In today's era where the number of Meme coins is growing wildly into the millions, can Web4 become the next frontier?

Written by: Meow (Co-founder of Jupiter)

Translated by: Nicky, Foresight News

TL;DR: The article proposes that Web4: Social Currency will become the next stage in the evolution of the internet, with its core being the liberation of the power to create currency from governments and financial institutions, empowering communities to autonomously design, issue, and manage currency. Here are the key points:

Core Claims

Democratization of Currency

• Web4 will replicate the "user-generated content" model of Web2, but applied to the currency domain: billions of people will become creators, distributors, and users of currency.

• Currency will no longer be limited to government fiat or a few assets, but will evolve into diverse tools that reflect community values (such as addressing climate issues, supporting local economies, etc.).

Currency as Social Technology

• Currency is essentially a tool for coordinating social behavior, with functions that go far beyond economic exchange. By designing the rules and incentives of currency, communities can promote collective action (such as environmental protection, fair distribution, etc.).

• Bitcoin is the first successful case: its asset value and social mission (financial sovereignty) mutually reinforce each other, proving that currency can serve as both a speculative asset and a bond for social movements.

Abundance Mindset Replacing Scarcity Logic

• Traditional economics assumes that currency competition is a zero-sum game, but Web4 advocates for coexistence of diversity: the success of one currency can enhance the credibility of others (such as Bitcoin giving rise to Ethereum and other ecosystems).

• Currency diversity corresponds to human cultural diversity, with each currency maintaining scarcity in specific scenarios (such as community tokens), but the overall system can expand infinitely.

Positive Transformation of Speculative Energy

• The speculative nature of the crypto market is redefined as "fuel for launching social currency." Early speculators provide liquidity and a trust foundation for new currency networks, facilitating their transition to practical scenarios.

• For example, experiments in DAO and NFT communities have validated that tokens can be tied to specific goals (such as co-creating art, local development), transcending mere asset attributes.

Key Transformations

• Technology Stack Transformation: Off-chain financial tools of Web3 (such as exchanges) will migrate on-chain, achieving true programmability of currency. Decentralized governance and transparent rules will replace centralized institutions.

• Universal Minting Rights: Anyone can issue currency through code and community consensus, without relying on banks or governments. This reshapes power structures, making economic systems more aligned with individual needs.

• Social Embeddedness of Currency: Tokens are deeply tied to community identities (such as fan tokens, environmental contribution points), with usage scenarios 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 frameworks (to prevent abuse), and interoperability between traditional finance and the on-chain world still need breakthroughs.

• Long-term Vision: Web4 will give rise to a "currency ecological rainforest" — millions of community currencies coexisting, solving the failures of traditional systems (such as wealth disparity, information silos) through competitive collaboration.

Final Prophecy: Just as social media disrupted the media landscape, social currency will reconstruct the underlying logic of finance and society — currency will no longer be a "given tool," but a canvas for human collective imagination and collaboration.

Original Content Below:

Web4: Social Currency

Note: This article gathers the core ideas I have been contemplating for many years — from my first exposure to economic theory in high school, to participating in social network construction during the Web2 era, to my ongoing exploration in the crypto field today.

Web 1: Internet, Web 2: Social Media, Web 3: Blockchain, Web 4: Social Currency

Infinite Currency

Each stage of the internet represents a new frontier of human connection, empowering us to reimagine the ways we coordinate socially. Now, with the arrival of Web4, we will liberate the very concept of currency, fundamentally changing how we collectively define, create, and use currency.

Just as Web2 democratized media, shifting power from centralized institutions to billions of individual creators, Web4 will achieve the democratization of currency creation. Billions of users will become creators, distributors, and everyday users of diverse currencies. Currency in Web4 will be fundamentally different from traditional fiat currency, just as TikTok videos differ from BBC broadcasts, providing unprecedented creative expression for communities in the financial realm.

