The next stop for cryptocurrency is not another casino, but a new currency design.

Written by: @hmalviya9

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

Cryptocurrency needs not another casino, but new monetary rules

The cryptocurrency industry is always asking the wrong question: What is the next narrative? Meme, perpetual contracts, prediction markets, AI agents, tokenized stocks. Every few months, the market adopts a new guise, pours in capital, and then moves on to the next wave.

But the more important question is: What kind of economy do we really want to build?

If the ultimate answer is just another casino—where more capital, more attention, more fans, faster information, and quicker execution drain wealth from others—then we haven't built anything new at all. We've merely accelerated old tricks and moved them on-chain.

Don’t just ask for the next narrative, first ask what economy to build

Looking back at the history of cryptocurrency, one thing appears repeatedly: commitment.

In the early days, people contributed personal computing power to mine Bitcoin; then they invested in GPUs to mine Ethereum; and later, the model became simpler—invest capital to receive capital in return. The more capital you have, the more opportunities you can access, and the greater the potential returns.

Then we entered another phase: people began to contribute labor. Claiming airdrops, joining Discord, using protocols, creating content, building communities, completing tasks, clicking buttons daily, hoping that six months later someone would send tokens into their wallets. Sometimes this approach worked, and some made life-changing money; other times, greed led these people to reinvest the profits back into the market.

But the core mechanism hasn’t changed: You stake something in hopes of a result. What you stake can be time, capital, computing power, attention, reputation, or it can be labor.

So perhaps the next generation of cryptocurrency products should start with a very simple question: What are people willing to stake? What return can code fairly provide them?

Once you think this way, the design space opens up far beyond memes and perpetual contracts.

Why can’t real-world events turn into markets?

Imagine a group of people pooling capital around an event. Not just elections or coin prices, but a real-world event.

A marathon can be an event, a sports season can be an event. A creator finishing a movie, a community restoring a lake, a startup reaching a milestone, or a group completing a fitness challenge—all can become events for coordinating capital and incentives.

At this point, cryptocurrency becomes more than just trading assets. It starts to transform into a system for coordinating people around outcomes.

If the ultimate goal is mainstream adoption, why limit products to “you must first become an extreme gambler to participate”? Why can't real-world actions be tokenized in ways that are understandable in risk and still exciting in upside?

A risk of about one times, along with two or three times the possible upside, is far more mainstream than teaching everyone to use 50x leverage. The opportunity is not just to create new markets but to create new forms of participation.

Commitment, coordination, reputation: Three unconnected pillars

I continuously return to three words: commitment, coordination, reputation.

These might be the three most important pillars of cryptocurrency, yet they have not truly synchronized to date. Cryptocurrency has resolved capital, speculation, liquidity, and token issuance. We are extremely skilled at creating assets, markets, and incentives. But humanity still has not solved one issue: how to coordinate around rules without those rules eventually becoming corrupt.

Perhaps AI agents can solve this.

If AI agents can truly solve coordination problems at scale, much of the coordination will happen on-chain. Agents need rules, identity, payment, reputation systems, programmable environments, and ways to prove actions. They also need a system that allows coordination without constantly applying for permission from centralized operators.

Cryptocurrency already has many such building blocks, just scattered across different protocols and standards. So in my view, the combination of AI agents with cryptocurrency is far more interesting from a coordination perspective than the so-called “AI tokens.”

User education has failed, privacy must cover the entire stack

Another problem that no one wants to admit is: cryptocurrency user education is terrible.

The generation of 2021 has demonstrated this. People entered, lost money, found scapegoats, followed the wrong KOLs, learned the wrong lessons. Then many of them became KOLs themselves, and the cycle continued.

This is dangerous. When enough people collectively lose money due to scams, hacks, bad actors, and malfunctioning systems, regulators will eventually gain political permission to monitor everything: every transaction, every wallet, every flow of funds.

Only then will people start talking about privacy.

But privacy cannot just mean hiding a stablecoin transaction. Privacy must cover the entire stack: IP layer, RPC, wallets, exchanges, trades, balances, identities, and interactions. If the other three layers are leaking, selective privacy is simply not enough.

So instead of asking “which is the best privacy coin,” it would be better to start thinking about the privacy stack: which protocols solve which layer? What parts are missing? Where is metadata leaking? Where are centralized operators still stuck in intermediary positions?

Once viewed this way, the entire research process will change. Education surrounding the privacy stack could become one of the most important parts of cryptocurrency adoption.

The essence of cryptocurrency is not coin price, but rules

The core of cryptocurrency is actually quite simple: you create rules with code, and people coordinate around those rules.

A community shares certain values, and an economy starts to operate, no longer reliant on the third-party operators within traditional systems.

From this perspective, you no longer see tokens merely as things that go up and down in value. Tokens are the rules around value.

This is also where token design becomes interesting again. Tokens need not just be fixed supply, transferable units. They can carry rules, represent rights, define conditions, and can change behavior based on time, ownership, identity, reputation, or other on-chain conditions.

When currency becomes programmable, token design becomes much closer to social design.

When currency is programmable, token design is social design

Kings once defined currency rules, and kingdoms were responsible for execution.

Now, code can execute. And increasingly, it is clear that those who write the code define the rules.

Strangely, AI may write more and more code. Give AI agents chain identities, wallets, permission systems, reputations, and programmable assets, and you will get something that operates alongside human activities like an extraterrestrial economic society.

