TL;DR: The article proposes that Web 4: Social Currency will become the next stage in the evolution of the internet, centered on liberating the power of currency creation from governments and financial institutions, empowering communities to autonomously design, issue, and manage currency. Here are the key points:
Core claim
Democratization of currency
Web 4 will replicate the 'user-generated content' model of Web 2 but applied to the currency industry: 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 a diverse tool that reflects community values (such as addressing climate issues, supporting local economies, etc.).
Currency as social technology
The essence of currency is a tool for coordinating social behavior, with functions far beyond economic exchange. By designing the rules and incentives of currency, communities can promote collective actions (such as environmental protection, equitable 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 social movement bond.
Abundance mindset replaces scarcity logic
Traditional economics assumes currency competition is a zero-sum game, but Web 4 advocates for the coexistence of diversity: the success of one currency can enhance the credibility of other currencies (like Bitcoin spawning Ethereum and other ecosystems).
Currency diversity corresponds to human cultural diversity, with each currency maintaining scarcity in specific contexts (like community tokens), but the overall system can infinitely expand functionality.
Positive transformation of speculative energy
The speculative nature of crypto markets has been redefined as 'fuel for launching social currencies.' Early speculators provided liquidity and a trust foundation for new currency networks, pushing them toward practical scenarios.
For example, DAO and NFT community experiments have validated that tokens can bind to specific goals (such as collaborative art, local development), transcending mere asset attributes.
Key transformations
Transformation of the technological stack: Web 3's off-chain financial tools (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, bringing economic systems closer to individual needs.
The social embeddedness of currency: tokens are deeply tied to community identity (such as fan tokens, environmental contribution points), and usage scenarios naturally integrate into daily life rather than being limited to investment.
Challenges and visions
Short-term barriers: user experience (wallet management of multiple tokens), governance structures (preventing abuse), and interoperability between traditional finance and on-chain worlds still need breakthroughs.
Long-term vision: Web 4 will give rise to a 'currency ecological rainforest' — millions of community currencies coexisting, collaboratively solving the problems of traditional systems' failures (such as wealth disparity, information silos).
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.
The original content is as follows:
Web 4: Social currency
Note: This article aggregates the core ideas I've been contemplating for years — from first engaging with economic theory in high school to participating in social network construction during the Web 2 era, to my ongoing exploration in the crypto industry today.
Web 1: Internet, Web 2: Social Media, Web 3: Blockchain, Web 4: Social Currency
Infinite currency
The stages of the internet represent new frontiers of human connection, empowering us to rethink ways of social coordination. Today, with the arrival of Web 4, we will liberate the very concept of currency, fundamentally altering how we collectively define, create, and use currency.
Just as Web 2 democratized media, shifting power from centralized institutions to billions of individual creators, Web 4 will democratize currency creation. Billions of users will become creators, distributors, and everyday users of diverse currencies. Currencies in Web 4 will be starkly different from traditional fiat currencies, just as TikTok videos differ from BBC broadcasts, providing unprecedented creative expression for communities within the financial industry.
Although 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 solve their unique social coordination problems — from Yap Island stone money, medieval counting sticks, to local tokens during the Great Depression. Web 4 will reshape the historical diversity of currency, directly returning the power of currency creation to communities.
In Web 4, currency will return to its essence as a social technology. Communities of various sizes will create currencies that directly reflect their values, ideals, and goals — whether spreading memes or addressing global hunger issues. By designing their currencies, communities can achieve unprecedented cooperation and alignment around shared objectives.
Currency has always been a powerful tool for creating incentive alignment, capable of uniting 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 of all sizes, amplifying the impact of collective actions to transcend traditional divisions.
Web 3 has built an extraordinary speculative machine, creating a vast network of assets but has failed to truly integrate into the daily lives of ordinary people. In Web 4, we need to redirect this alchemical power toward meaningful ends — not just creating speculative assets but building social currencies deeply embedded in daily life and applied by billions.
Web 4 abandons competition driven by scarcity and zero-sum thinking, embracing abundance and monetary diversity. Millions of social currencies will coexist, competing fiercely around meme appeal, utility, and credibility, ultimately reinforcing each other. The success of one currency will enhance the faith and usage of others, forming a resilient ecosystem of mutual trust.