While most people view currency as government fiat, this singular perspective has been historically anomalous. Throughout history, various communities have independently created expressive and adaptive forms of currency to address their unique social coordination problems — from Yap Island stone money, medieval counting sticks, to local tokens during the Great Depression. Web4 will reshape the historical diversity of currency, directly returning the power of currency creation to communities.

In Web4, currency will return to its essence as a social technology. Communities of all sizes will create currencies that directly reflect their values, ideas, and goals — whether spreading memes or addressing global hunger. By designing their own currencies, communities can achieve unprecedented collaboration and alignment around common goals.

Currency has always been a powerful tool for creating incentive alignment, capable of uniting groups across borders, languages, races, and religions. In Web4, successful social currencies will become universal aligners, seamlessly serving as the preferred currency for communities of all sizes, amplifying the impact of collective action to transcend traditional divides.

Web3 built an extraordinary speculative machine, creating a vast network of assets, but failed to truly integrate into the daily lives of ordinary people. In Web4, we need to direct this alchemical power toward meaningful ends — not just creating speculative assets, but building social currencies that are deeply embedded in daily life, used by billions.

Web4 discards competition driven by scarcity and zero-sum thinking, embracing abundance and currency diversity. Millions of social currencies will coexist, fiercely competing around meme appeal, utility, and credibility, but ultimately reinforcing each other. The success of one currency will enhance the faith and usage of others, forming a resilient ecosystem of mutual trust.

Web4 will realize the original vision of cryptocurrency — but in a way that differs from Satoshi's imagination. Instead of a single global decentralized currency, there will be millions of specialized currencies resonating with cultural nuances, governed autonomously by their communities.

Ultimately, Web4 reveals the profound paradox of currency:

Currency must be scarce, but the currency system can be infinite.

Table of Contents

• Evolution of the Internet

• Web1: Internet

• Web2: Social Media

• Web3: Blockchain

• Web4: Social Currency

• Analogy with Web2

• Transition from Web3 to Web4

• Focus on Speculative Energy

• Infinite Social Currency

• Abundance Mindset

• Intense Adaptive Competition

• Symbiotic Paradox

• Rethinking Infinity

• Aggregating Everything

• Social Currency System

• The Social Nature of Currency

• Currency as Social Technology

• Bitcoin: Prototype Social Currency System

• Urgent Need for New Currency

• Returning to the Social Core of Currency

• Universal Minting Rights

• User-Generated Currency

• Social Transformation Trajectory

• Crypto Vision

• Acknowledgments

Evolution of the Internet

Each stage of the internet marks an innovation in the way humans connect, driving the reconstruction of social coordination possibilities.

Web1: 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 created a social framework through experimental platforms like BBS and forums. Although the early construction of broadband, financing structures, and payment networks gave rise to bubbles, it significantly reduced communication and transaction costs, laying the groundwork for subsequent applications.

Web2: Social Media

Web2, built on Web1, fundamentally changed the way humans communicate, transforming the masses from passive consumers into creators, distributors, and trendsetters, giving rise to entirely new social, economic, and political possibilities. The core organizational element of modern society, media, shifted from centralized control to user-generated content (UGC), achieving decentralized creation, distribution, and consumption. This transformation was not just a technological upgrade, but restructured power dynamics, making media a participatory creative process.

Extraordinary things happened: Billions of people transitioned from passive content consumption to active content creation. Everyone has the potential to become a creator. Communities formed around common interests rather than geographical locations. Power shifted from institutions to individuals and networks. The fundamental act of expression achieved unprecedented democratization in human history.

Web3: Blockchain

Just as Web1 laid the technical foundation for information exchange, Web3 built the core infrastructure for decentralized value and liquidity — blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, and stablecoins. With the enrichment of the technology stack (including on-chain space, fiat entry points, and value anchoring frameworks), transaction costs approached zero, paving the way for social adoption. The practices of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana being accepted as currency within their communities indicate that cryptocurrencies can indeed become mainstream currency. Although experiments in DAO, NFT communities, and decentralized social networks are limited in scale, they validate the possibilities.

