can be considered a form of money.
This profound fundamental idea — that money is not just legal tender, but anything that any community can create for its own purposes — will completely and radically change the way societies form and grow.
Universal coinage
Seigniorage — the right and profit from creating money — is 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 progress we are making on Web3, we are on the verge of a profound shift where the privilege of money creation will become universal and decentralized.
User Generated Currency
One thing has always been clear to me: the fundamental purpose of crypto has always been to generate new forms of money.
However, the crypto community has been hesitant to directly link crypto to money creation, preferring to think of crypto as technology, products, or assets. This hesitation must end. Otherwise, we will always be stuck in the dilemma of creating assets instead of creating money that is deeply embedded in the daily lives of users.
Rather than keeping the concept of money off-limits, we must embrace the radical democratization of money creation. This requires a shift from viewing crypto as a manufactured product, technology, or even an asset to understanding that the purpose of crypto is to create money to advance any community or social cause.
Universal coinage ultimately means that the power and profits from creating money are no longer concentrated in the hands of a few, but are distributed among the many, enabling entirely new forms of human collaboration and solving problems that our traditional systems have failed to solve.
Social transformation trajectory
Sound impossible? Social transformation always does until it happens.
Major religions began as small movements that reshaped the moral and economic perspectives of billions of people, and ultimately reshaped civilization. Christianity grew from a little-known Jewish sect to a dominant imperial power in a few centuries. Islam spread to every continent in a few decades. These were not just belief systems, but complete social transformations that restructured economic systems and political structures.
Historically, social actions that were considered impossible become inevitable when three conditions align: technological possibility, social acceptance, and economic advantage.
The adoption of fiat currencies, the rise of social media, the spread of democracy — all of these seemed unimaginable before they happened, but are taken for granted afterward.
When Marco Polo encountered paper money in the empire of Kublai Khan, the concept seemed like financial alchemy to Europeans. How could a mulberry bark note with no intrinsic value be exchanged for a valuable commodity? Yet the Mongol Empire had established a complex monetary system based entirely on social agreement.
What seemed magical to the outside world was really just a different conception of what money could be. Of course, these “magic notes” that astounded the Europeans are now the absolute dominant standard by which we conduct transactions, exchange, and measure value itself.
Of course, something they themselves had fought, fought and even died for — the value of gold was also based on the collective belief that it had value.
It all comes down to collective belief, and once enough people believe in a metanarrative, it shifts. That’s where the word “meta” comes from.
Web 4 will follow this pattern. Although millions of community currencies may seem unfeasible today, they will emerge when technological, social, and economic conditions align. Like all profound social movements, this transformation will start slowly and then accelerate dramatically.
When the rainy season comes, it rains heavily.
Encryption Vision
In Web 4, we will realize the original vision of crypto, but with a critical difference that Satoshi did not fully foresee. The revolution will not come in the form of a single decentralized currency replacing fiat, but through millions of specialized currencies created and maintained by a global community. Like all visionaries, Satoshi was right about the direction, but did not foresee the exact path that the transformation would take.
In Web 4, we need to fundamentally reimagine who has the power to create money, build entirely new ideas around what is fair, and build new technologies and liquidity systems that accommodate the full diversity of how anyone might want to create their own money, and how that value flows in society. Communities will forge their own systems of mutual obligations without permission from governments or financial gatekeepers, enabling entirely new social contracts based on transparency rather than institutionalized opacity.
User-generated currencies will become the standard for how we interact with finance, just as user-generated content is now the standard for how we interact with media. Speculation will become a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end must be a decentralized world order where social currencies become the norm in our daily lives, used anywhere, anytime, and seamlessly with everything.
We’re returning to the core idea of money as a social technology that can be invented by any group of humans united by a common cause — from simply spreading a meme to launching a new project to creating currencies that solve our most difficult problems, which are completely unsolved by traditional political, religious, and financial systems.
Money becomes something that any community actively uses, trusts, and governs. Traditional definitions of money no longer fully apply. Tokens held and actively used by communities naturally become money through collective acceptance. We will return to the deep social roots of money, strengthening the connections between us, rather than abstracting it as something given to us. Money will serve as a creative medium to reimagine coordination and cooperation at every level — from the neighborhood to the global.
At the same time, social currencies will be as different from money as we know it today as a TikTok video is different from a BBC broadcast. We will need to completely recalibrate the way we think about and understand money itself. We will understand the amazing alignment, attraction, and community-forming power of money. The interplay between tribalism and money creation will be revealed in full glory, and new money-social systems will flourish in ways we could never have imagined.
We will take Bitcoins blueprint far beyond anyones imagination, replicating it across millions of diverse communities. Successful social currencies will not compete with each other, but coexist, reinforcing a resilient network of mutual trust. What Bitcoin did for financial sovereignty, other currencies will do for memes, climate action, artistic creation, local economic development, and countless other communities, no matter how small or significant.
Everything we’ve done so far in Web3 is just laying the foundation for this future. We’re really, really, really just getting started.
Finally, in Web 4, we will see the core paradox of money play out in real time:
Money must be scarce, but the monetary system can be infinite.
Why do we know it will happen?
Because everyone loves money.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Naval, Wassie Lawyer, Mei, Noah, Siong, Jennie, Julian, Mei, and Chainyoda for reviewing and providing valuable feedback on this article.
Special thanks to Kat, Vibhu, Sellout and Kash for spending hours together to complete this work.
