“Aren’t they all speculative scams?” you ask thoughtfully, mid-click, while bridging your fartcoin holdings into the derpcoin DeFi hub.

Yeah, mostly. Like, probably almost all of them. I genuinely kind of hate it.

“Then why is JAVCoN messing with crypto at all?” you press, reheating three-day-old mac and cheese with the lid askew.

Fair question. The honest answer is that I think there’s something here worth more than a ticker symbol, and I’d like to spend a few minutes trying to convince you of it, because the loudest people in this space have done an outstanding job convincing everyone else that the entire thing is a casino built on top of a Ponzi scheme glued to a JPEG of a monkey.

Coins Is A Stupid Word

Let me start by burning the vocabulary. “Coins” is a stupid word for what these things actually are. It evokes a fistful of metal you spend at a vending machine, which is just close enough to the truth to be misleading and just dumb enough to attract the wrong crowd.

Tokens is better. The word comes from networking, where a token is a thing a network manager hands out to give a device permission to talk on the wire. In a blockchain network, the analogous arrangement is that participants effectively bid their tokens to the network as a fee for the right to have their requested instructions processed. The rules of issuance are baked into the network itself, continuously self-executing, and if you try to break them, you get politely (and automatically) shown the door.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Permission to broadcast, governed by rules nobody can quietly bend after the fact.

The Chuck E. Cheese Theory Of Value

Let me put that in plain English, because the previous paragraph contains the word “node” in spirit and I refuse to lose you that early.

A blockchain network is an arcade. Chuck E. Cheese, if you like. To play the games inside the arcade, you have to use the arcade’s tokens. The games can tell whether your tokens are real or counterfeit. The player willing to pay the most tokens gets to cut the line and play first.

Why are the tokens valuable? Because they let you play the games. Why do you want to play the games? Because the games are why you came to the arcade. This is admittedly a circle, and a slightly annoying one, but it’s the same kind of circle as “I can’t get a job without a car and I can’t get a car without a job,” and we all live with that one just fine.

The tokens themselves are basically fungible blobs of nothing. The differentiator is which arcade you walked into. Different arcades have different games and different prizes, and that’s the only reason to prefer one set of tokens over another. If an arcade has no games worth playing, the tokens are correctly worth nothing, and the market eventually figures that out, usually with a fair amount of yelling.

So far, we have explained the entire memecoin economy.

What Is Actually Valuable Here

Now the part that isn’t memecoins.

The only genuinely valuable output of a blockchain network is block space. When a transaction is included in a validated, finalized block, the entire network agrees: this happened, in this order, at this point in time. We can all point at it. Who played what game, when, with what score.

“So that’s not all that exciting,” you say, petting your cat sinisterly from deep inside your volcano lair.

Well, no. Not when the transactions you’re verifying are swapping monkey JPEGs and betting on the weather. But the asset isn’t the point. The verification is the point. The asset is just the thing being verified.

Once that lands, the interesting question becomes: what else might be worth verifying?

Votes cast by public officials. Payments for services rendered. Statements made publicly by people who later go on TV to swear they never said any such thing. We are deep into an era of “alternative truth” where the events of last Tuesday are subject to revision by next Tuesday’s news cycle, and the platforms that mediate this stuff have, generously, mixed incentives. History books are written by whoever wins, edited by whoever’s still around to edit them. A neutral, append-only public record of what actually happened, the moment it happened, starts to sound less like crypto bro nonsense and more like an actually useful piece of civic infrastructure.

You don’t even have to agree with the people writing the record. That’s sort of the point.

Freedom To Speak, Freedom To Ignore

I’m not going to pretend I agree with everything I see online. I don’t. But I do believe that if you have a message and you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is, and you’re willing to accept the resulting public conversation, you should be free to do so. I also believe nobody is obligated to listen, agree, or amplify you. Those are two different freedoms, and the prevailing platforms have managed to mangle both. Freedom for me but not for thee, applied with all the consistency of a coin flip in the dark.

Engagement collectives should emerge organically, peer to peer, on the basis of actual shared interests. Not because an algorithm decided that’s the bucket you fit into this quarter. Your interests are yours. You should not be funneled into a single monolithic platform just because that’s where everyone else got funneled first.

Which is, conveniently, where I was going the whole time.

Bringing This Back To DATUM

I mentioned DATUM in the masterplan, and this is the part where it connects.

DATUM is a distributed ad targeting utility marketplace. The job of an ad tech coordinator, classically, is to sit between advertisers, publishers, and users, take the largest slice of the pie for doing so, and reserve the right to quietly censor or deprioritize anything it doesn’t like. The advertisers don’t love this. The publishers don’t love this. The users definitely don’t love this. The coordinator, on the other hand, loves it very much.

Crypto and blockchain infrastructure makes it possible to remove the coordinator without removing the coordination. Advertisers, publishers, and users come to terms directly, on the record, and split the revenue without a referee skimming half of it on the way through. The attention is real, the impressions are real, the people bearing the risk of putting something in front of an audience are real, and for once, the money can actually go to them.

How far does maximum value extraction have to go before it crosses into exploitation? I don’t have a hard number, but I think we passed it a couple of platform pivots ago.

So that’s why JAVCoN, an avowed crypto skeptic, is building on this stuff. Not because tokens are inherently valuable, and definitely not because I think your bridge from fartcoin to derpcoin is going to change the world. Underneath all of it, though, is a primitive nobody else has: a public, verifiable, neutral record of what happened, and the ability to coordinate strangers around it without a middleman who quietly hates them both.

That’s worth a few blog posts. Maybe a whole project.

— Kasey