Web4: From Fiat to Social Currency — The Democratic Revolution of Monetary Creation

2025.05.21

Web4: From Fiat to Social Currency — The Democratic Revolution of Monetary Creation

In an era where meme coins are growing wildly by the tens of millions, can Web4 become the next destination?

2025.05.21 - 11:28:22

Web4

Navigating Web3 tides with focused insights

In an era where meme coins are growing wildly by the tens of millions, can Web4 become the next destination?

Author: Meow (Co-founder of Jupiter)

Translation: Nicky, Foresight News

TL;DR: This article proposes Web4: Social Money as the next stage of internet evolution, centered on liberating monetary creation from governments and financial institutions, empowering communities to autonomously design, issue, and manage their own currencies. Key takeaways:

Core Claims

Democratization of Money

Web4 will replicate Web2’s “user-generated content” model but applied to money—billions will become creators, distributors, and users of currency.
Money will no longer be limited to government fiat or a few assets, but evolve into diverse tools reflecting community values (e.g., addressing climate change, supporting local economies).

Money as Social Technology

At its core, money is a tool for coordinating social behavior, extending far beyond economic exchange. By designing rules and incentives, communities can drive collective action (e.g., environmentalism, fair distribution).
Bitcoin is the first successful case: its asset value and social mission (financial sovereignty) reinforce each other, proving money can serve both as speculative asset and social movement catalyst.

Abundance Over Scarcity

Traditional economics assumes zero-sum competition between currencies, but Web4 promotes coexistence of diversity: one currency's success enhances credibility for others (e.g., Bitcoin catalyzing Ethereum and broader ecosystems).
Currency diversity mirrors cultural diversity—each remains scarce within specific contexts (e.g., community tokens), while the overall system scales infinitely.

Positive Transformation of Speculative Energy

Speculation in crypto markets is redefined as "fuel to launch social currencies." Early speculators provide liquidity and trust foundations, enabling transition to real-world utility.
DAOs and NFT communities have already demonstrated how tokens can be tied to specific goals (e.g., collaborative art, local development), going beyond pure asset functions.

Key Transformations

Infrastructure Shift: Web3’s off-chain financial tools (e.g., exchanges) will move on-chain, enabling truly programmable money. Decentralized governance and transparent rules replace centralized institutions.
Universal Minting Rights: Anyone can issue currency via code and community consensus, without banks or government approval—reshaping power structures to better meet individual needs.
Social Embedding of Money: Tokens are deeply tied to community identity (e.g., fan tokens, environmental contribution points), naturally integrated into daily life rather than confined to investment.

Challenges & Vision

Short-term Barriers: User experience (managing multiple wallets/tokens), governance frameworks (preventing abuse), and interoperability between traditional finance and on-chain worlds still need breakthroughs.
Long-term Vision: Web4 will spawn a “monetary ecosystem rainforest”—millions of community currencies coexisting, competitively collaborating to solve systemic failures (e.g., wealth inequality, data silos).

Final Prediction: Just as social media disrupted media, social money will reshape the foundations of finance and society—money will no longer be a “given tool,” but a canvas for human imagination and collaboration.

Original Content Below:

Web4: Social Money

Note: This article compiles core ideas I’ve developed over years—from first encountering economic theories in high school, building social networks during Web2, to ongoing exploration in crypto today.

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

Infinite Money

Each web era represents a new frontier of human connection, empowering us to reimagine coordination. Now with Web4, we’ll liberate the very concept of money, fundamentally transforming how we collectively define, create, and use it.

Just as Web2 democratized media by shifting power from central institutions to billions of individual creators, Web4 will democratize monetary creation. Billions will become creators, distributors, and everyday users of diverse currencies. These Web4 currencies will differ from traditional fiat as much as TikTok videos differ from BBC broadcasts—enabling unprecedented creative expression in finance.

Though most view money as government-issued fiat, this singular perspective is historically abnormal. Throughout history, communities independently created expressive, adaptive forms of money to solve unique coordination problems—from Yap stones and medieval tally sticks to Depression-era local scrip. Web4 revives this historical diversity, returning monetary creation directly to communities.

In Web4, money returns to its essence as social technology. Communities of all sizes will create currencies embodying their values, visions, and goals—whether spreading memes or ending global hunger. By designing their own money, communities achieve unprecedented alignment around shared objectives.