However, Web3 still faces significant limitations: most assets reside in centralized exchanges, user entry barriers are high, and experiences are subpar. The core utility of current cryptocurrencies (stablecoins, blockchain technology, foundational DeFi) has not truly changed users' financial lives. The once-vision has devolved into a casino — we have built a world of speculative assets that adapt to economic, financial, and political frameworks, merely laying new tracks over the old order.

Web2 gave us a voice, Web3 gave us assets, but neither has shaken the old world order. Now let us enter Web4.

Web4: Social Currency

The next step in crypto evolution, and a new stage in human coordination and currency evolution — social currency.

Just as Web2 democratized content creation (billions of consumers turned into creators), Web4 will achieve the democratization of currency creation, making billions of users creators, distributors, and users of social currency. User interactions on social media (whether intentional or unintentional) have already propelled the development of the human consciousness network through the butterfly effect; social currency will replicate this model, allowing communities to establish mutual obligation systems without the permission of governments or financial gatekeepers, building a new social contract based on transparency rather than institutional power.

Using these currencies (on-chain / off-chain, online / offline) will seamlessly switch like 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, evolutionary speed, and expressiveness of user-generated content far exceed that of professionally produced content. Similarly, most currencies will be eliminated through experimentation, fraud, coordination issues, or institutional resistance, but each success paves the way for subsequent iterations, forming a cycle of learning and adaptation. The combination of meme energy and currency incentives will create the strongest positive feedback loop in human history.

The core human needs of currency (connection, being seen, being recognized) were key to the exponential growth of social media; in Web4, currency will present a difference from traditional fiat currency akin to the difference between TikTok videos and BBC broadcasts — this is not a flaw but a feature, allowing for larger-scale experimentation, cultural expression, and contextual adaptation.

Analogy with Web2

To understand what Web4 might look like, the impact of Web2 provides a powerful framework. Just like currency, media is one of the core organizational foundations of modern society.

Web2 did not eliminate traditional media but coexisted with it, benefiting from existing platforms and infrastructure. Similarly, social currency in Web4 will coexist with traditional fiat currency, leveraging its stability and regulatory structure while expanding the boundaries of possibility.

Web2 democratized media creation, breaking the notion that only official channels were qualified to produce content. Web4 does the same for currency creation, democratizing the minting rights and transforming it from a privilege of governments and elites into a creative act that everyone can participate in.

Web2 incentivized large-scale participation through attention, reputation, and financial rewards, triggering an explosive growth of user-generated content. Web4 will replicate this dynamic, encouraging users to actively participate in currency creation rather than passively holding assets. The result will be billions of people participating in currency creation as naturally as they create social media posts today.

While most content in Web2 is ephemeral, some become lasting cultural narratives. Similarly, many tokens in Web4 will gradually disappear, but a few will evolve into stable, enduring currency 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.

Just a few decades ago — it seemed completely unbelievable that billions of people would create, share, and participate in content globally. Yet today, we live in a world where everyone is a media creator in some way.

The same will happen in the currency domain — all of us will participate in the process of currency creation.

Transition from Web3 to Web4

The technology stack of Web3 is technical — focusing on solving challenges such as consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities, and interoperability protocols. The technology stack of Web4, however, is the currency creation chain — focusing on solving social challenges such as governance, value distribution, trust, and universal minting rights.

Web3 primarily operates off-chain, with most users interacting through centralized exchanges. Web4 will shift the entire currency paradigm on-chain, achieving true programmability, usability, and composability of social currency.

Web3 mainly views tokens as assets — investment tools, collectibles, or practical tools deriving value through scarcity, speculation, or functional benefits, but with limited interaction in daily life. In this regard, today’s crypto is more akin to creating stocks rather than currency. The assets created in Web4 also become social currency — expressions of community, identity, and shared purpose, with their value derived from trust, utility, and social embeddedness.