Web 4 will realize the original vision of cryptocurrencies — but in a way different from what Satoshi imagined. Instead of a single global decentralized currency, there will be millions of specialized currencies resonating culturally, governed autonomously by their communities.
Ultimately, Web 4 reveals the profound paradox of currency:
Currency must be scarce, but the currency system can be infinite.
Table of contents
Evolution of the internet
Web 1: Internet
Web 2: Social Media
Web 3: Blockchain
Web 4: Social Currency
Analogy with Web 2
Transition from Web 3 to Web 4
Focusing on speculative energy
Infinite social currency
Abundance mindset
Intense adaptive competition
Symbiotic paradox
Rethinking the infinite
Aggregating everything
Social currency systems
The social nature of currency
Currency as social technology
Bitcoin: Prototype social currency system
Urgent demand for new currency
Returning to the social core of currency
Universal minting rights
User-generated currency
Social transformation trajectories
Cryptographic vision
Acknowledgments
Evolution of the internet
Each stage of the internet symbolizes an innovation in how humans connect, driving a reconfiguration of the possibilities for social coordination.
Web1: Internet
Web1 established the technical foundation of the internet through technologies like HTTP, HTML, browsers, and servers, built the economic foundation through e-commerce, and constructed the social structure through experimental platforms like BBS and forums. Although early developments in broadband, financing structures, and payment networks spawned bubbles, they significantly reduced communication and transaction costs, laying the foundation for subsequent applications.
Web2: Social Media
Web2 built on Web1, fundamentally changing how humans communicate, transforming the masses from passive consumers into creators, distributors, and trendsetters, spawning entirely 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 transformation is not merely a technical upgrade but reconstructs power structures, making media a participatory creative process.
An extraordinary thing happened: billions of people transitioned from passive content consumption to active content creation. Everyone has the potential to become a creator. Communities form around common interests rather than geographic locations. Power shifts from institutions to individuals and networks. The fundamental act of expression has 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. As the technological stack enriches (including on-chain space, fiat entry points, and value anchoring structures), transaction costs approach zero, paving the way for social adoption. The practices of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana being accepted as currency within their communities demonstrate that cryptocurrencies can indeed become mainstream currency. Experiments in DAOs, NFT communities, and decentralized social networks, although limited in scale, have validated this potential.
However, Web3 still faces significant limitations: most assets reside in centralized exchanges, user entry barriers are high, and experiences are poor. The current core utility of 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 speculative asset world adapted to economic, financial, and political structures, yet merely laid new tracks over the old order.
Web2 gave us channels for voice, Web3 gave us assets, but both have not shaken the old world order. Now, let's enter Web4.
Web4: Social Currency
The next step in the evolution of cryptography, and a new phase in human coordination and currency evolution — social currency.
Just as Web2 democratized content creation (billions of consumers becoming creators), Web4 will democratize currency creation, making billions of users creators, distributors, and everyday users of social currencies. Users’ interactions in social media (whether intentional or unintentional) have pushed 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, constructing 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 fails to become memes), but this does not hinder social media from changing the world — the creativity, evolutionary speed, and expressiveness of user-generated content far exceed that of professionally produced content. Likewise, most currencies will be eliminated through experimentation, fraud, coordination issues, or institutional resistance, but every success will pave the way for subsequent iterations, creating a cycle of learning and adaptation. The combination of meme energy and currency incentives will create the most powerful positive feedback loop in human history.
The core human needs of currency (connection, being seen, being recognized) have been key to the exponential growth of social media; in Web4, currency will present a difference from traditional fiat currencies akin to the distinction between TikTok videos and BBC broadcasts — this is not a defect but a feature, allowing for larger-scale experiments, cultural expression, and contextual adaptation.
Analogy with Web2
To understand what Web4 might look like, the influence of Web2 provides a powerful framework. Like currency, media is one of the core organizational foundations of modern society.
Web2 did not eliminate traditional media but coexisted with it and benefited from existing platforms and infrastructure. Similarly, social currencies in Web4 will coexist with traditional fiat currencies, leveraging their stability and regulatory structures while expanding the possibilities of functionality.
Web2 democratized media creation, breaking the notion that only official channels are 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 anyone can participate in.
