In the early 2000s, my wife and I backpacked through the Sichuan province in China to Lhasa, Tibet. Many of China’s towns and villages were being torn down and rebuilt, and we wanted to see them before much of their history was lost. During our travels, we transacted with vendors using abacuses in the streets or at train stations. They would flip through the abacus with lightning speed and show us the resulting price. I will admit, we had no idea how to read an abacus, so we just nodded and handed them the number of paper bills we felt approximated the value of what we were buying. It usually worked out just fine.
Those who have used cryptocurrencies or other digital assets like NFTs can likely relate to how I felt about the abacus. Usually, it works just fine—except when it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, there may be a lot at stake! Unlike the abacus, the technology behind digital assets is enabling new innovations that are important for local communities and individuals. However, those innovations shouldn’t require the user to learn how to understand something that feels as abstract as the abacus did to me—it should feel familiar and secure.
I confess I am a technologist by profession, so naturally, I was interested in Bitcoin when it released in 2009. But it wasn’t until late 2017 or early 2018 that I jumped in completely by installing solar panels on my home and mining a cryptocurrency called Zcash. In 2018, I co-developed a blockchain patent with a colleague, and by late 2020 I realized that blockchain technology was developing into an important solution that could empower individuals and communities.
At that time, blockchain technology started evolving from a way to transact digital currency to a valuable tool for storing information, managing personal identities, coordinating large communities, and representing and trading real-world assets, among many other uses. These advances allowed the individual or community who developed the…