Money has always been a powerful tool for aligning incentives, uniting people across borders, languages, races, and religions. In Web4, successful social currencies will act as universal aligners—seamlessly serving as preferred mediums for communities large and small, amplifying collective impact beyond traditional divisions.

Web3 built an extraordinary speculation machine, creating vast asset networks, but failed to integrate into ordinary lives. In Web4, we must channel this alchemical power toward meaningful ends—not just speculative assets, but deeply embedded social currencies used practically by billions.

Web4 rejects scarcity-driven, zero-sum competition, embracing abundance and monetary diversity. Millions of social currencies will coexist, fiercely competing on meme appeal, utility, and credibility—yet ultimately reinforcing one another. Success of one boosts faith and usage in others, forming resilient, trust-based ecosystems.

Web4 fulfills crypto’s original vision—but differently than Satoshi imagined. Instead of one global decentralized currency, millions of culturally resonant, specialized currencies will emerge, governed autonomously by their communities.

Ultimately, Web4 reveals money’s profound paradox:

Money must be scarce, but the monetary system can be infinite.

Evolution of the Internet
Web1: Internet
Web2: Social Media
Web3: Blockchain
Web4: Social Money
Analogy with Web2
Transition from Web3 to Web4
Focusing Speculative Energy
Infinite Social Money
Mindset of Abundance
Fierce Adaptive Competition
Symbiotic Paradox
Rethinking Infinity
Aggregating Everything
Social Money Systems
Social Nature of Money
Money as Social Technology
Bitcoin: Prototype Social Money System
Urgent Need for New Money
Returning to Money’s Social Core
Universal Minting Rights
User-Generated Money
Social Transformation Trajectory
Crypto Vision
Acknowledgments

Evolution of the Internet

Each phase of the internet marks a revolution in human connectivity, reshaping what’s possible in social coordination.

Web1: Internet

Web1 established the technical foundation of the internet using HTTP, HTML, browsers, and servers; built economic infrastructure through e-commerce; and laid social frameworks via experimental platforms like BBS and forums. Though early broadband, funding models, and payment networks led to bubbles, they drastically reduced communication and transaction costs, paving the way for future applications.

Web2: Social Media

Building on Web1, Web2 transformed human communication—shifting the masses from passive consumers to creators, distributors, and trendsetters—unlocking new social, economic, and political possibilities. Media, a core organizing element of modern society, moved from centralized control to user-generated content (UGC), decentralizing creation, distribution, and consumption. This wasn’t just a tech upgrade—it restructured power, turning media into a participatory creative process.

Something extraordinary happened: billions shifted from passively consuming content to actively creating it. Everyone gained creator potential. Communities formed around shared interests, not geography. Power moved from institutions to individuals and networks. For the first time in history, basic expression became profoundly democratized.

Web3: Blockchain

Just as Web1 laid the foundation for information exchange, Web3 builds core infrastructure for decentralized value and liquidity—blockchains, smart contracts, DEXs, and stablecoins. As the stack matures (on-chain spaces, fiat ramps, value anchoring), transaction costs near zero, enabling mass adoption. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana being accepted as money within their communities shows crypto can go mainstream. Experiments with DAOs, NFT communities, and decentralized social networks, though limited in scale, prove feasibility.

Yet Web3 faces major limitations: most assets remain on centralized exchanges, entry barriers are high, and user experience poor. Current crypto utility (stablecoins, blockchain tech, basic DeFi) hasn’t truly changed users’ financial lives. The original vision devolved into a casino—we built speculative assets adapted to old economic, financial, and political frameworks, merely layering new rails atop the existing order.

Web2 gave us voice, Web3 gave us assets, but neither overturned the old world order. Now we enter Web4.

Web4: Social Money

The next step in crypto evolution—a new stage of human coordination and monetary development: social money.

Just as Web2 democratized content creation (billions of consumers becoming creators), Web4 democratizes monetary creation, making billions into creators, distributors, and users of social money. Interactions on social media (intentional or not) already drive the evolution of human consciousness networks through butterfly effects; social money replicates this pattern, allowing communities to build mutual obligation systems without permission from governments or financial gatekeepers—forging new social contracts based on transparency, not institutional power.