Web2 incentivized massive participation through attention, reputation, and financial rewards, triggering 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 have become lasting cultural narratives. Similarly, many tokens in Web4 will gradually disappear, but a few will evolve into stable, enduring currency systems. Just as user-generated content in social media often fails, many social currencies will fail. However, every experiment, 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 engage with content globally. Yet today, we live in a world where everyone has become a media creator in some way.
The currency industry will undergo the same transformation — all of us will participate in the process of currency creation.
Transition from Web3 to Web4
The technological stack of Web3 is technical — focused on solving challenges like consensus mechanisms, smart contract capabilities, and interoperability protocols. The technological stack of Web4, however, is centered on currency creation chains — focusing on resolving 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 transfer the entire currency paradigm on-chain, realizing the true programmability, usability, and composability of social currency.
Web3 primarily views tokens as assets — investment tools, collectibles, or practical tools deriving value through scarcity, speculation, or functional benefits, but with limited interaction with daily life. In this regard, today's crypto is more akin to creating stocks than currency. The assets created in Web4 also become social currencies — expressions of community, identity, and common 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 fundamentals — at the most essential level, 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, yet it is a key feature for initiating social currency. In Web4, we can focus the vast speculative resources of Web3 on creating meaningful, community-driven currencies. The extensive infrastructure built for speculation becomes critical for launching new social currency systems.
Speculation provided the initial energy and capital needed to launch new currency networks, just as early speculators in Bitcoin laid the groundwork for its eventual wider utility. Without this speculative phase, overcoming the cold start problem inherent in creating new currency systems would be nearly impossible.
Social currencies will directly address global challenges such as climate change, inequality, and misinformation through carefully designed incentives that are directly embedded into the currency system. Every community, business, or interest group can now design a currency that is clearly aligned with its values and goals.
True innovation lies in empowering communities to independently shape their currency and incentive structures, bypassing traditional gatekeepers. Web4 builds on the foundation of Web3, using the power of speculative assets to create practical, everyday social currencies that address real coordination problems globally.
The foundations of technology, liquidity, governance, and community building are already in place. What is needed now is the collective will — to transform speculative energy into purposeful, impactful social currencies, redefining human coordination capabilities.
Infinite social currency
When discussing Web4 with everyone, the main question is always: in a world where everyone is trying to create new social currencies, how do we maintain sustainability, usability, or maintainability?
I did not directly answer this question but instead proposed a significant and dramatic re-framing, starting from 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 others. This premise has supported the establishment of our entire financial infrastructure built for a unified currency world governed by agencies and centralized control.
But what if this foundational assumption is wrong?
Abundance mindset
What if it’s not a world of scarcity, but one where millions of social currencies coexist and reinforce each other? The success of one will not weaken but amplify others. This is not mere speculation — we have already seen this dynamic emerge 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 would dilute its value. Conversely, Bitcoin's success has spawned explosive growth in new currencies — Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, and thousands of others — each serving different communities, solving different problems, and expressing different values. These alternatives have not weakened Bitcoin; instead, they have expanded the functional possibilities of the entire ecosystem while validating its core premise. Bitcoin has not lost relevance; the entire industry 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.
The stark contrast with extractive networks that do not contribute to sustainable systems is that these networks inevitably collapse, providing valuable lessons for future iterations.
Intense adaptive competition
But make no mistake, all tokens are in fierce and ongoing competition, vying for meme adaptability, practical value, and credibility. Maintaining a deep symbiotic relationship at the same time.
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 to millions of truly useful social currencies through dynamic competition. 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 credible community currencies.
Symbiotic paradox
However, this competitive paradox has ironically strengthened the connections between communities.
The rise of a social currency directly increases the possibility belief in other currencies, especially those with relevant purposes. While tribalism and scarcity thinking may raise alarms about any signs of competition, empirical evidence from the crypto industry shows that good, robust, sustainable assets ultimately always help others in the ecosystem.
Unlike traditional market share competition, successful social currencies engage in a 'player pumps player' (PPP) dynamic rather than a '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 effectiveness of currency pluralism. Despite the narrative of 'one currency to rule them all,' Bitcoin's success has actually fueled explosive growth in alternative currencies, validating its core premise while expanding possibilities for everyone.
