Today, we launch the Terminus Fund with $100,000 in support for sovereign communities and the tools that make them possible. Inspired by the Network State movement and the idea of Terminus as a civilization archive, we’re backing internet communities that materialize in the real world and grow into new societies. From monthlong villages and popup cities to permanent territory, we support opt-in experiments that can be shared, forked, and scaled.

We believe Artizen itself is core infrastructure for network states. To peacefully exit failing systems and build new ones, communities need a way to pool capital, coordinate priorities, and fund the creative work they depend on. That’s the layer Artizen provides: social technology—curation and game mechanics—combined with financial technology that lets communities fund what matters most.

My fascination with Network States traces back to a single afternoon in 2013. I was sitting in a cold auditorium at YC’s Startup School when a talk cracked open my brain.

Startup School was exactly what you’d expect. Smart people. Sensible advice. Nothing radical.

Then Balaji took the stage and gave a talk called Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit.

It hit me like a thunderbolt.

If you can start a new company, why not start a new country?

When a system is failing—whether a corporation or a nation—you have two options. Voice: reform it from within. Or exit: leave and build something new. Exit isn’t quitting. It’s creation. Forking. Founding. Opting out peacefully instead of fighting.

Just a few weeks earlier, my childhood best friend and roommate, Ross Ulbricht, had been arrested for creating the Silk Road. I was still reeling.

Inspired by the idea of what Ross had built—consenting adults trading without permission from the state—but heartbroken by the outcome. It felt like proof that trying to radically reinvent the system will end only in your destruction.

But Balaji offered another path.

Not through violence. Not through revolution. But by building new opt-in societies so compelling that people freely choose them.

That’s the promise of the Network State. Communities form online around shared values. If they’re strong enough, they gather in the real world. Most fail. Some persist. A few harden into institutions, territory, and eventually international recognition.

But there’s a piece of this story that often gets skipped.

None of it works without a way for communities to pool money and fund the work they care about.

Culture doesn’t appear by accident. Tools don’t build themselves. Experiments cost money. Creativity is the engine—but funding is the constraint. Without aligned capital, sovereignty stays theoretical.

That’s the problem Artizen exists to solve.

For a long time, I thought Artizen and the Network State were adjacent ideas. They aren’t. Artizen is core infrastructure for the Network State movement. We build the social and financial technology that lets internet-native communities coordinate capital and fund their own priorities.

That’s not just useful for artists or scientists or builders. It’s foundational for any sovereign community. If people are going to peacefully exit failing systems, the alternative has to function. Every real community needs funding that works.

That’s why we’re launching the Terminus Fund.

We’re already backing projects like Grandmatopia in Arizona, stewarding land and artists in a highland sanctuary; Ipê Village in Brazil, prototyping internet-native governance in a month-long pop-up city; Agartha, a solarpunk R&D lab mapping and incubating regenerative communities; and Regenera, a living systems laboratory launching experimental sites across Europe and the United States. Different contexts. Same pattern: organize online, gather in the real world, and test new systems.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Terminus wasn’t about ruling the empire. It was about preserving knowledge, running experiments, and forking civilization when the center became too brittle to survive.

That’s why the Terminus Fund exists.
And why Artizen exists.

Not to fight the old system.
Not to reform it from within.

But to build something better.
Fund alternatives.
Make exit real.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Kevin Owocki sits at the fault line between idealism and infrastructure.

As the founder of Gitcoin, he helped turn a simple question—how do we fund public goods?—into one of the most important experiments in crypto. Gitcoin pioneered quadratic funding, moved millions of dollars to open-source developers, and proved that coordination at internet scale is possible when incentives are designed with care.

But Kevin isn’t interested in abstract theory. He’s interested in what works. What lasts. What actually gets built when hype fades and builders remain.

In this conversation, we talk about funding as a form of values, why public goods are chronically underfunded, and what it takes to design systems that reward contribution instead of extraction.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation.

1. Funding is a moral choice.

“Every funding mechanism encodes values. You’re deciding—explicitly or implicitly—what you want more of in the world.”

Markets aren’t neutral. Neither are grants, DAOs, or protocols. Every system rewards some behaviors and suppresses others. Kevin’s core insight is simple but uncomfortable: if we don’t like the outcomes, it’s because we don’t like the incentives we designed.

Public goods don’t fail because people don’t care. They fail because the systems around them don’t pay.

2. Public goods are everywhere—and almost nowhere funded.

“So much of what we rely on every day is maintained by volunteers, underpaid contributors, or pure altruism.”

Open-source software. Digital infrastructure. Cultural commons. These are foundational layers of modern life, yet they survive on scraps. Kevin sees this as a systemic blind spot: capitalism is good at pricing exclusion, terrible at pricing shared value.

Gitcoin wasn’t built to fix everything. It was built to test whether better funding primitives could change that equation.

3. Quadratic funding works—but only if people show up.

“Quadratic funding doesn’t replace community. It amplifies it.”

Math alone doesn’t save public goods. Participation does. Quadratic funding is powerful because it weights broad support over concentrated capital—but only when real humans engage.

Without community, even the most elegant mechanism collapses into abstraction.

4. Governance is a social problem before it’s a technical one.

“You can’t engineer trust purely in code. People matter.”

Kevin is blunt about this. Protocols can help. Smart contracts can enforce rules. But legitimacy comes from social consensus—shared norms, accountability, and culture.

This is why Gitcoin evolved beyond grants into governance experiments, reputation systems, and new forms of coordination. Code sets the floor. People set the ceiling.

5. Regenerative systems reward contribution, not extraction.

“If the system only rewards taking, that’s what you’ll get.”

Kevin distinguishes extractive systems—where value is siphoned upward—from regenerative ones, where value circulates back to contributors. The difference isn’t philosophical. It’s architectural.

Regenerative systems don’t just fund outputs. They sustain the people doing the work.

6. Builders stay when the hype leaves.

“The real signal is who’s still here when it’s not cool anymore.”

Cycles come and go. Narratives inflate and collapse. What remains are the builders who care more about the work than the spotlight.

Kevin measures success less by market caps and more by continuity—projects that keep shipping, communities that keep showing up, systems that quietly compound.

That’s how public goods survive: not through spectacle, but through persistence.

Closing thought

Kevin Owocki doesn’t talk about funding as charity. He talks about it as design.

Designing systems that make it easier to do the right thing.
Designing incentives that align individual action with collective good.
Designing markets that can finally see what matters.

If the future depends on public goods—and it does—then the real question isn’t whether we can fund them.

It’s whether we’re willing to build systems that mean what they say.

ETH Boulder is an experiment.

A small gathering—200 to 300 people—at the edge of art, science, and technology. No main-stage posturing. No corporate theater. Just builders, artists, engineers, and explorers who believe creativity is a contact sport—and that breakthroughs happen when strange minds collide.

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This is not for everyone. If you want polished booths, branded tote bags, and a calendar packed with sponsor pitches, you will be disappointed. If you’re curious, playful, and allergic to soulless conferences, you will feel at home.

ETH Boulder is about cross-pollination. Engineers talking to artists. Scientists trading insights with musicians. As Matt Ridley says, innovation happens when ideas have sex. ETH Boulder is a breeding ground. Bring your best ideas. Let them collide. See what new “baby ideas” are born.

My friend Kevin Owocki—founder of Gitcoin—and I have been searching for the right moment to bring our communities together.

The Artizen community: artists, storytellers, creators. And the Gitcoin community: engineers, scientists, open-source builders. Distinct cultures, but same tribe. Explorers at the frontier of innovation. People who care deeply about funding what matters most. People who believe creativity—whether expressed as code, art, or research—is how progress actually happens.

Back in 2018, Gitcoin gave me confidence I wasn’t alone. Kevin was taking a radical idea—quadratic funding—and turning it into real infrastructure. I didn’t want to build Gitcoin. But it rhymed with what I’d been working toward for years. We met. We became friends. Kevin invested in Artizen. Mostly, we kept circling the same question: when is the right moment to bring these worlds together?

That moment arrived when Kevin decided to fork the frontier.

ETH Denver began as something rare—grassroots, messy, alive. Ostensibly for Ethereum developers, but really a magnet for frontier explorers: artists, scientists, musicians, regen thinkers. A festival more than a conference. Famously, Vitalik Buterin once wandered the event in a Bufficorn suit.

But scale has gravity. Over time, ETH Denver became polished, corporate, and hollowed out. Last year’s “Year of the Regen” felt more like branding than belief.

So Kevin did something honest—and brave. He forked it.

When Kevin floated the idea, I texted him immediately. Artizen was all in. This was the moment we’d been waiting for.

ETH Boulder will be intimate. Experimental. A little risky. A robot Fight Club produced by theater kids. Sound journeys. Collective murals. Choirs built from the crowd. Tea ceremonies. Saunas. Open-source coordination sessions. Experiments in public goods, resilient infrastructure, and local community building. Serious ideas, handled playfully. Playful ideas, taken seriously.

It might be a disaster. First years often are. But building on the frontier requires risk.

ETH Boulder is a gathering of explorers in one of America’s great frontier towns. If you’re exploring the outer edges of art, the limits of science, or the future of technology—and you’re looking for your people—we want you there. Come help us see what happens when the right people show up.