Using these currencies (on/off-chain, online/offline) will switch as seamlessly as cash, digital payments, and credit cards. Most tokens will fail (like most content fails to become memes), yet that didn’t stop social media from changing the world—user-generated content’s creativity, speed of evolution, and expressiveness far surpass professional production. Similarly, most currencies will be eliminated through experimentation, fraud, coordination issues, or institutional resistance, but every success paves the way for future iterations, creating cycles of learning and adaptation. The fusion of meme energy and monetary incentives will generate the strongest positive feedback loop in human history.

The core human needs behind money (connection, visibility, recognition)—key drivers of social media’s exponential growth—will now apply to money. Web4 currencies will differ from fiat like TikTok videos differ from BBC broadcasts—not a flaw, but a feature, enabling larger-scale experimentation, cultural expression, and contextual adaptation.

Analogy with Web2

To understand Web4’s potential, Web2’s impact offers a powerful framework. Like money, media is a foundational organizing principle of modern society.

Web2 didn’t eliminate traditional media but coexisted with it, benefiting from existing platforms and infrastructure. Likewise, Web4’s social money will coexist with traditional fiat, leveraging its stability and regulatory structures while expanding possibility frontiers.

Web2 democratized media creation, shattering the idea that only official channels could produce content. Web4 does the same for monetary creation—democratizing minting rights, turning it from a privilege of governments and elites into a creative act open to all.

Web2 incentivized massive participation through attention, reputation, and financial rewards, triggering an explosion of user-generated content. Web4 replicates this dynamic, driving active participation in currency creation—not passive asset holding. The result: billions naturally engaging in monetary creation, just as they now post on social media.

Though most Web2 content fades quickly, some becomes enduring cultural narratives. Similarly, many Web4 tokens will vanish, but a few will evolve into stable, lasting monetary systems. As with UGC, many social currencies will fail. Yet every experiment—successful or not—contributes to rapid learning and evolutionary improvement.

Finally, just decades ago, the idea that billions would globally create, share, and engage with content seemed utterly implausible. Today, we live in a world where everyone is, in some way, a media creator.

The same will happen in money—we will all participate in monetary creation.

Transition from Web3 to Web4

Web3’s tech stack is technical—focused on solving challenges like consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities, and interoperability protocols. Web4’s tech stack is the monetary creation chain—focused on social challenges: governance, value distribution, trust, and universal minting rights.

Web3 operates mostly off-chain, with users interacting mainly through centralized exchanges. Web4 shifts the entire monetary paradigm on-chain, enabling true programmability, usability, and composability of social money.

Web3 treats tokens primarily as assets—investment vehicles, collectibles, or utilities deriving value from scarcity, speculation, or functional benefits—with limited integration into daily life. Today’s crypto resembles stock creation more than money. Web4 creates assets that become social money—expressions of community, identity, and shared purpose, valued for trust, utility, and social embedding.

Web3 operates largely within existing economic paradigms—adapting blockchain to traditional concepts of value and exchange. Web4 reimagines the foundations—fundamentally questioning and redefining what money is and how it functions in society.

Focusing Speculative Energy

Crypto’s speculative nature is often criticized as a flaw, but it’s actually a key feature for launching social money. In Web4, we can focus Web3’s vast speculative resources on creating meaningful, community-driven currencies. The broad infrastructure built for speculation becomes essential for bootstrapping new social money systems.

Speculation provides the initial energy and capital needed to launch new monetary networks—just as Bitcoin’s early speculators laid the groundwork for its later practical utility. Without this speculative phase, overcoming the cold-start problem of new monetary systems would be nearly impossible.

Social money will directly tackle global challenges—climate change, inequality, misinformation—through carefully designed incentives embedded in the currency itself. Every community, cause, or interest group can now design money explicitly aligned with its values and goals.

The real innovation lies in empowering communities to independently shape their own monetary and incentive structures, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Web4 builds on Web3, harnessing the power of speculative assets to create useful, everyday social money for solving real-world coordination problems at scale.

The foundations—technology, liquidity, governance, community-building—are already in place. What’s missing is collective will—to transform speculative energy into purposeful, impactful social money, redefining humanity’s coordination capacity.

Infinite Social Money

Whenever I discuss Web4, the main question is always: how can sustainability, usability, or maintainability work in a world where everyone creates new social money?

Instead of answering directly, I propose a radical reframing—starting by challenging the core assumption of scarcity.

