When money becomes programmable, crypto’s next step may be rewriting token rules.

Written by: hmalviya9

Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

The crypto industry keeps asking the wrong question: What’s the next narrative? Memes, perpetual contracts, prediction markets, AI agents, tokenized stocks. Every few months, the market adopts a new shell, pumps capital into it, and then moves on to the next wave.

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

If the end result is merely another casino—where those with more capital, more attention, more fans, faster information, and quicker execution extract wealth from others—then we haven’t really built anything new. We’ve just sped up the old tricks and moved them on-chain.

Looking back at crypto history, one thing keeps recurring: promises.

In the early days, people contributed their personal computing power to mine Bitcoin; later, they used GPUs to mine Ethereum; subsequently, 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 your potential returns.

Next comes another phase: people begin to put in effort—claiming airdrops, joining Discord servers, using protocols, creating content, building communities, completing tasks, and clicking buttons daily, hoping that months later, tokens will be sent to their wallets. Sometimes this strategy works, and some people earn life-changing money; other times, greed causes them to give their profits back to the market.

But the core mechanism remains the same: you stake something, expecting a particular outcome. What you stake can be time, capital, computing power, attention, reputation, or labor.

So, the next generation of crypto products might start with a simple question: What are people willing to stake? And what fair return can code provide them?

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

Imagine a group of people pooling capital around an event—not just an election or a coin price, but a real-world event.

A marathon can be an event; a football tournament can be an event. A creator finishing a film, a community restoring a lake, a startup reaching a milestone, or a group completing a physical challenge can all become events that align capital and motivation.

At this point, encryption is no longer just about transacting assets; it begins to evolve into a system that coordinates actors around outcomes.

If the ultimate goal is mainstream adoption, why restrict the product to “you must first become an extreme gambler to participate”? Why can’t real-world behaviors be tokenized in a way that makes risk understandable and upside still exciting?

Accepting a risk of about one times, paired with potential outcomes two or three times greater, is far more mainstream than teaching everyone to use 50x leverage. Opportunities aren’t just about creating new markets—they’re about creating new forms of participation.

I always return to three words: commitment, coordination, and reputation.

These may be the three most important pillars of crypto, but they have never truly been aligned. Crypto has mastered capital, speculation, liquidity, and token issuance. We are exceptionally skilled at creating assets, markets, and incentives. Yet humanity has yet to solve one problem: how to coordinate around rules without those rules eventually becoming corrupted.

Maybe an AI agent can solve it.

If AI agents can truly solve coordination problems at scale, much of this coordination will occur on-chain. Agents will need rules, identities, payment systems, reputation systems, programmable environments, and ways to prove actions. They also need a system that allows them to coordinate without constantly seeking permission from centralized operators.

There are already many such building blocks in crypto, just scattered across different protocols and standards. Therefore, in my view, the integration of AI agents with crypto is far more interesting from a coordination perspective than what is typically called an “AI token.”

Another issue no one wants to admit is that cryptocurrency user education is poor.

The generation of 2021 has already demonstrated this cycle: people enter, lose money, look for scapegoats, follow the wrong KOLs, and learn the wrong lessons. Then, many of them become KOLs themselves, and the cycle continues.

This is dangerous. When enough people lose money due to scams, hacks, bad actors, and flawed systems, regulators will eventually gain the political license to monitor everything: every transaction, every wallet, every movement of funds.

At that point, people began to talk about privacy.

But privacy cannot merely mean hiding a stablecoin transfer. Privacy must encompass the entire stack: IP layer, RPC, wallet, exchange, transaction, balance, identity, and interaction. If the other three layers are leaking, selective privacy is not enough.

So instead of asking, “Which is the best privacy coin?” start thinking about the privacy stack: which protocols address which layers? Which components are missing? Where are metadata leaks occurring? And where are centralized operators still bottlenecking the process?

Once privacy is viewed this way, the entire research process changes. Education around the privacy stack may become the most important part of cryptocurrency adoption.

At its core, cryptography is simple: you create rules with code, and people coordinate around those rules.

When a community shares certain values, an economy begins to function, no longer relying on third-party operators from traditional systems.

Looking at crypto this way, you’ll no longer see tokens merely as things that go up or down. Tokens are rules around value.

This is where token design becomes interesting again. Tokens don’t have to be merely fixed-supply, transferable units—they can carry rules, represent rights, define conditions, and change behavior based on time, ownership, identity, reputation, or other on-chain conditions.