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For years, Michel kept a sentence pinned in front of him at work: “I used to be normal, but it drove me mad.” It captured a lifelong instinct—to move away from conformity and embrace the unknown.

Michel Reilhac has a rare vantage point on creativity at the edge. A former contemporary dancer and longtime cultural explorer, he spent a decade as Head of Cinema at ARTE France, where he helped produce and champion bold independent films, including Lars von Trier’s Melancholia.

Drawn consistently to the frontier, Michel later turned his focus to immersive storytelling. Alongside his co-curator Liz Rosenthal, he founded Venice Immersive, now the world’s most important platform for immersive art. Today, he works as an independent story architect and mentor, helping creators navigate uncertainty, embodiment, and risk as new creative forms come into being.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation about how to live a creative life.

1. Being normal is a creative dead end.

“There is nothing more reducing, constraining, and reductive than trying to conform—trying to fit a mold that forces you to cut your wings.”

Normality doesn’t just limit creativity—it slowly erases it. The parts of yourself that don’t quite fit, that feel excessive or awkward or out of place, are usually the source of your originality. When you suppress them to be acceptable, you don’t become better—you become flatter.

A more creative life often starts by refusing to shrink yourself to match the room.

2. Embrace the Beginner’s Mind.

“You’re never as good as when you don’t know how to do something.”

Not knowing sharpens attention. Without a script, you’re forced into presence—drawing on intuition, curiosity, memory, and instinct all at once. Creative growth comes from choosing situations where expertise no longer carries you and awareness has to take the lead.

3. If it can’t fail spectacularly, it doesn’t matter.

“The most interesting things are risky and dangerous, but that is exactly why they matter.”

Safe ideas rarely open new territory. Work that can fail spectacularly demands more of you. The ideas that move culture forward often live uncomfortably close to embarrassment, rejection, and catastrophe.

4. Explore the frontier without a map.

“Creating is about doing something that does not exist yet—not referencing anything, almost starting from scratch.”

Much of what we call creativity is recombination—connecting familiar dots. That has value. But breakthroughs happen when you stop referencing what exists and step into the unknown without a map.

Exploring the frontier often feels lonely—not because you’re wrong, but because no one else is there yet.

5. Let go of the past.

“Things happen. People experience them. And then they’re gone. Holding on to the past takes up mental space that should belong to what’s coming.”

Michel isn’t dismissing experience—he’s resisting attachment. When identity hardens around past success or failure, it blocks new work from emerging. Obsession with preservation often comes from fear, not necessity. Creative longevity depends less on what you keep than on what you’re willing to release.

6. Seek creative collisions in the real world.

“Projects are born from people meeting people. Sharing the same moment, the same experience, in the physical world—that is irreplaceable.”

If you want to amplify creativity, don’t stay isolated or fully online. Put yourself in rooms where ideas, disciplines, and people collide. Proximity creates friction. Friction creates momentum. Shared uncertainty turns into shared movement.

Digital tools help—but creativity compounds fastest when people gather, experiment, and build together in the real world.

Closing thought

Michel’s line “I used to be normal, but it drove me mad” isn’t a rejection of discipline or rigor. It’s a refusal to let comfort, conformity, or precedent dull aliveness.

Normal offers safety.
Creativity demands risk.

And the work that matters most almost never feels normal while you’re making it.

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 7: Like a Phoenix, Motherfucker

Leap of faith

Our investor Dan Hill introduces me to Simon Corry—studied under Dieter Rams, founding team at WeTransfer, now a director of design at Facebook. We hit it off, and a few months later, he quits his cushy gig to join Artizen.

Together, we build the dream team. Eric Jacobsen, a front-end dev and lovable curmudgeon. Zsofie Tubel, a Hungarian who lives for death metal, tattoos, and crypto—perfect. Eric Katerman, my old co-founder at Hurricane Party. Dov Heichemer, a PM from SoundCloud. And Juju Parchimowicz, a creative force of nature.

With the crew assembled, we should be flying. Instead, we’re stuck on the tarmac. Meetings drag, decisions stall, launch dates slip. I hired insanely talented people—way more talented than me—shouldn’t I give them creative freedom? But the more I step back, the more progress grinds to a halt.

Desperate for momentum, we join SeedClub—a playground for internet cool kids—run by that tall guy Jess and that shorter guy Josh. They lean into Artizen like a stalled car. We use demo day as a forcing function: ship something, anything. Inspired by Nouns, we launch daily grants. Every 24 hours we fund new creators like Eddie Lee, Vladimir Storm, Mike Tucker, and Gabriela Arp. But the time horizon is too short.

The product flops.

We call an emergency summit. Simon takes charge: thousands of sticky notes, collaborative workshops, rapid prototyping, the full IDEO playbook. At first, it’s fun. By day two, I’m miserable. By day three, I snap.

This isn’t working. There are too many voices. Inspiration speaks in whispers. All I hear is noise. We’re burning money—only six months of runway left. We need direction. In my filmmaking days, I thrived as a micromanaging control freak—a true auteur. Now, I hesitate. My gut knows what to build, but I second-guess my instincts.

And then a moment of clarity: I am an artist, not an entrepreneur. I trust intuition more than metrics. I value improvisation over process. I love collaborating. I hate managing. I want to dance—wild and free, to the music of creation. I ask myself:

Can I run my company like I make art?

No idea, but I want to find out. The first step is painful: break up the band. Making art is too intimate for me. Requires too much trust. I only go deep with one or two collaborators, or work alone.

Saying goodbye to Ruben is the hardest. I’m not easy to work with—constantly change my mind, fixate, obsess. But Ruben put up with my autistic mania. For that, and so much more, I love him.

The next scene is unscripted. But as I climb back into the director’s chair, I feel at home.

Escape velocity

My ambition hasn’t changed: build a billion-dollar business that reinvents funding for creators. But pulling it off on my own? As a weird art project? That’s the trick.

About a year earlier, I met this kid Nate Van Cleve. He built a product called SproutUp—a donation tool for charities. I figured he had a team of engineers. Nope. Solo dev. Doesn’t even know how to code! He built the whole thing with Bubble. My brain explodes.

After the team falls apart, I call Nate. Could we rebuild Artizen—using Bubble as a web2 wrapper for our smart contracts? Nate is confident.

It feels insane. Deleting our codebase—again—on purpose!? But it also feels right. Bubble lets me move 10x faster at a fraction of the cost. It gives me the freedom to experiment, to play. With Nate as my Bubble shaman, the ritual begins. Summon the new Artizen!

To help conjure the magic, my friend Sven suggests Techstars—he knows the web3 director. By now, I’m addicted to accelerators: the structure, the deadlines, the intensity. At 40, it’s the best way to make new friends—people who get it, who know the struggle, who give a shit. I’m in!

Techstars delivers. Pete Townsend and Hugh McGirr dig into the business. Sean Lee drills me on sales; Audrey O’Regan lifts my spirits; Ben Jorgensen steps up with his own match fund; and Sam Williams, founder of Arweave—crypto OG with a 10,000-watt brain—jams on our tokenomics.

Things click. Nate and I find our rhythm, shipping product at a furious tempo. We’re inventing a new game—creators roll the dice on bold ideas, fans bet on projects they love, and brands ante up cash to grow their ecosystems. Everyone walks away a winner.

Riding high from demo day, we land sponsors like Filecoin, Juicebox, Cabin, Funding the Commons, MetaCamp, and the DeSci Foundation. Season 1 was a disaster—$50,000 raised. Season 2 showed promise at $100,000, but the product was a mess. Then, in Season 3, everything changes. Our game is finally fun to play! A hardcore group of Artizens emerge: Scott Murphy with Resonate, Omid and Anna with Tuner, Sven Hermann with Incented, Eoghan O’Keeffe with Locus, Tamara Montenegro with her Sound Temple, and dozens more. Their passion ignites the community, and creators raise over $500,000.

Now, in Season 4, Artizen is cooking. Our members cast 1.4 million votes to curate 158 remarkable projects like Echos of the Heart, City of Apparition, Futuro Nativo, synth-e-sthesia, Sexilio, The Land I Live On, Palestinian Lullabies, Flow, Social Layer, Inter-Woven, CharmVerse, Node Archives, Bone Conductive Instrument, Remembering to Forget, and Earths to Come. It’s our strongest lineup yet, and I’ve got a good feeling creators will raise over $1,000,000 by season’s end.

Artizen has left the launchpad, breaking free from the pull of gravity. Just me and Nate and a constellation of friends.

We might still explode, but the rocket is climbing, the heavens open.

Obsession wins

Obsession is a dark art. It unlocks superpowers. Beats talent and discipline. Overcomes failure and fear. Obsession wins—but it demands a high price. It’s a dance with madness, a fire that threatens to consume you.

For decades, I obsessed. Why do we fail to fund creators?

Artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and builders—these are the people who drive progress, who fill our lives with beauty and abundance, who make the world rich. And yet, most creators are poor. Rage at this cruel irony fueled me.

Now, something greater fuels me—faith.

I believe in the power of human creativity. It’s the core of civilization—the true source of growth. I believe all problems are solvable with enough creativity.

I believe in a future that is bright and boundless.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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Danielle Strachman has a rare vantage point on creativity. As part of the founding team behind the Thiel Fellowship, she helped support people like Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum), Dylan Field (Figma), Laura Deming (longevity), and Chris Olah (Anthropic). Today she co-runs 1517 Fund and the Medici grant program, backing creative outsiders long before institutions recognize their brilliance.