Traditional economic theory always frames monetary competition as zero-sum: one currency’s victory requires another’s defeat. This premise shaped our entire financial infrastructure for a world of uniform, centrally controlled currencies.

But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?

Mindset of Abundance

What if instead of scarcity, we envision a world where millions of social currencies coexist and mutually reinforce each other? Where one’s success doesn’t diminish but amplifies others? This isn’t mere speculation—we’re already seeing this dynamic emerge in crypto, hinting at scalable potential.

Take Bitcoin. Many believed it should be the only cryptocurrency, warning alternatives would dilute its value. Instead, Bitcoin’s success sparked an explosion of new currencies—Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, thousands more—each serving different communities, solving different problems, expressing different values. These alternatives didn’t weaken Bitcoin—they expanded the entire ecosystem while validating its core premise. Bitcoin didn’t lose relevance; the entire field grew exponentially.

This reveals a profound truth: in networks built on social consensus, value creation isn’t zero-sum. When participants from successful networks bring their wealth, knowledge, and reputation into new ones, they create virtuous cycles benefiting the whole ecosystem.

Contrast this with extractive networks that only take value without contributing sustainable systems—these inevitably collapse, providing valuable lessons for future iterations.

Fierce Adaptive Competition

Make no mistake—all tokens are in fierce, ongoing competition for meme fitness, practical value, and credibility—while maintaining deep symbiotic relationships.

All social money competes along three key dimensions:

Meme Appeal: Capturing 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 converge into millions of genuinely useful social currencies through dynamic competition. Tokens gain widespread adoption based on cultural resonance, utility, and credibility. This competitive process isn’t negative—it actively identifies and elevates the most effective and trustworthy community currencies.

Symbiotic Paradox

Paradoxically, this competition strengthens connections between communities.

The rise of one social currency directly increases belief in the possibility of others, especially those with related purposes. While tribalism and scarcity thinking may sound alarms at any sign of competition, empirical evidence from crypto shows well-built, robust, sustainable assets ultimately help others in the ecosystem.

Unlike traditional market share battles, successful social currencies engage in a “Player Pumps Player” (PPP) dynamic, not “Player vs. Player” (PvP). You’re not fighting over a fixed pool of fiat dollars—you’re co-creating new forms of value.

Bitcoin’s greatest contribution may be exactly what its maximalist advocates never anticipated: proving the viability of monetary pluralism. Despite the “one currency rules all” narrative, Bitcoin’s success actually spawned an explosion of alternative currencies, validating its core premise while expanding possibilities for everyone.

Rethinking Infinity

Shifting from scarcity to abundance requires a deep philosophical adjustment. We’re conditioned to believe monetary fragmentation leads to chaos, and successful money must dominate competitors.

Web4 invites us to consider the opposite: monetary diversity creates resilience, specialized currencies solve problems better than general-purpose ones, and every currency’s success strengthens all others.

In Web4, successful social currencies will differ from today’s money as much as social media differs from broadcast TV. They won’t be imposed top-down, but emerge organically from communities with shared goals.

By distributing monetary creation to global communities, we don’t devalue money—we multiply it, creating an ecosystem as diverse and interconnected as humanity itself.

The potential diversity of social money is infinite, limited only by human imagination and social needs. Each social currency remains scarce within its own context and community, preserving its value and utility.

Aggregating Everything

The final, most common question: how can people cognitively hold or effectively use so many currencies?

The answer: they won’t need to. They’ll be able to instantly swap any currency for any other at minimal cost, friction, or effort. Decentralization enables aggregators to let users trade seamlessly across venues, chains, and arbitrary liquidity pools.

This is only possible in a decentralized world—in centralized systems, including crypto CEXs, it’s fundamentally impossible. This is another reason moving users on-chain is critical for an infinite money world.

That said, aggregation alone isn’t enough—challenges around minting rights, trust, governance, and credibility remain.

We need intuitive data and social frameworks enabling easy coordination among decentralized currency creators and stewards, governance models letting communities define their own values while maintaining trust, credibility signaling without central authorities, and bridges between traditional finance and these new social currencies.

Social Money Systems

From childhood, we’re taught to see money as a single concept. Early education reinforces this. We have “money” in piggy banks, not “currencies.” We learn to count, save, and spend it as a collective entity—“money.”

This singular framework aligns with financial institutions and government interests. Authority and control are maintained when money is seen as unified and standardized, not diverse and fragmented “currencies.” Consider how central banks and governments strive to preserve monetary unity—they want us to see it as one system, one authority.

