In a recent dispatch from blockchain events in DC, Project Glitch reported that the industry is "filled with earnest nerds who are passionate about ... an internet where individuals have the technical power to own and control their data."

Why it matters: If these earnest nerds build something useful in the world's largest economy, it will become more difficult to make the case against decentralized entrepreneurship.

So here are some of the promising categories of efforts underway that might be relevant in the U.S.

Complex privacy

There's Monero for sending money privately and Signal for private communications, but what if you want to do really complicated things on the internet but in a private way?

What if you want to run financial markets, host social networks or run intranet services (along the lines of Slack), all in a way where even the people building them can't see what users are doing?

• That's the aim of lots of these privacy-based blockchains that are coming along, mainly building on zero-knowledge technology.
• Some projects to keep an eye on here include Aztec, Aleo and zkSync.

What we're watching: It will all get really weird in a future in which homomorphic encryption works at scale.

Friction point: Governments seem to hate this stuff lately.

Compute as a service

This is basically how blockchains started. Satoshi needed a record of transactions, but he also needed so many people keeping that record up to date at once that it would be impossible for someone to put fake transactions in the books.

• Once that model proved to work, folks have begun to employ it for other kinds of services.
• Other people's machines can check cross-blockchain bridges, verify the findings of oracles, calculate prices on decentralized exchanges, and etc.

EigenLayer is the giant here. Others, like Solayer, are coming together, and other companies, such as Ether.fi and Puffer are coming along atop them.

Machines on demand

Imagine you wanted to complete some unbelievably complex global task. Like mapping every road or making a private consumer price index. You have two options:

1. You could do the work yourself. That would require getting lots of staff and getting contacts from scratch all over the world. Or...
2. You could create an incentive for others to do the work for you.

That's projects like Hivemapper for mapping, Filecoin and Arweave for data storage. Helium for connectivity.

Between the lines: Defining precisely the difference between this and the previous thing is a bit tricky, but if you squint, the former is more purely in the cloud while the latter ultimately connects to terra firma.

Zoom out: Obviously, blockchainers are still working on fixing the money system in all kinds of ways, but that's less salient on a day-to-day basis in the USA.

OK, you might be thinking, those things sound fine, but why do these projects need to pay participants in these networks in magic space money?

• Why not just actually pay them?

The answer: Because tokens allow participants in the network to share ownership and risk.

Example: Let's imagine I wanted to start a company to measure water levels and flows in bodies of water (rivers, lakes) all over the world. So I create specs for devices and software to do it well.

• I manufacture some but I also open-source it all so that other people could build similar devices to spec, right?
• One option: I could try to raise money, but it would be impossible to know how much would be needed and investors might not bite.
• Direct payment also means that the only upside for my contractors is whatever they get paid. As soon as the money runs out, they are out. Which also means they have no more incentive beyond that to do work that's just good enough.

Enter, tokens: With tokens, I can make money basically for free, and at first it's worth nothing on the open market. But anyone who shares the vision of this network of gauges can share the risk with me.

• They can set up monitors, earn tokens that have no value now but hope they will be worth a lot when the network becomes valuable.
• So then later when people are paying in that same token to access the data set, the tokens my workers earned early on will be worth much more.

The gist: With cryptocurrency, we can both share in the upside of the network, even though we have no idea how far it will go.

This has already worked. It worked for Bitcoin, which paid people to break little chunks of encrypted records of transactions in hope that the world would eventually decide that work was valuable. And it has.

Think of a deck of cards. Thousands of games can be played with a deck of cards, and no permission is needed to invent new ones.

• In fact, a creative person could invent a game that combined a deck of cards with a chessboard, if they wanted. In fact, they have.

Why it matters: Imagine if computer games were as flexible. Directionally, that's where blockchain gaming is headed. In theory.

• Imaginations could really run wild if it were as easy to invent in video games as it is in analog games.

State of play: Crypto people are trying very hard to crack the gaming code, but the efforts so far have been mostly, eh 😒.

The big picture: There are two camps making video games — NFT companies and crypto companies — and both want to open new gaming experiences.

• The idea is that if you let people own pieces of a larger collection of intellectual property, they will bring things forth the original creator didn't expect.

Zoom in: Nouns and the Wizards Cult have supported many community members in making stuff that extends the mythology of each. Bored Apes has been having a very hard time.

• Stepn and Sweatcoin are attempting to gamify real-world activities, like walking or jogging.
• Most of the traditional-looking video games are, so far, in fact, just ways to grind to show engagement and earn cryptocurrencies that can be traded for a little real-world cash.

💭 Brady's thought bubble: This whole "build it and they will build even more" thing, so far, has been all hat and no cattle.

🚪 The man who made bitcoin ETFs happen, Grayscale's CEO, is moving on. (Axios)

🤲 Gemini Earn customers can see the light at the end of the tunnel. (The Block)

😵‍💫 Experts weigh in on the confusing implications of the charges against two brothers for market manipulation over their alleged attack on arbitrage bots. (The Defiant)

🌁 Cross-chain DeFi app Infinex, broke $60 million in liquidity deposited in less than two days. (The Defiant)

"We recognize that FIT 21 will introduce new compliance challenges for digital assets companies, but regulatory clarity is indisputably more responsible, safer for consumers, and preferable to the status quo."