Solarpunk vs Lunarpunk: Is The Future of Crypto Regulated?
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In today’s newsletter, I’ll be breaking down some potential paths crypto could go down regarding regulation and mass adoption.
Recently, regulation has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind; or so it would seem judging from my twitter feed.
Off the top of my head, there are a few reasons for this:
Progress in certain areas, such as bridging real estate onchain or institutional investment in crypto is extremely dependent on new enabling regulation being passed. People in this sector naturally often talk about regulation more than an individual trader or investor might.
It seems like every other day that the SEC, CTFC, or one of the many other U.S. federal agencies issue some kind of negative statement regarding crypto.
Last and most importantly: SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried), CEO of FTX, recently released a controversial twitter thread proposing various regulatory solutions for crypto in the U.S.
TLDR: his ideas were not well received, and many expressed that if implemented, SBF’s proposals would effectively kill American DeFi, and stunt the growth of all crypto sectors.
SBFs recent tweets, combined with the “Effective Altruism” mantra that many associate him with, has some characteristics of a certain concept echoed by some in crypto: Solarpunk.
What is Solarpunk?
Solarpunk is a term used to refer to crypto participants who are very optimistic, and see the good in crypto. Think “WAGMI”, and the sort of idealogy that believes in using crypto to empower users and the modern ‘proletariat’.
Negative twitter sentiment towards SBF/FTX
The Solarpunk aesthetic
On the other hand, Lunarpunk describes an opposing ideology, one that involves the use of black markets, anonymity, and outright opposition to authority as tools to achieve the adoption of crypto.
The Lunarpunk aesthetic
“lunarpunks are preparing for war, and building privacy-enhanced tooling to protect their communities”.
-Rachel Rose O’Leary, Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle
Both groups, in the context of crypto, want mass adoption to happen, but they have different ideas of what it looks like and what it will take to get there.
Take some of the most prominent figures on crypto twitter, and you may be able to get a decent gauge for which side of the ‘punk’ coin they belong to, or at least which path they tend to lean towards.
This might be based on their rhetoric, their actions, their responses to certain events, etc.
The concept of Solarpunk and Lunarpunk originally stemmed from Sci-Fi, before being applied to crypto.
But if you’re reading this right now, in these market conditions, you probably have a decent amount of belief in crypto, and think that mass adoption happens sooner rather than later.
While crypto adoption may not coincide with the futuristic graphics in the images above, many believe there is a good chance that it will be achieved by going down one of these two paths. I might add a third option, that crypto could go down both paths, just at different periods in time.
But we don’t need to simply speculate on what the future holds; we can see blatant examples of Solarpunk vs Lunarpunk idealogy in crypto today:
As mentioned above, SBF has a predisposition to “effective altruism”; he is optimistic for the future and wants to contribute, even if he isn’t 100% sure how, as he somewhat admits with his recent response to sentiment around his proposals. Most notably, he wants to play by the rules, and cooperate with regulators.
There is also an ongoing debate right now around NFT royalties: currently, royalties to NFT creators are actually unenforceable, and some marketplaces have begun ignoring them to provide better prices for traders.
In this clip, Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly Capital extrapolates the opposing ‘solarpunk’ and ‘lunarpunk’ subgenres to the terms “Web3” vs “crypto”, respectively.
Those who support royalties clearly want to empower creators, while some are willing to accept the gritter reality of crypto, that many people will willingly deplete a primary source of revenue for creators if it means saving a few percentage points on their trade.
You can probably guess which categories of ‘punk’ belong where.
In one of the first notes we published at Revelo Intel, we covered Jordi Alexander of Selini Capital explicitly explaining that the Solarpunk and Lunarpunk rift within the ETH community would be enhanced by the merge, and the advent of PoS (proof of stake).
Andre Cronje, most known for developing Yearn and Solidly, also emphasized his belief that there will be both doxxed, regulated DeFi, and anonymous, “badlands” DeFi, coexisting together.
There are many more relevant examples, too many to list, actually. Perhaps in a future original newsletter, I can delve into what a Solarpunk future vs Lunarpunk future might look like, with historical comparisons.
Which category of punk do you fall under? What path do you think we’re most likely to follow?