Web3 primarily operates within the existing economic paradigm — adapting blockchain technology to traditional concepts of value and exchange. Web4 reimagines the foundation — fundamentally questioning and redefining what currency is and how it operates in society.

Focusing on Speculative Energy

The speculative nature of crypto assets is often criticized as a flaw; in reality, it is a key feature for launching social currency. In Web4, we can focus the vast speculative resources of Web3 on creating meaningful, community-driven currency. The extensive infrastructure built for investors becomes crucial for launching new social currency systems.

Speculation provides the initial energy and capital needed to kickstart new currency networks, just as early speculators in Bitcoin laid the groundwork for Bitcoin's eventual broader utility. Without this speculative phase, it would be nearly impossible to overcome the inherent cold start problems of creating new currency systems.

Social currency will directly address global challenges through carefully designed incentives, such as climate change, inequality, and misinformation, with these incentives directly embedded in the currency system. Each community, cause, or interest group can now design currency that aligns clearly with its values and goals.

The real innovation lies in empowering communities to independently shape their own currency and incentive structures, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Web4 builds on the foundation of Web3, harnessing the power of speculative assets to create practical, everyday social currency that addresses real coordination problems globally.

The foundations of technology, liquidity, governance, and community building are already in place. What is now needed is collective will — to transform speculative energy into purposeful, impactful social currency that redefines human coordination capabilities.

Infinite Social Currency

When discussing Web4 with everyone, the main question always arises: in a world where everyone is trying to create new social currency, how do we maintain sustainability, usability, or maintainability?

I do not directly answer this question but propose a significant and dramatic reframing, starting from the core assumption of addressing 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 others. This premise underpins the establishment of our entire financial infrastructure, built for a unified currency world governed by government institutions and centralized control.

But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?

Abundance Mindset

What if instead of a world of scarcity, we have a world where millions of social currencies coexist and reinforce each other? The success of one does not weaken but amplifies the others. This is not just speculation — we have already seen the emergence of this dynamic in the crypto ecosystem, indicating the potential for scaling.

Take Bitcoin as an example. Many believe it should be the only cryptocurrency, warning that alternatives will dilute its value. On the contrary, Bitcoin's success has spawned an explosive growth of new currencies — Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, and thousands of other currencies — each serving different communities, solving different problems, and expressing different values. These alternatives have not weakened Bitcoin; rather, they have expanded the entire ecosystem while validating its core premise. Bitcoin has not lost relevance; the entire field has grown exponentially.

This phenomenon reveals a profound truth: in networks built on social consensus, value creation is not a zero-sum game. When participants in successful currency networks bring their wealth, knowledge, and reputation into new networks, they create a virtuous cycle that benefits the entire ecosystem.

In stark contrast to extractive networks that take value without contributing to sustainable systems, this comparison highlights how these networks inevitably collapse, providing valuable lessons for future iterations.

Intense Adaptive Competition

But do not misunderstand, all tokens are in fierce, ongoing competition, vying for meme adaptability, practical value, and credibility, while maintaining deep symbiotic relationships.

All social currencies compete along three key dimensions:

• Meme Appeal: Attracting attention and achieving cultural embedding.

• Practical Value: Solving real problems and enhancing coordination.

• Credibility: Maintaining trust through transparency and governance.

Trillions of speculative tokens will naturally reduce through dynamic competition to millions of truly useful social currencies. Tokens gain widespread adoption based on their cultural resonance, practical value, and credibility. This competitive process is not negative; rather, it actively identifies and elevates the most effective and trustworthy community currencies.

Symbiotic Paradox

However, this competitive paradoxically strengthens the connections between communities.

The rise of one social currency directly increases the possibility belief in other currencies, especially those with relevant purposes. While tribalism and scarcity thinking may sound alarms at any signs of competition, empirical evidence from the crypto space suggests that good, robust, and sustainable assets ultimately help others in the ecosystem.