Rethinking the infinite
Shifting from scarcity mindset to abundance mindset requires a profound philosophical adjustment. We have been conditioned to believe that fragmentation of currency leads to chaos, and successful currencies must dominate their competitors.
Web4 invites us to consider the opposite perspective: diversity of currency creates resilience; specialized currencies solve problems better than universal currencies, 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 distributing the power to create currency to global communities, we do not weaken its value — we multiply it, creating an ecosystem as diverse and interconnected as humanity itself.
The potential diversity of social currencies is limitless, constrained 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 frequently asked is — how can people cognitively hold or effectively use large amounts of currency?
The answer is that they do not need to do so; they will be able to exchange any currency for any other currency with minimal cost, barriers, or issues. The power of decentralization means that there are no barriers preventing aggregators from effectively allowing users to trade across trading venues, chains, and any number of liquidity jumps.
It is important to note that this is only possible in a decentralized world; it is utterly impossible to achieve within centralized trading systems, including crypto centralized exchanges. This is also another reason why moving users to the on-chain world is a key factor for the emergence of an infinite currency world.
That is to say, aggregating capability is far from sufficient — there are many more issues to resolve around minting rights, trust, governance, and credibility.
We need intuitive data and social structures that allow for easy coordination between decentralized currency creators and maintainers, with governance structures enabling communities to define their own value concepts while maintaining trust, without the credibility signaling mechanisms of central authorities, and bridging traditional finance with these new social currencies.
Social currency systems
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 'currency.' 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 'currencies,' it maintains some authority and control. Consider how central banks and governments strive to maintain the unity of currency; they want us to see it as a system, an authority.
'Currency' appears in specialized contexts (legal documents, financial statements, government budgets) as the formal, official space for exercising and recording currency authority. This creates a linguistic boundary — those controlling and regulating 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 currencies, communities used shells, stones, sticks, salt, and text symbols to coordinate value, obligations, and trust. Currency is not standardized but expressive, adaptive, and social.
The people of Yap Island in Micronesia use large stone discs called rai as currency, with ownership transferred through oral history rather than physical movement. In medieval England, tally sticks — notched wooden sticks — were used as currency for over 700 years, recording debts between individuals and even used to pay royal taxes.
Native Americans used wampum belts — complex beadwork with specific patterns and designs, not only as currency but also for recording agreements, treaties, and shared histories. The value of these belts lies not in the materials they contain but in the social trust and shared meanings 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 economic operations when national systems failed. The Swiss WIR Bank, established in 1934, operates a complementary currency system that now includes over 60,000 businesses, helping stabilize the Swiss economy during economic downturns.
These are not the 'real' predecessors of currency — rather, they are complex social technologies designed to solve specific coordination problems within their communities. The idea that currency must be issued by a central authority and backed by precious metals or government decree is historically anomalous and not 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 collectively strive 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 the relationships between people and between people and their environment.
Thus, the true power of currency lies in its capacity to influence social engineering, far surpassing its traditional economic functions. By thoughtfully designing its forms, 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 in which the currency itself embodies or directly rewards the desired social outcomes.
Bitcoin demonstrates the dual power of crypto as both an asset and a social currency. Its global success is attributed not just to its scarcity but to the profound social cohesion it facilitates. The initial technological innovation has evolved into a powerful coordination mechanism of millions of shared currencies, central banking, and beliefs in financial sovereignty.
The asset value of Bitcoin enables it to function as currency — tokens without value cannot coordinate economic activity. However, simplifying 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 focal point, offering economic incentives and mechanisms to the entire global community, beginning to drive large-scale social change and fundamentally reforming financial and fiat currency systems.
Original social currency — Bitcoin itself is an excellent example illustrating how to understand the positive interaction between asset speculation and community mission, with the dual aspects of tokens reinforcing each other. A yin-yang movement toward a social currency system that changes the world as we know it.
Urgent demand for new currency
Our most challenging problems — climate change, wealth inequality, access to health care, erosion of democracy, integrity of information — have proven resistant to solutions offered by existing political, economic, and social structures. We need to invent new currencies specifically designed to tackle these challenges, creating incentive structures and coordination mechanisms that traditional institutions have failed to provide.
