I've been thinking a lot about what happens when communities stop being just groups of people talking and start becoming economies.
Most online communities I've been part of follow the same pattern. Someone creates a Discord or Telegram. People show up. They share ideas, help each other, build things together. And then someone realizes: we've created a lot of value here. But who owns it?
Usually, the answer is "the platform." Discord owns the graph. The conversations live on their servers. If they change their terms or shut down, the community is toast.
That's always felt wrong to me. The people in the community created the value. They should own it.
Building on Farcaster
At v03, I'm experimenting with Farcaster as the social layer. Not because it's perfect, but because it gets something fundamental right: you own your social graph.
Your identity isn't tied to one app. Your followers aren't locked to one service. If you don't like the client you're using, you can switch to another one without starting over.
It sounds like a small thing, but it changes everything. You're not building on rented land anymore. You're building on infrastructure you actually control.
I'm using this to test what it means to have a community that exists on a protocol instead of a platform. Where the social connections are portable. Where the data isn't owned by a corporation.
Micro-economies that actually work
Here's the thing I've been learning: when communities have their own economies, behavior changes.
I've seen this in a few DAOs and protocol communities. When people can earn tokens for contributing, when there's a shared treasury that members vote on, when helping someone actually gives you a stake in the thing you're building — people show up differently.
At v03, I'm building tools to enable this kind of coordination. Small treasuries for specific projects. Contribution tracking that's transparent and onchain. Voting systems where the people doing the work have actual power.
It's messy. Governance is hard. Coordination is slow. But it's more honest than the alternative, where a handful of people at the top extract value from everyone else's work.
Why this matters
I think we're at a point where communities don't have to choose between being social spaces and being economic systems. They can be both.
You can have a group of people who genuinely care about something, and also have a way to fairly compensate the ones who put in the work. You can have open collaboration without exploitation.
That's what I'm trying to build at v03. Spaces where the social layer is on a protocol like Farcaster, so you own your connections. Where the economic layer is transparent and programmable, so value flows to contributors.
It's not about making everyone rich. It's about building communities that can sustain themselves without depending on extraction.
What I'm learning
The hard part isn't the technology. Farcaster works. Smart contracts work. Treasuries work.
The hard part is getting people to think differently about what communities can be. We're so used to platforms that the idea of owning your social graph feels weird. We're so used to unpaid labor that the idea of getting compensated for contributions feels uncomfortable.
But I think it's worth pushing through that discomfort. Because the alternative is just rebuilding the same extractive systems we already have, with new branding.
At v03, I'm betting on protocols over platforms. And I'm betting that enough people will want to build with us to make it work.