Unlike traditional market share battles, successful social currencies participate in a "player pumps player" (PPP) dynamic rather than "player versus player" (PvP). You are not competing for a fixed number of fiat dollars; rather, you are co-creating new forms of value.

Bitcoin's greatest contribution may be precisely what its maximalist advocates did not foresee: proving the validity of currency pluralism. Despite the narrative of "one currency to rule them all," Bitcoin's success has actually spawned explosive growth 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 have been conditioned to believe that the fragmentation of currency leads to chaos, and that successful currencies must dominate their competitors.

Web4 invites us to consider the opposite viewpoint: currency diversity creates resilience, specialized currencies solve problems better than generic ones, and the success of each currency reinforces all currencies.

In Web4, successful social currencies will be fundamentally different from the currencies we know today, just as social media is fundamentally different from broadcast television. They will not be imposed from the top down but will emerge from communities with shared goals.

By allocating the power of currency creation to global communities, we do not diminish its value — we multiply it, creating an ecosystem as diverse and interconnected as humanity itself.

The potential diversity of social currencies is infinite, limited only by human imagination and social needs. Each social currency maintains scarcity within its own context and community, ensuring its ongoing value and utility.

Aggregating Everything

The last question most often asked is — how can people cognitively hold or effectively use a large number of currencies?

The answer is that they do not need 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 exchanges, chains, and any number of liquidity jumps.

It is important to note that this is only possible in a decentralized world; it is fundamentally impossible to achieve in centralized trading systems, including crypto centralized exchanges. This is also one of the key factors that make the transition of users to the on-chain world of infinite currency possible.

That said, the ability to aggregate is far from sufficient — there are more issues to address around minting rights, 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 concepts of value while maintaining trust, without the credibility signaling mechanisms of central authorities, and bridges between traditional finance and these new social currencies.

Social Currency System

From a young age, we are taught to view currency as a singular concept. Our early education reinforces this. We have "money" in our piggy banks, not "currencies." We learn to count, save, and spend it as a collective entity — "money."

This singular framework aligns with the interests of financial institutions and governments. When currency is viewed as a unified, standardized system rather than a diverse, separate "currency," it maintains a certain authority and control. Consider how central banks and governments strive to uphold the uniformity of currency; they want us to see it as a system, an authority.

The specialized context in which "currency" appears (legal documents, financial statements, government budgets) is precisely the formal, official space for exercising and recording currency authority. This creates a linguistic boundary — those who control and regulate currency can use "currency," while everyday users only have "money."

Of course, this turns currency into a mere "thing," completely forgetting the historical nature of currency itself.

The Social Nature of Currency

Since the dawn of civilization, we have been creating unique forms of currency to meet local needs. Long before governments issued fiat currency, communities used shells, stones, sticks, salt, and symbols to coordinate value, obligations, and trust. Currency is not standardized but rather expressive, adaptive, and social.

The islanders of Yap in Micronesia use large stone disks called rai as currency, with ownership transferred through oral history rather than physical movement. In medieval England, counting sticks — wooden rods with notches — were used as currency for over 700 years, recording debts between individuals and even used to pay royal taxes.

Native Americans used wampum belts — intricate beadwork with specific patterns and designs, not only as currency but also to record agreements, treaties, and shared histories. 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 currency system that maintained local economies when the national system failed. The WIR Bank established in Switzerland in 1934 operates a complementary currency system that now includes over 60,000 businesses, helping stabilize the Swiss economy during downturns.

These are not primitive precursors to "real" currency — they are complex social technologies designed to solve specific coordination problems within their communities. The notion that currency must be issued by a central authority and backed by precious metals or government decree is a historical anomaly rather than the norm.