The specialized context where “currency” appears—legal documents, financial statements, government budgets—is precisely the formal, official space where monetary authority is exercised and recorded. This creates a linguistic boundary—the people who control and regulate money get to say “currency,” while everyday users only have “money.”

Of course, this reduces money to just a “thing,” completely forgetting its historical nature.

Social Nature of Money

Since civilization began, we’ve created unique monetary forms to meet local needs. Long before governments issued fiat, communities used shells, stones, sticks, salt, and symbolic inscriptions to coordinate value, obligations, and trust. Money was never standardized—it was expressive, adaptive, and social.

The Yap Islanders of Micronesia used giant stone disks called rai as money, transferring ownership through oral history rather than physical movement. In medieval England, tally sticks—notched wooden rods—served as money for over 700 years, recording debts between individuals and even paying royal taxes.

Native Americans used wampum belts—elaborate beadwork with specific patterns—not just as money, but to record agreements, treaties, and shared histories. Their value lay not in materials, but in the social trust and shared meaning they represented.

During the Great Depression, when federal money was scarce, hundreds of American communities issued local tokens—creating monetary systems that kept local economies running when national systems failed. The Swiss WIR Bank, founded in 1934, operates a complementary currency system now involving over 60,000 businesses, helping stabilize the Swiss economy during downturns.

These aren’t primitive precursors to “real” money—they’re sophisticated social technologies designed to solve specific coordination problems within communities. The idea that money must be issued by central authorities and backed by precious metals or government decree is a historical anomaly, not the norm.

Money as Social Technology

Fundamentally, money is a social technology designed to solve complex social, incentive, and coordination problems. It’s a tool enabling human groups to align efforts, reward behaviors, and work together toward shared goals. When we issue money, we’re not just creating a medium of exchange—we’re designing an incentive system that can transform how people relate to each other and their environment.

Thus, money’s true power lies in its ability to engineer society, far beyond traditional economic functions. By thoughtfully designing its form, issuance, and usage rules, we can create targeted incentives that foster cooperation and coordinate action against wide-ranging social challenges. This often involves systems where the currency itself embodies or directly rewards desired social outcomes.

Bitcoin demonstrates crypto’s dual power as asset and social money. Its global success stems not just from scarcity, but from the deep social cohesion it fosters. An initial technical innovation evolved into a powerful coordination mechanism for millions sharing beliefs in monetary freedom, central banks, and financial sovereignty.

Bitcoin’s asset value allows it to function as money—tokens without value cannot coordinate economic activity. But reducing Bitcoin to just an asset overlooks its profound social role as a rallying point for a global movement. Bitcoin’s emergence as a currency accepted and held by millions has mobilized a central hub, providing economic incentives and mechanisms that drive large-scale social change, transforming financial and fiat systems.

The original social money—Bitcoin itself—is a perfect example of how asset speculation and community mission can positively interact—two sides reinforcing each other. A yin-yang movement toward social money systems that change the world as we know it.

Urgent Need for New Money

Our toughest problems—climate change, wealth inequality, healthcare access, democratic erosion, information integrity—have proven resistant to solutions within existing political, economic, and social frameworks. We need to invent new money specifically designed to tackle these challenges, creating incentive structures and coordination mechanisms that traditional institutions have failed to provide.

In fact, money is essentially something used in a community or society to align individual interests, store value, enable use-value, incentivize contributions, and establish status. Contrary to what we’ve been taught since birth, money is a pure social construct—any human collective can create money for its own needs, attracting new members, coordinating existing ones, and incentivizing activities to achieve desired social outcomes.

Returning to Money’s Social Core

In the crypto world, traditional definitions of money have become irrelevant. Creating tokens with monetary technical properties (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, unit of account) has become extremely easy. Meanwhile, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and on-chain data platforms have turned any tradable token into a medium of exchange and store of value, no matter how trivial or temporary.

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

This profound fundamental idea—that money isn’t just fiat, but anything a community can create for its own purposes—will completely transform how societies form and grow.

Universal Minting Rights

Minting rights—the power and profit of creating money—may be the most important economic concept most people have never heard of. This ignorance isn’t accidental—historically, governments and financial institutions have jealously guarded monetary creation.