Here are the sharpest insights from our conversation.

1. Creativity begins as irrational passion.

We look for the irrationally passionate — the ones who sit two standard deviations out on curiosity. The people who, like Vitalik, are learning Mandarin on their phone mid-conversation because they need to understand a community. It’s not hobby energy. It’s “I have to go all the way down this rabbit hole.”

This is what Danielle calls hyperfluency — a kind of creative intensity where curiosity becomes obsession. That depth — the compulsion to push further — is the fuel that separates average makers from outliers.

2. Childhood obsessions are the blueprint.

One founder told me he used to lie on his back at six, throw a wooden chair in the air, and catch it just to think. And honestly, that tracks. The intensity shows up early.

Childhood gives you the purest snapshot of a creative mind before school, fear, and conformity dull the edges. The strange games, the obsessive tinkering, an inner world that demands expression — these are early forms of pattern-making and problem-solving. If you want to understand a creator’s trajectory, look at who they were before the world told them who to be.

3. Curiosity only matters if it turns into making.

You can be incredibly curious and never create anything. The people we back have that itch — they have to put their hands on it and make something. Curiosity alone isn’t enough. It has to turn into output.

Reading, exploring, wandering — not enough. Creativity requires output. The transformation happens when curiosity hits friction and becomes real work.

4. The best creators live at intersections.

So many of our founders were artists first — painters, sculptors, pianists. When they finally show us their work, it just clicks. The creator–artist is often their first instantiation, the thing they were before the world turned them into technologists.

Painters become roboticists. Musicians drift into biotech. Sculptors become technologists. New ideas emerge when identities collide — not when people stay in a lane.

5. Creative practice strengthens perception.

When I draw, the phone disappears. I’m totally gone — lost in time, really noticing things. It’s deep focus, the kind that resets your whole system.

For Danielle, drawing isn’t a hobby. It’s a discipline of perception. It slows the mind to a pace where details come back into view — shadow, proportion, texture, meaning. That kind of attention is the root of creativity. When you train yourself to see clearly, you expand what you’re capable of imagining and making. Great creators don’t just produce; they observe.

6. Youth gives freshness. Age gives depth.

Young people bring this raw, unfiltered curiosity — but older creators bring depth. There’s a different weight when someone who’s been through a lot is still making things. The lived experience shows up in the work. It’s beautiful.

Young creators see possibilities without baggage. Older creators bring wisdom and emotional weight. Creativity doesn’t peak — it changes texture.

7. A fund can be a work of art.

1517 is my art. Human mindshare is scarce, so I’m always asking what happens if you put this person with that one and a whole new thing emerges. Making those connections feels like painting with people.

Danielle treats her fund the way an artist treats a canvas — not as an institution, but as a living medium. Creativity isn’t only in the founders she backs; it’s in how she pairs people, curates environments, and engineers serendipity. She sees relationships as raw material. And when they collide, new ideas surface.

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 6: Kaleidoscope

Canceled and broke

Rumors swirl. At our last event—Impact Reality in Seattle—attendees are getting sick, but we don’t know why. Then, two days before SXSW, the festival cancels. COVID is here. The world shuts down.

Events drive all our revenue. No events, no business. Desperate, I call my friend Robin Stethem, founder of the Museum of Other Realities—a stunning virtual space. “Wanna be the exclusive venue for Kaleidoscope?”

Next, I recruit Ana Brzezińska, a ferocious producer who takes no prisoners, always ready for a knife fight. Me, Ana, and Robin form a guerrilla squad: I run sales, Ana orchestrates the chaos, and Robin builds our exhibitions.

It works—on the surface. After hundreds of calls, I land deals with Tribeca, Cannes, NewImages, and VIFF. We produce jaw-dropping virtual events, showcasing stunning works like Minimum Mass and Kusunda. But behind the scenes, we’re bleeding money.

Turns out, high-quality VR events are a financial black hole. The demands are relentless, stretching us to the brink. Bills stack up as body bags fill the news. Oregon wildfires turn the sun into an orange haze. Portland riots. So this is the apocalypse?

Then, a flicker of hope: the Black Realities Grant.

A few years earlier, we launched a small-dollar grant program—$1,000 to $5,000. We expected a handful of submissions but got hundreds. The grants were wildly popular—even with established creators—but a nightmare to curate. I get buried in project proposals.

Maybe, the community can help? Let them pick the winners.

I hire Ruben Campos—a full-stack dev I met on AngelList—to hack together a prototype. We spend months iterating—one person, one vote; ranked choice; quadratic voting. We hit dead ends, break things, piss off the community.

It’s a wicked hard problem: how do you get a diverse group of creators—often in direct competition—to select the best projects? And how do you make it feel fair, so even the losers walk away believing in the process?

Then, in the summer of 2020, we partner with academy award-winner Viola Davis, to launch the Black Realities Grant. It goes viral, raising over $100,000 for black artists at the frontier of immersive storytelling.

I look at Ruben. This is it! The breakthrough we’ve been chasing!

Time to bet the farm. I invest my savings, then start taking on debt. I max out credit cards to keep the grants flowing. It’s terrifying but our growth engine picks up speed. More creators, more fans, more sponsors, more money. The day we hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue I text Lenny to celebrate. It’s working! We’re gonna make it!

Less than an hour later, we’re dead. I get an automated email from Stripe, our payment processor. Too many chargebacks. Our account is canceled. No warning. No appeal. COVID killed the old business. Stripe killed the new one. And now I’m drowning in $437,000 of debt.

No options left. Bankruptcy.

Like a phoenix, motherfucker!

Selena has every right to pack her bags. We’ve got a three-year-old and a mountain of bills. But she never wavers. Ride-or-die. And for all the pain, bankruptcy is survivable. A cheap lawyer, 15 minutes on the phone with a judge, and my sins are absolved. Tabula rasa. A clean slate—mostly.

Our creditors torch everything—the codebase, the product, the brand. But Ruben and I have got conviction. We’ve seen the future: crowdfunded grants. So I ask Ruben to be my co-founder, and together, we rise from the ashes.

Artizen is born.

But this time, we do it right. Never again will we build our home on shifting sands. Artizen will run on crypto rails—powered by NFTs, blockchain magic, and immutable freedom. Ruben codes like a madman while I hit the road to raise money.

Li Jin is my first pitch. I zoom in cocky, unprepared, rambling through the deck. Hard pass. The rejection wakes me up like a slap in the face. I grind through 100 iterations, fine-tuning the pitch until it sings. A few friends chip in: Elliot Cole, Brian Lio, Brad Weiers, Amy Zimmerman, Adam Myhill, and Paula Pettit. Just enough to keep the music playing.

Then crypto rages into a bull market, juiced up on stimmy checks. I parachute into Beyond Basel—an NFT exhibition hosted by Trippy—to infiltrate crypto culture. Someone hands me a Polaroid camera that spits out chocolate photos laced with psilocybin. Alex and Allyson Grey hold court. Asad Malik and Jake Sally glide through the crowd, fresh off Jadu Jetpacks—a metaverse play that raised $37M.

I walk through Central Park with Nick Ducoff—old friend from the Austin tech scene. “Apply to Tachyon,” he says. “I know the director.” Another accelerator? Really? But we get in. Day one, Gabriel Anderson tears us a new asshole for botching our elevator pitch. Oh shit. This guy’s for real. I’m hooked.

Gabriel whips us into shape. We raise a $1.2M pre-seed from Protocol VC , Animoca Brands, ConsenSys, Juan Benet, and Path.

We are so back. Like a phoenix, motherfucker!

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 8: Escape Velocity

Investing in Your Community

Every creative community has someone who brings us together.

A person who shows up.
Who sends the invites.
Who makes the connections.
Who keeps the energy alive.

If that’s you, I want to help.

We’re investing at least $1,000,000 to launch new Funds on Artizen that support the creators in your community.

Apply today, and if selected, we’ll kickstart your fund with up to $50,000.

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Who We’re Looking For

Leaders rooted in creative communities, whether it’s basket weaving, biohacking, DIY robotics, or anything in between.

Maybe you run a writers circle?
Maybe you organize underground symposiums?
Maybe you lead a thriving Discord for AI researchers?
Maybe you’ve built a space—online or in person—where artists connect, scientists collaborate, or coders hack?

If you have the drive to bring people together and support work that matters, we want to hear from you.

Why Launch a Fund?

A community fund on Artizen is simply a pool of capital to support the artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and engineers you love.

You define the mission.
Creators submit projects.
Your community votes.
The strongest projects unlock match funding and cash prizes.

And every $1 raised becomes $3+ of impact:

• $1 from fans

• $1 from sponsors

• $1+ from the Artizen Endowment.

Launch a fund to direct resources where they matter most — and share in the upside. It’s the most powerful way to support the people, projects, and causes shaping your community.

📖 Learn more about funds

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Applications are open on a rolling basis.

1. Submit a Fund Proposal
To be considered, submit a fund proposal. Tell us your mission, the creators you serve, and why your creative community matters.

2. Meet with René
After you submit you’ll receive a link to schedule a call with me.

3. Get Funded
If approved, we’ll kickstart your Fund with up to $50,000.

Apply to Launch Your Fund

Why We’re Doing This

Because creativity doesn’t start in institutions — it starts in communities. Because movements grow when people step up. Because every breakthrough needs a home to take root.