Currency as Social Technology

Fundamentally, currency is a social technology designed to solve complex social, incentive, and coordination problems. It is a tool that allows human groups to align efforts, reward behaviors, and work together toward common goals. When we issue a currency, we are not merely creating a medium of exchange; we are designing an incentive system that can transform relationships between people and their environment.

Thus, the true power of currency lies in its ability to influence social engineering, far beyond its traditional economic functions. By thoughtfully designing its form, issuance, and usage rules, we can create targeted incentives that promote cooperation and coordinate actions to address a wide range of social 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 an asset and social currency. Its global success is attributed not only to its scarcity but also to the profound social cohesion it fosters. The initial technological innovation has evolved into a powerful coordinating mechanism for millions of shared currencies, central banks, and beliefs in financial sovereignty.

The asset value of Bitcoin enables it to function as currency — tokens without value cannot coordinate economic activity. However, reducing Bitcoin to merely an asset overlooks its profound social function as a focal point for the entire movement. The emergence of Bitcoin as a currency accepted and held by millions globally has mobilized and provided a central gathering point, offering economic incentives and mechanisms for the entire global community, beginning to drive large-scale social change and fundamentally reforming financial and fiat currency systems.

The original social currency — Bitcoin itself is an excellent example of how to understand the positive interaction between asset speculation and community mission, with the two sides of the coin reinforcing each other. A yin-yang movement, evolving toward a social currency system that changes the world as we know it.

The Urgent Need for New Currency

Our most pressing issues — climate change, wealth inequality, access to healthcare, erosion of democracy, information integrity — have proven resistant to solutions within existing political, economic, and social frameworks. We need to invent new currencies specifically designed to address these challenges, creating incentive structures and coordination mechanisms that traditional institutions have failed to provide.

In fact, currency is essentially something used within a community or society to align individual interests, maintain value, use value, incentivize contributions, and establish status. Contrary to what we have been conditioned to believe since birth, currency is a purely social construct that any human collective can create for its own needs, to attract new members, coordinate existing ones, and incentivize activities to achieve desired social goals.

Returning to the Social Core of Currency

In the crypto world, the traditional definition of currency has become irrelevant. Creating tokens with currency-like attributes (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, unit of account) has become extremely easy. Meanwhile, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and on-chain data platforms have transformed any tradable token into a medium of exchange and a means of storing value, no matter how trivial or ephemeral.

All previous boundaries and definitions of currency have completely lost their meaning. It is time to abandon useless, outdated Economics 101, government-approved definitions, and embrace the new reality: any token that achieves critical mass of social acceptance and sustained use within a community can be considered a form of currency.

This profound fundamental idea — that currency is not just fiat currency but anything that any community can create for its own purposes — will completely and radically change the way society is formed and grows.

Universal Minting Rights

Minting rights — the right and profit to create currency — may be the most important economic concept that most people have never heard of. This ignorance is not accidental; the power to create currency has historically been jealously guarded by governments and financial institutions.

Today, as we make progress in Web3, we are on the brink of a profound transformation where the privilege of currency 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 currency.

However, the crypto community has been hesitant, unwilling to directly link crypto with currency creation, preferring to view crypto as technology, products, or assets. This hesitation must end. Otherwise, we will forever be trapped in the dilemma of creating assets rather than currencies that are deeply embedded in users' daily lives.

We should not set the concept of currency as a taboo but must embrace the thorough democratization of currency creation. This requires a shift from viewing crypto as a means of producing products, technologies, or even assets to understanding that the purpose of crypto is to create currency to advance any community or social cause.

Universal minting rights ultimately mean that the power and profit from creating currency are no longer concentrated in the hands of a few but distributed among the many, enabling entirely new forms of human collaboration and addressing the problems that our traditional systems have failed to solve.

Trajectory of Social Transformation

Does it sound impossible? Social transformation always seems that way until it happens.

Major religions have reshaped billions of people's views on morality and economics, starting from small-scale movements, ultimately reshaping civilization. Christianity evolved from a little-known Jewish sect into a dominant force in empires over several centuries. Islam spread across continents in just a few decades. These are not just belief systems; they are complete social transformations that restructured economic systems and political structures.