Today, as we advance in Web3, we stand at the edge of a profound shift—monetary creation will become universal and decentralized.

User-Generated Money

One thing has always been clear to me: crypto’s fundamental purpose has always been to generate new forms of money.

Yet the crypto community has hesitated to directly link crypto with monetary creation, preferring to frame it as technology, product, or asset. This hesitation must end. Otherwise, we’ll forever be stuck creating assets, not money deeply embedded in users’ daily lives.

We must stop treating money as taboo and fully embrace the total democratization of monetary creation. This means shifting from viewing crypto as building products, technologies, or even assets—to understanding that crypto’s purpose is creating money to advance any community or social cause.

Universal minting rights ultimately mean the power and profit of money creation no longer concentrate in a few hands, but distribute across the many—enabling entirely new forms of human collaboration and solving problems our traditional systems cannot.

Social Transformation Trajectory

Seem impossible? Social transformation always does—until it happens.

Major religions reshaped billions’ views on morality and economics, ultimately transforming civilizations—by starting small. Christianity grew from an obscure Jewish sect to an empire-dominating force within centuries. Islam spread across continents within decades. These weren’t just belief systems—they were full social transformations, rebuilding economic and political structures.

Historically, when three conditions align—technical possibility, social acceptance, and economic advantage—socially “impossible” behaviors become inevitable.

The adoption of fiat currency, the rise of social media, the spread of democracy—all seemed unimaginable before happening, then obvious afterward.

When Marco Polo encountered paper money in Kublai Khan’s empire, the concept seemed like financial alchemy to Europeans. How could mulberry bark notes with no intrinsic value buy goods? Yet the Mongol Empire built a complex monetary system entirely based on social agreement.

What seemed magical to outsiders was simply a different conception of what money could be. Of course, those once-shocking “magical papers” are now the absolute dominant standard for trading, exchanging, and measuring value itself.

And yes, even gold—the thing they once fought, died, and sacrificed for—derives its value from collective belief that it’s valuable.

It all boils down to collective belief. Once enough people believe in a meta-narrative, it transforms. That’s exactly what “meta” means.

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

When the rainy season comes, the flood follows.

Crypto Vision

In Web4, we’ll fulfill crypto’s original vision—but with a crucial difference Satoshi didn’t fully foresee. The revolution won’t come by replacing fiat with one decentralized currency, but through millions of specialized currencies created and maintained by global communities. Like all visionaries, Satoshi got the direction right—but not the exact path of transformation.

In Web4, we must fundamentally rethink who holds the power to create money, build entirely new ideas around fairness, and develop new technical and liquidity systems to support the full diversity of anyone wanting to create their own money in any way—and how these values flow through society. Communities will forge mutual obligation systems without permission from governments or financial gatekeepers, enabling new social contracts based on transparency, not institutional opacity.

User-generated money will become our standard way of interacting with finance, just as user-generated content is now standard for media. Speculation will become a means to an end, not the end itself. The goal must be a decentralized world order where social money is normal—used seamlessly, everywhere, with everything, in daily life.

We’ll return to money’s core as social technology—any human group united by a common cause can invent money, from spreading memes to launching projects to creating currencies solving our toughest problems—ones traditional political, religious, and financial systems cannot touch.

Money becomes whatever a community actively uses, trusts, and governs. Traditional definitions no longer fully apply. Tokens collectively accepted and actively used by communities naturally become money. We’ll reconnect with money’s deep social roots, strengthening bonds between us—not abstracting it as something “given” to us. Money will become a creative medium for reimagining coordination and cooperation at every level—from neighborhood to global.

Meanwhile, social money will differ from today’s money as much as TikTok videos differ from BBC broadcasts. We need a complete recalibration of how we think about and understand money. We’ll recognize money’s astonishing power to align, attract, and form communities. The interplay between tribalism and monetary creation will shine in full glory, and new money-social systems will flourish in unimaginable ways.

We’ll push Bitcoin’s blueprint far beyond anyone’s imagination, replicating it across millions of diverse communities. Successful social currencies won’t compete—they’ll coexist, reinforcing a resilient network of mutual trust. Everything 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 trivial or significant.

Everything we’ve done in Web3 so far has only laid the foundation for this future. We are truly, really, really just beginning.

Finally, in Web4, we’ll witness money’s core paradox unfold in real time:

Money must be scarce, but the monetary system can be infinite.