A running list of threads I want to pull on. Each one connects to something I’ve seen or done — these aren’t abstract, they come from direct experience.
Decentralized Storage Economics
How do storage protocols sustain themselves? I co-founded Durability Labs and we’re building Archivist as our first project. I also spent four years working on Codex at IFT, so this isn’t theoretical for me — I need to understand the incentive design deeply.
Source: archivist.storage, free.technology
DAOs as Coordination Experiments
I posted about building a Dad DAO on Algorand in 2022. We built parts of the system — NFTs on ARC-69, the ARC-333 governance standard — but never launched. DAOs still didn’t make sense: the automation required was deeply intertwined with a philosophical problem of not being able to actually run a DAO. That experiment raised questions I still think about: what makes a DAO actually coordinate? What’s the minimum viable governance?
Source: r/AlgorandOfficial post
Identity and Reputation in Crypto
Civic works on decentralized identity. I was associated with one of their AMAs. Meanwhile, I maintain a consistent public identity across all my projects. How should reputation work in a space that values pseudonymity?
Source: Civic AMA event
The “Durability” Frame
Why we named our company “Durability Labs.” What does it mean to optimize for longevity in a space obsessed with speed?
Source: x.com/DurabilityLabs
Podcasting as Infrastructure
The Bitcoin Podcast Network (co-host since 2017, part-owner since 2020) and Hashing It Out (2018–present, now merged with The Bitcoin Podcast) weren’t just media — they were research infrastructure. Hundreds of deep technical interviews with protocol builders gave me a working knowledge of how decentralized systems are actually designed. How does long-form technical media function as a public good in crypto? What’s the compounding value of 179 episodes of infrastructure interviews?
Source: Amazon — The Bitcoin Podcast, Apple Podcasts — Hashing It Out
Dad DAO and ARC-333: NFT-Governed DAOs
Dad DAO (with Michael Trosen and Demetrick Ferguson) was intended as a paid learning community and incubator on Algorand. We built parts of the system — NFTs on ARC-69 and ARC-333, a metadata standard for NFT-controlled DAO governance — but never launched a token or the NFT collection. The project stalled on a deeply intertwined technical and philosophical problem: DAOs still didn’t make sense in terms of the automation required, and we couldn’t solve the fundamental problem of actually running one. Still, the questions remain worth pulling on: what does it mean to encode governance rules in NFT metadata? How does ARC-333 compare to other on-chain governance standards?
Source: Dad-DAO GitHub, coin.fyi summary