One of the least understood phenomena in crypto, I’ve become convinced, is the underlying networks that constitute them: “cryptonetworks”. In an earlier piece I mentioned them in passing. Here I plan to delve a little deeper. So, without further preamble, what is a cryptonetwork? While there are many ways to get at their essence, fundamentally, a cryptonetwork is a community -- that is, a collection of human beings, and in the future, agents more broadly -- coordinating, via public key cryptography, around some shared source of value (i.e. a “token”), mediated by a public blockchain. As of the present moment, they represent somewhere in the neighbourhood of $2T in economic value and some tens of millions of active on-chain accounts. What makes these networks so fascinating is that, at a high enough level of abstraction, they emulate a lot of the same properties as nation states. For instance, they have some built-in notion of property rights, a native economy mediated by its own sovereign money and monetary policy, and a citizenry that engages in all manner of social and economic activity. Another interesting point of overlap between the two constructs is the sense of patriotism they elicit. Just as one might feel a particular tribal affinity towards their country of residence, and even a sense of genuine community and belonging, cryptonetworks exhibit a striking capacity to ignite a similar sentiment amongst its participants. While there are parallels one may draw between cryptonetworks and other historical online communities -- traditional social networks, open source software communities etc. -- there is, it would seem, something fundamentally unique about the collective sociology of cryptonetworks. The source of this uniqueness is, I suggest, the sense of underlying mission and purpose that all of the most popular cryptonetworks convey. Bitcoin, for instance, exists to supplant the existing monetary order and establish in its place a far more equitable financial scheme; a system ‘for and by the people’. Ethereum extends this spirit beyond finance to include the entire Big Tech order as well, while Solana seeks to do more or less the same only better, cheaper, faster. While these are fundamentally secular endeavours, there is something palpably religious about the psychology of these networks. Amidst a broader societal crisis of meaning and identity, the epidemic of loneliness, people are finding many of the same virtues of religion in these online communities instead. Where religions and cryptonetworks diverge, however, is that you can actually own the latter, which adds considerably to the fervour.

While it’s probably hard for the average extremely online person to appreciate today, nation states have also served this quasi-religious function since their inception some couple hundred years ago. Just as cryptonetworks are beginning to, nation states have historically acted as a kind of cultural glue that bound different human beings together around some shared set of values and beliefs. They’re both ‘Imagined Communities’; systems that unite disparate peoples via some captivating narrative -- i.e. ‘America is a world of freedom and economic opportunity’, ‘Bitcoin is a fair and just financial order’, ‘Ethereum is a decentralized world’. Although people have spoken to the apparent religious dimension of crypto, it’s nevertheless a fundamentally underappreciated piece of what’s driving this whole affair. People aren’t just buying Bitcoin or Ethereum because of the number_go_up_ technology -- compelling as such is -- they’re buying them, equally, because they represent ‘something to believe in’, as it were. This fact is evidently lost by the nth blockchain project that simply offers some new technological advantage; they offer technology where the heavy-hitters offer salvation.