We want to invest in communities building at the frontier of creativity.

If that sounds like you, please apply to launch a fund to support the creators you love. Or read our Playbook to learn more about the process.

Let’s build something extraordinary.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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At Artizen, we’ve invested in thousands of creators across cultures and disciplines. Some succeed wildly. Some struggle.

But over time, patterns start to emerge.

You begin to see that breakthroughs aren’t random. Creativity flourishes when people have a sanctuary to quiet the noise, collisions that spark new thinking, and the tools to turn ideas into reality.

Sanctuary

Where the noise goes quiet.

Creativity needs space. Not metaphorically. Literally. Silence, wilderness, slowness, room to think — these are essential nutrients for a creative ecology.

You feel it at Grandmatopia, where a circle of grandmothers hand-built an earthen homestead and wildlife preserve in the Dragoon Mountains. Their descendants are restoring it now — opening the land to artists who seek a sanctuary shaped by reverence for the natural world.

And you feel the same vibrations at the Outer Echoes Artist Residency in Cascade, Montana, where regenerative agriculture and creative practice grow side by side. It’s a place to work, reflect, and reconnect with the rhythms that sharpen attention in ways no city can.

When the mind relaxes, creativity follows.

Creative Collisions

The spark of the unexpected.

Once you create space, you need collisions. New ideas come from friction — unexpected connections, cross-disciplinary encounters, cultural mixing.

You plug into that energy instantly with We’re Loud Africa, a roaming punk festival that picks a different country each year and drops musicians into the heart of a culture they’ve never played in before. In Nairobi, local bands shared the stage with international proto-punk legends like DEATH.

You sense a similar spark in DeSci Reviews, where collisions happen through ideas instead of sound. Traditional journals trap knowledge behind paywalls; DeSci Reviews turns research into portable, verifiable objects that circulate freely. Scientists keep their rights, peer review becomes transparent, and new fields take shape as ideas bump into one another in the open.

When ideas move, they transform. Collision is the spark.

Access to Tools

The means to make something real.

Inspiration is cheap. Execution isn’t. Every creative ecology depends on tools — the instruments, machines, labs, and materials that turn ideas into something real.

You see this clearly at Resonate, a recording studio and performance space in downtown San Francisco built to give overlooked musicians access to world-class audio engineering for free. Young talent can record, experiment, and be heard — not because they can pay, but because someone built the space for them.

You feel the same force at Make.DIY in Roatán, a biohacking and rapid-prototyping lab where creators get access to 3D scanners, cybernetics gear, and advanced fabrication tools. Artists, engineers, and curious learners build prosthetics, prototype inventions, and learn skills impossible to access elsewhere.

Tools change what’s possible. A creative ecology thrives when people can build.

Cultivating Creativity

Across all these projects — sanctuaries, festivals, residencies, labs, decentralized publishing networks — the pattern is unmistakable.

Give people a sanctuary.
Give them creative collisions.
Give them tools.

And creativity takes root. From that soil, new worlds can grow.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 5: Risking Everything

It’s time. No more fucking around. Time to chase my dream. Time to recapture my spark. Time to reinvent funding for creators!

I quit my job. Clear the decks. Full focus. One, two, three—GO. But I got nothing. No product. No idea where to start.

Don’t panic. Stay loose. Smoke a joint. I pick up the Oculus DK1 my friend Mike gave me to try. It’s like strapping a brick to my face. I launch Titans, a virtual tour of our solar system. It’s rough—pixelated planets—but as I float past Jupiter, the universe suddenly opens. I am a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Small, yet expansive.

And I know—this is the future of art and storytelling.

My bet is simple: if I want to reinvent how creators fund their work, VR is the place to start. A brand-new industry, wide open to new rules—the perfect petri dish. And if we crack the code here, we can scale it up to fund all kinds of art, science, and technology.

Selena and I start a VR meetup. She nailed every detail of our wedding, so I know she’ll crush it as an event producer. And she does. Every week at the old Mozilla HQ, creators show up. Dozens turn into hundreds, driving in from LA, flying in from across the country.

Tyler Hurd premieres BUTTS—two bald men pulling confetti out of their ass. It’s ridiculous. It’s genius. Skillman & Hackett demo Tilt Brush, the immersive painting app destined to be acquired (and killed) by Google. Tony Parisi, the godfather of VRML, drops wisdom. The air is electric. We’re giving birth to a new art form.

We want the world to see our baby. So, we launch a traveling VR film festival. Selena comes up with the name: Kaleidoscope.

We rent a U-Haul, cram it with hundreds of VR headsets, and hit the road on a DIY tour across America—scrappy, renegade, bootlegging the future. Every stop is packed. Lines snake around the block. People want to experience the transcendent beauty of Tana Pura and the haunting brilliance of Notes on Blindness. The press eats it up. The New York Times, LA Times, every major outlet covers the “first VR film festival.”

Somewhere in the Nevada desert, I get a call. My roadie—a homeless, schizophrenic I picked up at the last stop—pumps gas, muttering to himself. We’re on a brutal 43-hour drive from LA to Boston, halfway to nowhere, when Maya Draisin, head of marketing at WIRED, rings me out of the blue.

“Would you like to partner with WIRED on a world tour?”

A real tour. With a real budget. No more U-Hauls. No more wondering if my roadie will murder me in my sleep. “Hell yes,” I say.

My friends Anthony and Nev at Wevr kick in $500,000, and the Kaleidoscope World Tour sets sail—ten cities, four continents. It nearly kills us—arrested by the French, sued by the Israelis—but we meet hundreds of brilliant creators and learn two brutal truths. First, events are a shit business: high stress, low margin. Second, most creators suck at raising money. They hate pitching. They don’t know how to find investors, negotiate partnerships, or close deals.

But I do. And if I teach creators the mechanics of fundraising, over and over, maybe—eventually—I’ll figure out how to rebuild the whole damn machine.

Fame and fortune

I know the market—virtual reality. I know the mission—help creators raise money. Beyond that, it’s a blur.

I meet up with James Beshara, an old friend from Austin. Back then, we were both broke, chasing the startup dream. Now? James has raised $65M for his company Tilt from giants like Sean Parker and Alexis Ohanian. Silicon Valley is a thunderstorm—lightning strikes enough friends; sooner or later, it’s bound to hit you. Right?

“Apply to Y Combinator,” he says with relaxed confidence. “I’ll flag your app.”

Only the top 5% of startups get interviews, but we make the cut. On pitch day, Sam Altman hunches over a laptop, absorbed by his screen. Paul Graham—the prophet himself—stares through me. Desperate to break the ice, I turn to Jessica Livingston, the only friendly face in the room: “I loved Founders at Work. The Wozniak chapter is dope.”

PG narrows his gaze. “So, which Steve are you? Wozniak or Jobs?”

My soul hangs in the balance. Wrong answer, and it’s over. I freeze. “Both,” I blurt. “Got two Steves in me. Probably more. Steve Ballmer, Steve Case. Hoffman too. Just Steves all the way down.”

Rejected.

But Lenny—my old SXSW rival—believes in me enough to write a check. His startup, LocalMind, got acquired by Airbnb, and he’s ready to share the love. It’s his first investment—a far cry from the killers he’d later back: Figma, Anduril, Substack. Other friends step up. Aaron Koblin, Mike Lewis, Elliot Cole, Paul Kanyuk, Jonathan Rosenberg. My old boss Phil Soffer. My old co-founder Eric. Family chips in too—parents, aunts, and uncles. My in-laws, Mark and Kate, are the first check in.

With money in the bank, we’re off to the races. I team up with Selena and my friend Yelena to launch DevLab, an accelerator for VR films, games, and immersive experiences. Over the next three years, we work with hundreds of creators—visionaries like Josephine Decker, Cabbibo, Tender Claws, Funktronic Labs, and Marshmallow Laser Feast—and help fund breakthrough projects like Vestige, Mad God, APEX, Testimony, and Terminal 3.

I become a truffle pig, sniffing out money for our creators. Meta, Google, Samsung, Unity, HTC, Intel—any company dabbling in VR. Public funders in Canada, France, Britain, Taiwan—Arte, CNC, CMF, NFB, BFI, TAICCA. Private investors and random rich folks. If they’re funding VR, I root them out. Then drag them to First Look, where creators pitch and deals get done.

Curators tune into Kaleidoscope—Shari Frilot from Sundance, Blake Kammerdiener from SXSW, Loren Hammonds from Tribeca, and Liz and Michel from Venice. We become a feeder for the festivals. I live on the road, flying from one premiere to the next—a whirlwind of wild art, champagne parties, and high-intensity friendship.

I land the first 7-figure deal for a VR film: Spheres, a cosmic odyssey produced by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jessica Chastain, Millie Bobby Brown, and Patti Smith. We win the Grand Prize at Venice! We expand the frontier of immersive storytelling with Battlescar, a punk rock masterpiece about two runaway girls in the gritty streets of 1970s New York. And Evolver, a bold exploration of life itself, executive produced by Terrence Malick, starring Cate Blanchett, with original music by Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.

