Crypto, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Infinite Token Loop

• “My dreams were to be an artist.
• Not to try to outsmart an algorithm.”
• —@femijaye for VSG Entertainment

I recently nearly lost a thousand dollars through crypto exchanges. What a clusterfuck to get it back. It’s frightening and incredible at the same time: there is this whole other world out there. A world of fantastical fractions, ephemeral but real. A world where your attention better be on point or your funds will vanish in the ether[1] of “pending confirmations.” Web3 punishes the distracted. Every step feels like you’re getting richer—until you misclick, misunderstand, or misplace a decimal. Then you’re back at square one, crying to your BFF ChatGPT, wondering if the money is worth all this trouble.

Various fees for various currency exchanges, notably “a gas fee” for getting your transaction through, are like paying Charon to ferry your funds across the River Styx. You don’t get to choose whether to pay—you do it because the alternative is being stuck in transactional oblivion.

In the underworld, the money doesn’t quite feel real. On the blockchain, it’s just numbers in a wallet address. Until the dollars hit your actual bank account—and then, suddenly, it’s very real.

I made it out of oblivion. But to where?

Loops on Loops on Loops

Do you ever stake a token to mint another token, then take that token and stake it again to mint even more tokens… and realize you’re inside a financial M.C. Escher painting? Loops on loops. Infinite feedback spirals. My brain hurts for real (nomen fucking omen).

Crypto economies are built on loops: you stake tokens to earn more tokens, which you can stake again. Want to mint a stablecoin? Cool, just lock up some ETH. Want to stake that stablecoin? You can, and maybe even earn governance tokens. And those governance tokens? Stake ‘em too. Crypto is not just money, it’s like René Magritte’s mirrors. Each seems to stand alone but is based on mere reflection.

Now imagine you’re not just looping money, but language. That’s what WordCraft is playing with. You mint a word as a token. Other people trade it. Its value goes up. So now that word means something because it’s worth something… which makes it worth even more. You can say “ughslktr” is the word of the year, and if a number of people mint it and one buys it for $0.20, it becomes the word of the year. A word doesn’t just gain value—it gains value because it gained value. How is that different from the idea of art as a commodity, its value influenced by the transactions of critics, curators and collectors? If its value is not in its use but in perceptions of how it’s perceived, is this not just art market speculation without the art?

Or, maybe it is art, all of it. Everything is recorded on the blockchain, every word or deed. Literally words (in the case of WordCraft), and deeds (land title deeds and property records). It may be scant in the way of tangible material goods; buy NFT art and what you really own is a receipt, not unlike buying a wristband at a festival, without the festival. At least a wristband is a keepsake. Maybe a receipt for a Beeple or a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT is as well. Hang them up as a memento, a reminder of the experience. The gas fees were worth it if you consider it was never about the destination, but the journey.

Listen, the ferryman of the underworld is trying to say something. Don’t make him write it down or it’ll be spelled “ughslktr.” Just listen. We have entered a new era of language. Maybe it’s emojis, it’s memes. It’s GIFs, it’s a TikTok caption, it’s got no punctuation and looks creepy like AI wrote it. It’s no different than typeface in the Gutenberg press, than Egyptian hieroglyphs, than songs passed down orally, than nonverbal grunts and gestures. Give the ferryman a token, get on the ferry to hell. Tokenization of words is next, though it’s possible we’ll all be illiterate by then.

Notes