Agents can execute monetary rules while humans choose which systems suit them. Crowds will coordinate around certain forms of currency, and these crowds still need stories.

Stories need words. As more and more people enter, these words will become prompts.

So downstream, it will look like this: words become prompts, prompts become code, code becomes rules, and rules define currency. It sounds very philosophical, but I believe we are closer to it than most people think.

Refundable, expirable: tokens need not resemble ordinary money

The interesting part of token standards lies here.

What if money could expire? What if money could only be used for specific purposes? What if tokens could be refunded? What if holding it and trading it represented different rights? What if tokens defaulted to privacy? What if currency behaved differently based on the community using it?

Many token standards are already exploring these ideas. The problem is that the market hardly pays attention to them, as everyone is busy continuously issuing the same token design.

Refundable tokens are one example.

Suppose a token is issued at 1 USDC. People can trade it normally, but within seven days, holders still have a guarantee of a refund: at 0.80 USDC.

During these seven days, the holder has two choices: sell publicly or refund at the predetermined amount. If the market price rises to 2 USDC, they are likely to sell on the market; if the price crashes to 0.20 USDC, then the refund right suddenly becomes valuable.

This token gives something cryptocurrency rarely offers: a cancel button.

But this only holds if the refund is genuinely backed. If 100,000 tokens can each be redeemed for 0.80 USDC, then 80,000 USDC must exist somewhere to honor these obligations. Code cannot refund money that does not exist.

This is important because token design is not magic. Rules need economic backing.

Combining refunds and expiration makes it even more interesting. The refund right could expire after seven days while the token continues to trade; or the token itself can expire. These are two entirely different designs.

Thinking further, it leads to seasonal currency: tokens issued for a gaming season, an event, a community initiative, a funding period, an election, a loyalty period, or a speculative game. After expiration, the balance can expire, convert, or settle into something else.

At this point, what you are designing is no longer “another ERC-20” but a new version of currency. I believe this is a part of cryptocurrency that has hardly been explored.

Casinos can be redesigned, speculation need not be so foolish

People love to say that cryptocurrency is a casino. Well, perhaps it is.

But casinos also have rules, and those rules can change.

Right now, there is one very powerful rule: those who bring more people into the casino earn the most money. Attention nearly supersedes everything.

Yet, casinos need not always maximize extraction. They can experiment with refund mechanisms, better distribution models, progressive selling taxes, anti-sniping rules, privacy, purpose-linked currencies, expiring assets, reputation entry, conditional liquidity, commitment rewards, and different forms of coordination.

The goal is not to eliminate speculation. Speculation is likely one of the strongest distribution mechanisms in cryptocurrency.

The goal should be to make speculation less foolish.

If people are going to gamble anyway, at least give them a better game. Rules should be understandable, there should be more ways to win, and newcomers should not automatically become liquidity dumps. Just this alone would be a substantial improvement.

Cryptocurrency anarchism needs real philosophy

There’s another reason for all of this.

Cryptocurrency is caught between two forces: anarchism and authoritarianism.

Every bridge returning to traditional finance’s centralization enhances the authoritarian side’s influence; every private trading system, permissionless protocol, and autonomous economy strengthens the anarchist side.

But cryptocurrency anarchism cannot simply be: buy tokens, pump, sell tokens, cash out to fiat.

If everyone ultimately returns to the financial system they claim to flee from, then this experiment has not truly succeeded.

Cryptocurrency needs an internal economy. More goods exchanged for tokens, more services, more labor, more private payments, more coordination, more ways to earn money, more ways to participate, and more ways to create value without relying on token swaps.

Most importantly, it needs deeper philosophy. Without philosophy, every movement will ultimately be simplified to price.

Let meme coins become ecological currencies, not just speculative assets

Imagine a world: a meme coin becomes the currency within its own ecosystem.

You can trade it, spend it, earn it, use it privately, enter communities with it, coordinate agents with it, buy services with it, participate in prediction systems with it, build reputations with it, and make commitments with it.

By then, memes will no longer just be assets but rather the infrastructure of the economy.

I believe this is the direction cryptocurrency needs to explore: not a universal currency but thousands of programmable currencies, each with different rules, communities, philosophies, risk models, privacy models, and forms of commitment. Crowds will choose which set of rules they are willing to participate in.

This is far more interesting than all tokens behaving the same way.

The next cryptocurrency developer may just be an idea person

AI has also changed another important aspect: conducting these experiments is becoming easier.

You no longer need to spend five years becoming the best Solidity engineer before you can start thinking about token design. You can learn the standards, understand the rules and risks, write logic, use AI to turn ideas into implementations, test, break, improve, and then publish experiments.

The bottleneck is shifting from “can you write code” to “can you think of interesting rules.”

This could spawn an entirely different generation of cryptocurrency developers. They will start from philosophy, economics, game design, psychology, and coordination, and then use AI to translate these ideas into code.

I believe that this is where cryptocurrency becomes interesting again.

Don’t just ask which token will rise. Start asking: What new rules can a token introduce?

Because once currency becomes programmable, token design is social design. Who designs the rules designs the game.

The next big piece of cryptocurrency infrastructure may not be another chain, another exchange, another lending protocol, or another meme launcher.

It may just be: a better monetary rule.