All told, Kaleidoscope raised over $34M for creators and helped fuel the artistic renaissance of virtual reality. Trudging through the snow in Park City to pitch RZA a project for the Wu-Tang Clan, it feels like I’ve arrived. After a decade lost in the wilderness, the promised land is in sight.

Then the ground gives way. I slip, tumbling once more into the abyss.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 7: Like a Phoenix, Motherfucker

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Artizen invests in breakthroughs. But how do you spot one? What are the early signs of life — the tiny sparks that might turn into a blaze, the glitches in the matrix, the first hints of undiscovered land? After funding thousands of projects, we’ve learned that real breakthroughs — in art, science, or technology — always share three traits.

They’re weird.
They’re wonderful.
And they’re working.

That’s it. These three signals outperform résumés, credentials, and hype.

Weird

Breakthrough ideas never look normal at the start. They look off-beat, mismatched, slightly out of place. Embrace weird. It is a feature, not a bug. If your project feels hard to categorize — if people hear it, understand it, and then tilt their heads and lean in — that’s the signal. Not confusion. Curiosity.

The kind of weird that makes people say, “Wait… tell me more.”

Weird means original.
Weird means unclaimed territory.
Weird is where the frontier lives.

And one of the clearest examples on Artizen is iContact, the opera.

At first, it sounds simple: an opera about our evolving relationship with technology — the way it merges with us, mirrors us, and reshapes how we relate to each other and the natural world.

Clear. Understandable. Just weird enough to earn a second question.

Ok… tell me more?

Well, iContact asks what happens when technology isn’t something we hold in our hands, but something that presses back — like a robotic pet that learns your rhythms, or a digital spirit that behaves more like weather than software.

But what does that actually mean?

The opera answers by blurring the boundaries between bodies — human bodies, creature bodies, ecological bodies, robotic bodies — through sculptural fashion, projection-mapped environments, and experimental sound. Performers shift between forms. Audiences get pulled into inclusive choreography and collaborative arias.

And then you realize, this isn’t just an opera at all. It’s a tactile, immersive, ceremonial experiment about where technology ends and we begin.

That’s the right kind of weird.
Simple at first glance.
Stranger and more magical the closer you look.

Wonderful

Great projects spark something deep — a feeling that catches you in the chest. A widening of the world. A reminder that beauty and purpose still matter. Wonderful doesn’t demand attention; it invites it.

It carries a quiet truth you can feel before you can explain.

A perfect example is The FutureZoo, an immersive sanctuary where people reconnect with the natural world through virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.

FutureZoo is inventing a new kind of wildlife experience. Their team is building hyper-real digital twins of animals — not just how they look, but how they move, think, and behave. Using advanced simulation and AI-driven instincts, these creatures respond to you the way their real counterparts would in the wild.

They watch you.
They react.
They decide.
They feel alive.

You walk through forests of light, tidal shallows, and shifting ecosystems recreated with such fidelity that your body believes you’re there. It’s the awe of a David Attenborough documentary, but wrapped around you — intimate, immediate, and safe for every species involved.

This is beauty in service of something bigger.

Instead of caging animals for our entertainment, FutureZoo protects them — while giving humans a deeper, more meaningful connection to the wild than any traditional zoo could offer. It replaces harm with wonder. It turns empathy into an experience you can step inside.

Gentle. Ambitious. Transformative. That’s the right kind of wonderful: a project that fills you with awe — and leaves you caring more than you did before.

Working

Breakthroughs start messy, but they move. They gather momentum. They gather fans. They ship new code. They produce artifacts — things you can actually listen to, touch, or test. “Working” is not perfection. It’s evidence. Signs of life. Signals that the idea is becoming real.

One project that shows this beautifully is Mirroring by Summer Krinsky.

Summer is a rare combination — composer, performer, and engineer — now exploring the frontier of AI and music at Stanford. Her idea is ambitious: to build a machine-learning model trained on her entire musical history, then co-write an album with this “mirror” of herself. Not AI replacing the artist, but artist and algorithm learning from each other, shaping each other, and composing something new together, something neither could make alone.

Big idea.
Easy to dismiss.
Until you hear it working.

Every week she pushes fresh code to GitHub. She tests melodies with live audiences. She shares early tracks generated by the system — and they’re stunning. You can hear her progress. You can feel the momentum.

Her fans — myself included — are leaning in.

And beneath the album is something larger: a new way for people to make music. A new instrument. A breakthrough that changes how people compose and collaborate with AI.

Where breakthroughs live

These three signals — weird, wonderful, and working — are the clearest pattern we’ve seen after watching thousands of creators push the frontier forward.

Because that’s where breakthroughs come from.

If your work lives at the frontier — strange, beautiful, and in motion — you’re in the right place.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 4: Bad Forecast

New lovers and old friends

Eric and I move to SF and start work at Hangtime, the company that “acquired” us. It’s run by Karl Jacob, a man with the Midas touch. Every morning, he sails from Marin, docks at the yacht club, then rolls into the office on a foldable bike. I’m impressed.

I get an apartment in Hayes Valley—hipster heaven—with a roommate named Joe, a good natured alcoholic working in enterprise sales.

To make rent, we need one more roommate, so I convince my best friend Ross Ulbricht to join me in San Francisco. We grew up together, skater nerds in the straight-laced suburbs of West Lake. He always saw the world different. Picking up on bandwidths of light invisible to most.

Ross moves in, and it’s the endless summer. We start our days at Ocean Beach, surfing before work. Ross is fearless—he paddles out past the break, diving under waves that crash like mountains.

Then I meet Selena. Her dating profile says she runs a Pilates studio in Oakland—stunning, fit, smart—way out of my league, but I yolo it. She responds! On our first date, we kiss before saying hello. Her skinny, wiry body hums with energy as we walk through a Buckminster Fuller exhibit, unable to focus on anything but each other.

Soon it’s the three of us—me, Selena, and Ross. Inseparable. Dinner parties, game nights, camping trips. We create alter egos, our names backward—Sor, Anelas, and Anar forever!

Selena asks me to live with her. I charter a private hot air balloon, and propose to her at the top of the world. We get drunk on champagne and crash-land in a cow pasture.

For a while, my obsession fades. This is enough. This is everything.

The last time I see Ross, he borrows the White Wolf—my old Toyota pickup—to gather wood for a bonfire on the beach. I say I’ll meet him there but never make it. I picture him surrounded by friends, flames casting shadows, howling at the moon, free.

Double life sentence

I wake up with a jolt. My phone is exploding. DING! DING! DING! Missed calls, messages from reporters.

Did Ross create the Silk Road? Was he the Dread Pirate Roberts? Care to comment on your best friend’s billion-dollar, dark web, drug empire?

Blood drains from my brain—I feel dizzy.

Throwing on clothes, I call Ross’s mom. He’s at the Oakland jail. I grab my keys, ready to head out. Then—a knock on the door. Two FBI agents. “Just here to talk,” they say, repeating it until it sounds more like a threat.

Ross is a currency trader. No, he never mentioned running the Silk Road on the side. No, I don’t use Tor. No, I don’t know his password. No, no, no. And it’s the truth. Ross never told me—or anyone—about the Silk Road. He knew it would put us at risk.

Selena and I race to the Oakland jail. Guards lead us through metal detectors and steel doors to a concrete hall of empty booths. Ross waits, alone, swallowed in an oversized jumpsuit. He climbs onto his side of the table. I do the same. We press our hands to the glass. No words. Just pain.

In the years that follow—through the trial and endless appeals—I watch the scales of justice buckle, crushed under the state’s fat thumb. Two life sentences plus 40 years—for building a website.

I think back to Costa Rica—years earlier. Ross took me on a hike upriver, to a waterfall. Without hesitation, he scaled the rocks and dove in from the top. I stood frozen, heart pounding. It looked reckless. But Ross never jumped blindly. He took calculated risks. Still, sometimes he got the math wrong.

Ross risked everything for what he believed. What was I willing to risk?

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 6: Kaleidoscope

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In Part 1, we looked at why crypto’s obsession with finance is holding it back. Now let’s explore what comes next—how to build apps that feel less like trading terminals and more like living, breathing games.

Money → game currencies

We’ve now created millions of crypto currencies, which from a money standpoint makes little sense. The world mostly needs two types: Bitcoin to store value and stablecoins to spend it.

But if we’re building games, it makes perfect sense. In both video games and gamified web2 apps you find endless currencies. There’s freely earned soft currencies such as World of Warcraft gold, Twitch channel points, or Duolingo Gems. Or purchased hard currencies like Fortnite V-Bucks, Roblox Robux, and Tinder Super Likes.

Crypto rails unlock new benefits for game currencies. Game currencies can now outlive their original game or app, be resold on the open market, or potentially unlock benefits across other apps.

Investment tokens → resources

If we change the frame to crypto assets, we find a few good investments amongst an endless graveyard of scams, memes, and other odious excrements. We need fewer investment assets and more resources.

Games have many types of resources, like xp to mark progression, potions consumed for powerups, player stats like health, or crafting materials like ore.

We can spend our resources, although “spending” in games means something entirely different than in finance. You spend hit points in battle and mana on spells. On social media you spend reputation (measured by likes and follows) on a hot take. And in Duolingo you spend a life on a poor pronunciation attempt.

Resources do not compete with each other for liquidity. So unlike investments, each new resource is positive sum insofar as it creates a good experience for users. Resources can be used to push us toward our goals, help us learn, find love, create art, or simply infuse more fun into our daily lives.