Historically, when three conditions align, what is deemed impossible social behavior becomes inevitable: technological possibility, social acceptance, and economic advantage.

The adoption of fiat currency, the rise of social media, the spread of democracy — all of these seemed unimaginable before they occurred, yet afterward, they were taken for granted.

When Marco Polo encountered paper money in Kublai Khan's empire, the concept seemed like financial alchemy to Europeans. How could a mulberry bark note with no intrinsic value exchange for valuable goods? Yet, the Mongol Empire established a complex currency system entirely based on social agreements.

What appeared magical to outsiders was merely a different conception of what currency could be. Of course, the "magical paper money" that shocked Europeans has now become the absolute dominant standard for conducting transactions, exchanges, and measuring value itself.

Certainly, the value of gold — something they once fought for, battled over, and even sacrificed for — is also based on a collective belief that it has value.

Ultimately, it all comes down to collective belief; once enough people believe in a meta-narrative, the meta-narrative transforms. This is precisely where the term "meta" comes from.

Web4 will follow this pattern. Although millions of community currencies today may seem unfeasible, they will emerge when technological, social, and economic conditions align. Like all profound social movements, this transformation will start slowly and then accelerate rapidly.

When the rainy season arrives, it will pour.

The Vision for Crypto

In Web4, we will realize the original vision of crypto, but with a key distinction that Satoshi did not fully foresee. The revolution will not come in the form of a single decentralized currency replacing fiat currency, but through the creation and maintenance of millions of specialized currencies by global communities. Like all visionaries, Satoshi was correct about the direction, but did not foresee the exact path that the transformation would take.

In Web4, we need to fundamentally rethink who holds the power to create currency, establishing entirely new concepts around what is fair, while building new technological and liquidity systems that meet the full diversity of how anyone might wish to create their own currency in any way, and how these values flow within society. Communities will forge their own systems of mutual obligation without the permission of governments or financial gatekeepers, making a new social contract based on transparency rather than institutional opacity possible.

User-generated currency will become the standard for our interactions with finance, just as user-generated content is now the standard for our interactions with media. Speculation will become a means to achieve goals rather than the goal itself. The endpoint must be the establishment of a decentralized world order where social currency becomes the norm in our daily lives, used seamlessly with everything, everywhere.

We will return to the core idea of currency as social technology, where any human group united by a common cause can invent currency — from simply spreading memes to launching new projects, to creating currencies that solve our most pressing problems, which traditional political, religious, and financial systems have completely failed to address.

Currency will become something actively used, trusted, and governed by any community. The traditional definitions of currency will no longer fully apply. Tokens held and actively used by communities will naturally become currency through collective acceptance. We will return to the deep social roots of currency, strengthening our connections rather than abstracting it as something that is "given" to us. Currency will serve as a creative medium for coordination and cooperation reimagined at all levels — from neighborhoods to the global stage.

At the same time, social currency will be fundamentally different from the currencies we know today, just as TikTok videos are fundamentally different from BBC broadcasts. We need to completely recalibrate the way we think about and understand currency itself. We will understand the astonishing power of currency to align, attract, and form communities. The interaction between tribalism and currency creation will be fully illuminated, and new currency-social systems will flourish in unimaginable ways.

We will push the blueprint of Bitcoin to realms far beyond anyone's 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. Everything Bitcoin has done for financial sovereignty, other currencies will do for memes, climate action, artistic creation, local economic development, and countless other communities, no matter how trivial or significant.

Everything we have done in Web3 so far has only laid the groundwork for this future. We are really, really, really just getting started.

Finally, in Web4, we will witness the core paradox of currency play out in real-time:

Currency must be scarce, but the currency system can be infinite.

Why do we know it will happen?

Because everyone loves money.

Acknowledgments

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 collaborating to complete this work.

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