When money becomes programmable, token design becomes closer to social design.

The king once defined the rules of currency, and the kingdom was responsible for enforcement.

The code can now be executed. And it is increasingly clear that the person who wrote the code defines the rules.

Strangely, AI may write an increasing amount of code. Give AI agents on-chain identities, wallets, permission systems, reputations, and programmable assets, and you’ll get something that operates in parallel with humans, resembling an alien economy.

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

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

Thus, the downstream chain becomes this: words become prompts, prompts become code, code becomes rules, and rules define currency. It sounds philosophical, but I believe we are closer to it than most people realize.

The interesting part about token standards is right 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 and trading a token represented different rights? What if tokens were private by default? What if currency behaved differently depending on the community using it?

Many token standards have already explored these ideas. The problem is that the market barely pays attention to them, as everyone is busy repeatedly issuing the same token design.

A refundable token is one example.

Suppose a token is issued at 1 USDC. Users can trade it normally, but within seven days, holders are entitled to a guaranteed refund at 0.80 USDC.

Over these seven days, holders have two options: sell on the open market or redeem at the predetermined amount. If the market price rises to 2 USDC, they will likely sell on the market; if the price drops to 0.20 USDC, the redemption right suddenly becomes valuable.

This token offers something rare in the crypto world: a revoke button.

But this only holds true if the refund is actually backed. If 100,000 tokens can each be redeemed for 0.80 USDC, then there must be 80,000 USDC somewhere available to fulfill those obligations. Code cannot refund money that does not exist.

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

Combining refunds with expiration could be more interesting. The right to a refund could expire after seven days while the tokens continue to be traded, or the tokens themselves could expire. These are two entirely different designs.

Going further, there are seasonal currencies: tokens issued for a game season, an event, a community campaign, a funding cycle, an election, a loyalty period, or a speculative game. After expiration, balances can expire, convert, or be settled into something else.

At this point, what you're designing is no longer "another ERC-20," but a new version of money. I believe this is an area that cryptocurrency has barely explored.

People say crypto is a casino. Well, maybe it is.

But casinos also have rules, and rules can be changed.

There is now an extremely powerful rule: those who bring in the most people to the casino make the most money. Attention is almost everything.

But casinos don't have to always maximize extraction. They can experiment with refund mechanisms, better distribution models, progressive sell taxes, anti-sniping rules, privacy, purpose-bound currencies, expiring assets, reputation-based access, conditional liquidity, committed rewards, and various forms of coordination.

The goal is not to eliminate speculation. Speculation is likely one of crypto's strongest distribution mechanisms.

The goal should be to make speculation less foolish.

If people are going to gamble anyway, at least give them a better game—rules that are easy to understand, more diverse ways to win, and new users who don’t automatically become liquidity providers. Just this alone is a meaningful improvement.

There is another reason for all of this.

Crypto is caught between two forces: anarchism and authoritarianism.

Every centralized bridge back to traditional finance strengthens the influence of the authoritarian side; every private transaction system, permissionless protocol, and autonomous economy strengthens the anarchist side.

But crypto-anarchism cannot be merely: buy coins, pump, sell, and withdraw to fiat.

If everyone ultimately returns to the financial system they claimed to want to escape, then this experiment has not truly succeeded.

Crypto 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-to-token exchanges.

Most importantly, it requires a deeper philosophy. Without philosophy, every movement eventually gets reduced to price.

Imagine a world where a meme coin becomes the currency of its own ecosystem.

You can trade it, spend it, earn it, use it privately, use it to access communities, use it to coordinate agents, use it to purchase services, use it to participate in prediction markets, use it to build reputation, and use it to make commitments.

By then, Meme will no longer be just an asset, but will have become economic infrastructure.

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

This is much more interesting than having all tokens perform the same way.

The next crypto developer might just be someone with an idea.

AI has also made another important thing easier: conducting these experiments is becoming increasingly accessible.

You don’t need to spend five years becoming the best Solidity engineer before starting to think 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 release your experiments.

The bottleneck is shifting from "Can you write code?" to "Can you come up with interesting rules?"

This could give rise to an entirely new generation of crypto developers who approach things from philosophy, economics, game design, psychology, and coordination, then use AI to translate these ideas into code.

I think this is where cryptocurrency becomes interesting again.

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

Once money becomes programmable, token design is social design. Whoever designs the rules designs the game.

The next major crypto infrastructure may not be another blockchain, another exchange, another lending protocol, or another meme launcher.

It might simply be: a better monetary rule.