The game design mindset

Crypto has been largely blind to game currencies because our founding ethos is the antithesis of game design.

Our cypherpunk forefathers knew currency issuers (governments) are not to be trusted, and therefore money must be decentralized. But game designers know players are not to be trusted (as they will exploit the economy at first chance), and therefore game currencies must be tightly controlled.

These values translate into polar opposite designs. Stablecoins and Bitcoin are meant to be universal, frictionless, and noncoercive. They are designed for entire economies and have stable monetary policy.

Game currencies are specific to just one game, and sometimes can only purchase one type of item within that game. They intentionally have limitations to manipulate player behavior and emotions. And their economics can change on the fly to create new game mechanics.

The story of crypto thus far is what happens when libertarian design collides headfirst at internet speed with unchecked human nature. This was appropriate for finance. But in the realm of consumer apps, where users have plentiful choice and low switching costs, we should change our builder mindset to the benevolent authoritarianism of game design.

At Artizen our votes were originally tied to a user’s Artifacts. Everything was “onchain and decentralized” as was the obsession in 2021. But this presented challenges, like users being able to move Artifacts and therefore their voting power between wallets and double vote.

We decided to bring votes offchain and treat them more like a game currency where we were in complete control. And not only did this allow us to greatly improve and expand upon our voting mechanic (with lots more yet to come), it sparked the core idea behind this article: that crypto apps should be built around game design.

NFTs: Assets → Collectibles

If tokens are the currencies and resources we spend, NFTs are the collectibles we hold on to. But Default Finance has made us forget that holding isn’t just for making money.

At age 12, I gave away my Pokémon binder. At 33, I’d do anything to get it back. Not because of what they’re now worth to the market, but because of what they’re worth to me. Collectibles preserve memories and emotions–like the exact moment I opened a holo Charizard–which is worth more to me than the market would ever pay.

Let’s explore how to make NFTs fun again, with resale being emergent, not the only reason to play.

Imbue metadata with meaning

An NFT’s value should come from story, utility, or art, not manufactured scarcity. A 10k supply is so conspicuous that it breaks the fourth wall, signaling the collection is an investment. Design first and foremost around meaning and let scarcity be secondary. Better yet, turn trait rarities and supply caps into diegetically meaningful characteristics.

For example, I previously worked on charity Impact Certificates:

Imagine an NFT that represents a real planted tree: the attributes describe the type of tree and forest; the art is nature themed; the video is the proof of it being planted; and the collection size equals the actual number of planted trees.

By crafting meaningful characteristics you elevate your NFT from an ephemeral bull market hot potato into a timeless collectible.

(And your NFTs don’t have to map to the real world. Just give them in-world meaning within your app, like an item in a game.)

Upgrade the form factor

Just as physical collectibles come in many forms: Beanie Baby dolls, Pokemon cards, Tech Deck boards, Pog discs, and Tamagotchi gadgets, digital collectibles should likewise. Yet most NFTs are treated as artwork in most app UIs. This is Default Finance thinking, as art is a traditionally investable category (with auction houses and billionaire collectors), whereas only a select few game collectibles have ever achieved investment status.

Under the hood NFTs are shapeless data: a json file with a few key-value pairs. Let form follow function. Imagine new ways for NFTs to take form in your apps to create new collectible categories and new types of value.

Gestalts, not JPEGs

Most NFT collections treat only the image as the art and the rest of the metadata as supporting details. This is a skeuomorphic interpretation of NFT art.

The OpenSea standard has nine metadata slots, with attributes being an arbitrarily long list. Not to mention, you can add additional metadata beyond the standard. Instead of confining art to the image_url, treat each piece of metadata as a “brushstroke” and the entire NFT as the “painting.” The full potential of an NFT is not to be a JPEG but a gestalt of layered metadata.

And once you’ve created a gestalt, do not outsource your UX to the NFT marketplaces that display every NFT in identical cookie-cutter fashion: image here, title there, attributes below. It’s like crafting an elegant dish, then having it sorted into the little plastic compartments of a cafeteria tray on the way to the table.

At Artizen, what makes an Artifact meaningful will be different from project to project. Some will unlock rewards. Others will be standalone works of art. Some might be pieces of a larger whole, like characters or items in a story.

And, in time, we aim to enable every creator to authentically distill the essence of their project and create collectibles that their supporters cherish, regardless of market conditions.

Level-up your language

It’s not just the game resources themselves but the way we talk about them that shapes the user experience.

Imaginative limitation

If your app has users mint, stake, and burn you not only sound just like everybody else, you inherit the semantic shackles of these terms. Stake implies locking tokens to earn yield. But equip could unlock power ups, abilities, or cosmetic upgrades.

Users no longer care what is happening beneath the hood. Replace technical terms with whimsical ones to create a richer experience.

Finance pollution

Remove finance language, as it takes users out of the game and on to the trading floor.

Just because a token is onchain, doesn’t mean you have to call it by its $ticker. The $ticker suggests these things are like stocks, not game currencies. Your tokens can be called shards or essence, or any other name that creates immersion and thematically aligns with your app.

Do this across your entire app. Even universal terms like wallet can potentially be renamed to inventory to add unique flavor to your app.

App legibility

STEP’N, the gamified move-to-earn app, had users earning two tokens: $GST and $GMT. What the hell are GST and GMT? The names give no clue to their use. Games let us chop trees to get wood to build houses. Or collect herbs to make potions, which we know to be powerups.

Use familiar terms to keep your app intuitive. Users can keep track of dozens of game currencies, their uses, and conversion rates–if designed properly. But they will quickly get lost with just a few unfamiliar names or concepts.

From day one, set out to build a gamified experience. Ruthlessly delete adopted finance concepts that don’t belong. And only once you’ve created a fun and user-friendly experience can you intentionally add just the right amount of finance back in.

This guided us while building Artizen:

1. First create an app that is beneficial for creators and rewarding for fans.

2. Keep things user friendly and not too “crypto-y.”

3. And only once we have the basic foundation in place, add in an investment token that will help boost growth and funding platform-wide.

Add finance without sacrificing game feel

What if you want to give users ownership, juice user acquisition, or raise capital for your company? How can you add finance benefits without over financializing your UX?

The 60-30-10 Rule

In UI design, there’s a common default color ratio: 60-30-10. Sixty percent of the interface is whitespace. Thirty percent is black text. And just ten percent, the brand color, highlights key interactive elements.

We can apply similar thinking to add just the right amount of finance to our app economy.

60% - Currencies & Resources

Currencies and resources shape your core mechanics, controlling pacing, gating, or progression.

They’re lives like Duolingo Hearts; actions like Tinder Swipes; credits like Midjourney image generation requests; or soft currencies like World of Warcraft gold.

There are soft currencies that are typically freely earned through gameplay. And purchased hard currencies that buy premium loot and upgrades.

30% - Collectibles

Collectibles make games more rewarding.

They’re the unique Pudgy Party characters that grant in-game abilities; guns and attachments in Call of Duty; or League of Legends skins. These collectibles can potentially be resold but they should be primarily designed for players not speculators.

Collectibles can also be achievements like Duolingo streak milestones or GitHub contribution trophies but these should not be purchasable.

10% - Investments

Investments are your only assets designed primarily for speculation and financial return.

Investments should serve a purpose that is outside your core app ux, like rewarding early users, or boosting growth. Said differently, users should be able to have a complete experience without ever touching an investment.

If you want to weave investments into your app, you might reward investment holders with your non-investment game currencies. But don’t do the reverse: don’t primarily reward users in your volatile currency (e.g. play to earn) thrusting everyone into a PvP finance experience.

Is an asset a collectible or an investment?

If the resale price of the asset can go to $0 and still have value to users, it’s a collectible. But if the price goes to zero and users bring out the pitchforks, it’s an investment (or was anyway).

How 60-30-10 preserves game feel

Risk management

Default Finance apps nakedly expose users to financial risk. For example, they reward users with a volatile currency but fail to warn how the market can render the currency worthless.

With investments capped at 10%, you can now treat them more like ranked or hardcore mode, where users opt in and you signal there is permadeath risk. Not every player can handle hardcore so let users choose their preferred difficulty.

Value signaling

Too many Default Finance apps have a UX that is like: “stake your $butts utility token to earn $farts governance token, and also buy our $tp NFT collection.” Problem is, users quickly lose track of which is most valuable: the $butts, the $farts, or the $tp.

In games, users can keep track of many resources because each has a distinct purpose, presentation, and value. Save the $ticker symbol for your investment assets. Then use other design treatments to differentiate your currencies and collectibles.

Economic control

Investors and gamers are both ruthless. They exploit value gaps, discover arbitrage, hack, grief, and invent unanticipated strategies that destabilize entire economies. The difference is game developers can patch on the fly. Finance devs have limited options.

Control your currencies and resources in a smart contract that allows fine-tuned permissions, or keep them offchain altogether. Let collectibles be resold, but tightly manage the faucets, transaction fees, and the marketplace. Only let investments be at the whim of the market.

This way 60-30-10 ensures 90% of your app is mostly under your control for when your users inevitably find exploits.

What 60-30-10 looks like at Artizen

Artizen’s game currency is Votes (offchain soft currency). Users vote to boost potential funding for their favorite projects. Users get free votes on signup and can earn more by taking various actions throughout the app.