In fact, currency is fundamentally something used in a community or society that aligns individual interests, maintains value, provides utility, incentivizes contributions, and establishes status within that society. 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 members, 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 technical attributes (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, limited supply, unit of account) has become extremely easy. At the same time, decentralized exchanges, aggregators, and on-chain data platforms have transformed any tradable token into a medium of exchange and a means of value storage, 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 gaining critical quality of social acceptance and sustained use within a community can be considered a form of currency.
This profound foundational idea — that currency is not just fiat currency but anything that any community can create for its own purposes — will completely and fundamentally change how society forms and grows.
Universal minting rights
Minting rights — the right and profit of creating currency — may be the most important economic concept that most people have never heard of. This ignorance is not accidental; historically, the power to create currency has 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 to directly associate crypto with currency creation, preferring to view crypto as technology, products, or assets. This hesitation must end. Otherwise, we will forever be stuck in the dilemma of creating assets rather than currencies deeply embedded in users' daily lives.
We should not set the concept of currency as a taboo but embrace the thorough democratization of currency creation. This requires a shift from viewing crypto as manufacturing 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 derived from creating currency are no longer concentrated in the hands of a few but distributed among the majority, enabling entirely new forms of human collaboration and solving problems that our traditional systems have failed to address.
Social transformation trajectories
Sounds impossible? Social transformation always seems so until it happens.
Major religions have reshaped billions of people's views on morality and economics by starting from small-scale movements, ultimately reshaping civilization. Christianity evolved from a little-known Jewish sect into a dominant force in empires over centuries. Islam spread across continents within a few decades. These are not just belief systems but complete societal transformations that rebuilt economic systems and political structures.
Historically, when three conditions align, socially impossible behaviors become inevitable: technological possibilities, social acceptance, and economic advantages.
The adoption of fiat currencies, the rise of social media, and the spread of democracy — all seemed unimaginable before they happened, 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 value-less mulberry bark note exchange for valuable goods? Yet, the Mongol Empire established a complex currency system entirely based on social agreement.
What seems magical to the outside world is actually just a different conception of what currency could be. Of course, these 'magical paper notes' that shocked Europeans have now become the absolute dominant standard for conducting transactions, exchanging, and assessing value itself.
Of course, what they themselves once struggled for, fought for, and even sacrificed — the value of gold is also based on collective belief that it has value.
Everything ultimately comes down to collective belief; once enough people believe in the 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 seem unfeasible, they will emerge when technology, social, and economic conditions align. Like all profound social movements, this transformation will start slowly and then accelerate sharply.
When the rainy season comes, it will pour.
Cryptographic vision
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 millions of specialized currencies created and maintained by global communities. Like all visionaries, Satoshi was right about the direction but did not foresee the exact path transformation would take.
In Web4, we need to fundamentally rethink who owns the power to create currency, establish entirely new ideas around fairness, and build new technological and liquidity systems to meet the full diversity of any individual's desire to create their own currency in any way, and how these values flow within society. Communities will forge their own mutual obligation systems without the permission of government 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 end goal itself. The endpoint must be to establish a decentralized world order where social currency becomes the norm in our daily lives, used seamlessly and everywhere.
We will return to the core concept of currency as a 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 address our most challenging problems, which traditional political, religious, and financial systems have completely failed to resolve.
Currency becomes something actively used, trusted, and governed by any community. Traditional definitions of currency no longer fully apply. Tokens held and actively used by communities 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 'given' to us. Currency will serve as a creative medium for reimagining coordination and cooperation at various levels — from neighborhoods to global scales.
At the same time, social currencies will be starkly different from the currencies we know today, just as TikTok videos are starkly different from BBC broadcasts. We need to completely recalibrate how we think about and understand currency itself. We will understand the astonishing alignment, attraction, and community-building power of currency. The interplay between tribalism and currency creation will shine with full brilliance, and the new currency-social systems will thrive 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, however trivial or significant.
Everything we have done so far in Web3 is merely laying the groundwork for this future. We are really, really, really just getting started.
Ultimately, 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.
This article is reprinted with permission from: (ForesightNews)
Author: Meow (Co-founder of Jupiter)
‘From Web3 to Web4: ‘Social Currency’ will be key, and everyone is a currency creator’ was first published in ‘Crypto City’