Our collectible is Artifacts (NFTs). Users financially support their favorite projects by buying their Artifacts. Artifacts grant rewards from the project, Artizen app utility, and potential financial ROI.

Lastly we have our ART token, which is an investment in the overall success of the platform and our creators. ART will grant in-app powerups but you won’t need to own it to take core actions.

Just like in UI design, 60-30-10 is a guide. Assets won’t always fall into these exact buckets but rather along spectrums of e.g. developer control or market risk. Proportion carefully to keep your economy healthy.

The end game

It’s time to try something different.

The consensus in Crypto is a future in which everything is a gamble. Let’s create a future in which everything is a game.

Ironically, once we stop focusing on finance we might all make more money. Because a rising tide of gamified apps that are fun and useful (and don’t rug our users) is the elusive PvE everyone has been searching for.

Love,
Nate Van Cleve
Head of Product at Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week.

Read Previous → Episode 3: Hurricane Party

The big nothing

After SXSW, we have a flurry of investor meetings, a handful of promises, and a feeling we were right on the edge of something huge. But then… nothing. Dead silence. No follow-ups, no checks. And, without the promise of free booze, our app flatlines. We’d been paying people to party. The minute the party stopped, so did our growth.

I was running on fumes and out of ideas. But my co-founder, Eric? He still had his head in the game. He’d found religion with the Lean Startup methodology—listening to users, testing hypotheses, pivoting based on what you learn. Like an anthropologist discovering a new tribe called “customers.”

While I wallowed, Eric interviewed users. That summer, everyone was obsessed with Foursquare, checking in to bars and restaurants for sport. But there was a flaw—seeing where your friends were now didn’t help you meet up. By the time you spotted a check-in, they were already out the door.

So, we have an idea: Foursquare for the future. Instead of announcing where you are, you forecast where you’re going to be. We build an app where friends post their plans for the next 24 hours—a crystal ball for your social life.

We’d call it Forecast.

The team throws together a prototype, and we start Forecasting with friends. Then, one day, we get our first real spike in growth—ten thousand downloads in a single day. Eric and I look like idiots, grinning ear to ear, high-fiving.

A few weeks later, we get the ultimate validation: Dennis Crowley, the founder of Foursquare—the guy on the actual cover of WIRED, the god of check-ins himself—downloads Forecast. And not only that, he Forecasts a party at our friend’s office. So, naturally, we crash it. There we are, hanging out with Dens, the king of startups, basking in the glow of what we’re sure is our big break.

With momentum on our side, we raise more money—a lovely investor named Art who made his fortune in chinchillas, and Klaus von Sayn-Wittgenstein, a German aristocrat who calls us as he drives through the Swiss Alps. “I heard about zis Party app. It sounds vahld! I vant to invest.”

We’re on top of the world. Money, users, and an app with serious buzz.

Facebook acquisition

I get invited to a pitch event in the Bay Area. Pacing my little booth, I look up to see a skinny kid handing me his card. He’s from Facebook. FACEBOOK?! He gives a polite nod and says the magic words:

“Have you ever thought about an acquisition?”

Could this be it? The real golden ticket? Just a few months ago, Facebook bought Beluga from my friends for millions. Now Facebook was giving us the nod. Were we next?

A few days later, we touch down in Menlo Park and head straight to Facebook HQ. The team splits up, each person disappearing into a different room, off to prove their worth in technical meetings and code reviews. My interview is with Justin Shaffer, founder of Hot Potato, recently absorbed by the mothership. He’s handsome in that scruffy, too-cool-to-care way. And unnervingly self confident.

He peppers me with gentle, open-ended questions. I shift uncomfortably, and pull out my notebook. “Here,” I say, pointing to a scribbled mess of circles and arrows. “This is my creative process.”

The diagram is a figure-eight. Expand the idea space, then simplify. Build then delete delete delete. Two harmonic waves rising and falling. Justin studies my doodle, lifts an eyebrow.

“What metric would you track to increase time spent on Newsfeed?”

It takes them a few days to get back to us, but I already know the deal is dead. Facebook is for engineers, not artists. Or maybe I’m just not good enough…

The breakup

We get back to Austin, defeated. Then Apple changes their permissions, killing our viral loop. Growth slows, then stops. Once again, dead in the water.

Meanwhile, our officemate, Courtney Powell, gets into 500 Startups. It’s the Yale of accelerators, second best only to YC. Suddenly our lead engineers, A.T. Fouty and Richard McClellan, want to talk. They walk me and Eric out behind the office, into the alley, like an execution. A.T. takes the lead.

“We’re leaving. Courtney offered us co-founder roles. We’re going to 500.”

Richard—our tall, goofy iOS dev with the insane laugh, the soul of the team, a being of pure light and joy, with a plaque at Pluckers for eating 1,000 wings, who’d one day marry Courtney—starts to speak but chokes up.

I nod, swallowing hard. “You should do it.” And I mean it, even as my guts twist. Eric and I press on. We need cash, fast. I fly to New York, LA, SF—pitch anyone who’ll listen. But no one bites. The check-in fad is over.

Then I get an email from Josh Felser at Freestyle Capital. One of his portfolio companies needs a mobile design team. “Would you be interested in an acqui-hire?” We’re out of money and options. We take the deal. At least we’ll have jobs, stick together, get to the Bay Area.

But it feels like a death.

I pack up my South Austin shack, break up with my girlfriend of eight years, and say goodbye to my old life. Leaving hurts. It still hurts. My heart will always be in Texas.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 5: Risking Everything

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In crypto, every app is a finance app. But what if this is wrong?

Today, crypto apps are Default Finance. By default, tokens are treated as money and stock. Builders focus on token price, supply dynamics, and financial engineering. And users expect to make money.

This works for actual finance like lending, perpetuals, and payments. DeFi can be DeFi. But for consumer categories like social, learning, fitness, creator tools, or entertainment, we should default to building apps more like games.

The gamer spirit burns in crypto’s millennial and gen-z user base. We’ve grown up farming gold, collecting items, and min-maxing economies. But through the Default Finance lens, this energy has been channeled into degenerate speculation.

Creating apps through a game design lens, aka Default Game, is how we’ll build useful, enduring apps that take consumer crypto mainstream.

This is how we are building Artizen. Instead of creating yet another speculative trading app, we want to create something fun, fair, and rewarding for all our users.

The cult of Default Finance

How did we get Default Finance?

First there was Bitcoin. Then Ethereum. Then ERC-20s, programmable money, stablecoins, and DeFi. And tech aside, speculation was everywhere. It was natural to assume all crypto apps should be built around finance.

Beyond finance, builders copied the ethos of the founding projects. Bitcoin needed decentralization, but then, all crypto apps were dApps, all crypto finance was DeFi, and all crypto organizations were DAOs, whether decentralization was necessary or not. Features followed suit: staking, originally a blockchain security mechanism, became universal, often meaning ponzi yield. And we copied design assumptions. Layer 1 tokens naturally merge utility with investment. But then every crypto app token tried to graft utility to investment despite having completely different dynamics.

DeFi may indeed be the Future of Finance–but applying a finance ux across all consumer crypto apps is just another copying act. Default Game is not just a superficial reskin from finance to games, but a clean break from cargo-cult design to first-principles.

Game design > finance

Why is Default Finance a failed paradigm and how can Default Game fix it?

Default Finance

Default Finance means building consumer apps through a finance lens. It has numerous failure modes:

• Developer greed
  The possibility of a hot token launch and quick millions can pervert the incentives of otherwise noble devs. It also attracts outright scammers.

• Mercenary Users

  Default Finance brings users who only want money. “Wen token??” This mercenary user base is counterproductive to finding true product market fit.

• Sharks and minnows

  Consumers aren’t finance savvy. PvP finance apps turn retail users into shark bait. Every single time.

• Limited UX

  If an app is Default Finance the UX boils down to “number go up.” This crowds out more interesting possibilities.

Default Game

Default Game means building consumer apps of all kinds (not just video games) through a game design lens. Done right, it has the potential to fix Default Finance’s shortcomings:

• Easy to understand

  Games abstract complexity through intuitive mechanics. Points, items, and levels are easier to understand than perpetuals, impermanent loss, and liquid restaking.

• Unlimited UX

  Games can be anything: fun, scary, challenging, adventurous, puzzling, or competitive. And everyone can have a good outcome because entertainment is positive-sum.

• Better design levers

  Game design is more versatile than finance tokenomics design. Progression, quests, soft currencies, faucets, sinks, gameplay loops, and more all let game devs craft the perfect experience.

Beyond ux, it’s clear crypto’s user base lives and breathes games.

We’re all gamers now. 77% of Millennials and 81% of Gen Z play video games. Globally, 3.3 billion gamers spend 1.5 trillion hours gaming per year. Even the richest and busiest man in the world speed runs Diablo 4 in his spare time.

Gaming concepts are already widespread in crypto. We use terms like Meta and PvP, and PvE, to talk about trading. Many apps like Artizen have seasons. Communities do raids to shill their tokens. NFTs can be soulbound.

I’m not the first to say gaming will be mainstream. OGs like EllioTrades have been rightly saying this for years–but only half right. Because it’s not that crypto video games will be mainstream, but that all consumer crypto will become gamified. Gamify, not GameFi.

We’ve only just begun to adopt this design philosophy at Artizen. Much of our effort to date has gone into building core infrastructure, things like payments, wallets, and match funding math.

But if you squint, you can start to see the game taking shape:

• Our voting points are like a soft game currency, freely earned on signup and for doing beneficial things like attending live streams. Votes give everyone, regardless of their wealth, the ability to participate.

• Artifacts are primarily like collectible skins or items, not speculative assets. (Although they do have potential financial upside as well!)

• And like games, we have seasons. Going forward, seasons will progress more frequently, constantly presenting new gameplay mechanics from Artizen and new content from creators.

The goal is to use fun to keep everyone engaged, attract new users, and create a game that is rewarding for everyone.

In Part 2, we’ll explore how to reimagine tokens and NFTs, like our Voting Points and Artifacts, to create a rich, positive-sum game experience.

Love,
Nate Van Cleve
Head of Product at Artizen

Read Next → Default Game: Part 2

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week until the story ends or the rocket explodes.

Read Previous → Episode 2: Everyone is Barfing

Last time on OBSESSED: I got my first greenlight from MTV, watched it turn into a barf-soaked disaster, and found myself back in Austin with Jen and Kip—the spark of a new idea flickering.

I become the asshole

I was gutted, but not ready to give up. MTV might have bailed, but I loved our show. So I negotiated the rights back, ready to hit the street.

By then, it was 2006, and YouTube was blowing up—suddenly, making TV for the internet wasn’t so crazy. A friend tipped me off to a new company in Austin called OnNetworks. They raised $16 million to produce high-quality, low-budget shows for the web. It sounded perfect. I cold-called them, and somehow got a meeting with the co-founders Jen and Kip. They listened to my pitch, asked thoughtful questions, and treated me as a peer, even though I was just a snot-nosed kid.

Shockingly, they ordered a full season—renamed

Backpack Picnic. We got paid $10,000 per episode—just enough to scrape by. But more importantly, we got creative freedom.

After a year of working together, Jen and Kip offered me a full-time role. This was my first “real job.” And I was getting paid to do exactly what I loved—scouting talent, funding projects, and helping creators bring their visions to life. Living the dream.

But the dream had a cost. My inbox began to swell with pitches from hopeful creators. Between meetings, shoots, and the endless stream of project proposals, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

And then, like every overworked junior exec, I start taking shortcuts. Famous names? Check. Friends’ projects? Sure. Anything that looked, felt, or vaguely smelled like something that had worked before? Rubber-stamped. Safe bets were all I could handle.

A queasy feeling builds inside of me. Have I become the asshole? The guy I hated when I was on the other side of the table? The gatekeeper who decides which projects live or die for bullshit reasons. A cog in the loaded slot machine, where the suits get rich, and the artists go broke.

That’s when the whiteboard comes out.

Hurricane party!

“It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner. But for money!” Jen and Kip stare at me like a crazy person. Oh shit. I’m totally fired.

Only—they don’t fire me. Instead, Jen and Kip exchange a look. “This is... actually pretty cool,” Jen says. “I mean, there’s no way we’re building this at OnNetworks. But you might be onto something.”

Hurrah! I’m not insane.

“You know, what you’re doing here has got a name. It’s called Design.” Kip explains that the best designers don’t just build products; they reimagine how entire systems work.

My life as a filmmaker is over. A new path opens up, clear and burning with purpose. Off to design school I go. But I hate it. The professors all have boners for Edward Tufte. We spend an entire year just talking about maps.

Kip comes to the rescue. “Check out Capital Factory,” he tells me about a new accelerator in Austin. “Great way to learn about startups.”

I want to apply with my Big Idea—the magic vacuum cleaner in the sky, hoovering up capital, raining cash on creators—but it feels too ambitious and weird for a first-time founder. I need a warmup idea, something on trend, to prove I’ve got my finger on the pulse.

What if we build an app to create flashmobs with your friends? Two people bump phones, we find mutual contacts, and text: “Party happening now! Get here fast!” Each new person bumps, the invites keep spreading, the flashmob keeps growing.

We’d call it Hurricane Party.

I pull in my friends Eric Katerman and Avram Dodson, we pitch to Capital Factory—and get in. $20,000 and twelve weeks to turn our crazy idea into a business.

Titans of the Austin tech scene—Josh Baer, Mikey Trafton, Russell Hinds, Jason Cohen—cram hard-earned startup lessons through our thick skulls with a sledgehammer. 72-hour work sprints, sleeping under the desk. Our office has no AC after 5 p.m. and none on weekends. Texas, in summer. By Sunday, we’re all in our underwear, sweating it out. The air barely moves—if anyone farts, it just hangs there. We call it “baby pants.” Gross, miserable, but the intensity is addictive.

Our goal? Launch by SXSW. Twitter and Foursquare had blown up there, and we’re determined to be the next breakout hit. Our plan? Golden Tickets. We hand out brass cards to influencers—each with an engraved code—and if they throw a Hurricane Party, I show up on my scooter and buy drinks for the bar. Brilliant in theory. In reality? Pure hell. Out till 3 a.m., buying booze for tech bros.

Then comes the “big one”: tech writer Robert Scoble calls in his Golden Ticket. The whole team races over, giddy to meet him. But as I ply the great Scobleizer with margaritas and cupcakes, it hits me—what the hell am I doing? I hate bars, I hate drinking.

But it works—I open our app and see hurricanes spinning all over Austin.

Then I find out we’ve been nominated for “Best New App at SXSW.” We rally everyone to vote. We start to climb the leaderboard, beating apps like Uber, Instagram, and GroupMe, until we’re neck-and-neck with just one: LocalMind. Every time they bump up a slot, I stare at the founder’s name—Lenny Rachitsky—and curse. “Fucking Lenny! Just give up already!” Lenny is now a friend and advisor to Artizen, but at the time I hated him with the fury of 1,000 suns.

It’s down to the wire, but we win the bullshit poll! We win SXSW!

I ride a wave of momentum into Demo Day, the culmination of Capital Factory, where we pitch to a roomful of investors.

Naval Ravikant gives the intro talk. I climb on stage and nail my pitch. The stars are aligning. We’re gonna raise millions, go viral, and make the cover of WIRED.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 4: Bad Forecast

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In crypto, there’s a term of art: infinite money glitch. It’s the holy grail—a hypnotic feedback loop that seems to print money forever.

Mostly they’re scams. But every now and then, you get a breakthrough.

The bad kind you already know: ponzinomics like BitConnect, reflexive death spirals like Terra/LUNA, and meme coins—too many to name—that go parabolic and then collapse. What makes them bad isn’t just volatility—it’s that there’s no floor. Nothing anchors them to reality. When the story fades, the bottom falls out.

The good kind of infinite money glitch is different. It still feels magical—but it’s grounded in reality.

Bitcoin has it. A simple rule—supply cuts in half every few years—creates digital scarcity people can trust. Ethereum has it too. Every transaction burns a little bit of ETH, making the network more valuable the more it’s used. And Uniswap has it. Each trade generates real fees that attract more traders and more liquidity.

These loops are self-reinforcing, but they’re not imaginary. They work because they’re tied to something real: computation, liquidity, security, demand.

At Artizen, we think we’ve discovered a new glitch.

Buying ART mints new tokens or purchases them on the open market—whichever is cheaper—while a cut of every transaction flows into the Artizen Endowment. Each ART token is backed by our treasury and redeemable for US dollars at a floor price that climbs over time. And with a minting price that doubles on a fixed schedule, ART trades between an exponential ceiling and a rising floor.

But the most powerful glitches don’t just run on math. They run on belief.

Memes are how belief spreads. They’re the emotional layer of the glitch, the stories we tell each other that keep the flywheel spinning.

When you’re inside an infinite money glitch, it feels electric.

Numbers go up. Charts explode. Your phone buzzes with dopamine. It feels like you’ve hacked the universe—money just appearing out of thin air. That’s the magic of meme coins when they moon.

You feel the belief crystallize into value.

But that feeling is an illusion if there’s nothing real underneath. Once the hype fades, gravity pulls everything back to zero. The party ends because there’s no foundation—just belief suspended over a void.

And to be clear: memes do have value. They’re collective hallucinations that can move markets and reshape culture.

The trick is to build something real before the meme dies.

A few projects have done it: CryptoPunks, Dogecoin, Nouns, Bonk. They didn’t just mint memes—they built on them. They harnessed the energy of speculation to raise billions, and used that momentum to cross the chasm from hype to reality.

Our meme is simple: build the largest endowment for human creativity.

Two weeks ago we launched the Artizen Endowment with $4 million. It’s already grown by $360,000. If we can push to $6 million in the next 29 days—when the price of ART doubles—I believe we can hit $10 million by year’s end. It will be excruciatingly hard, but if we do, suddenly growing the Endowment to $100 million next year—and to a billion and beyond a few years later—doesn’t sound so crazy.

That’s the self-fulfilling prophecy of our meme. Every dollar we raise, every milestone we hit, makes the next one more inevitable.

Because belief compounds.

Of course, the same dynamics that make this system soar can also send it spiraling. That’s how memes work—they can run in reverse. The feedback loop that compounds belief can just as easily unwind it. If we miss a milestone, if a smart contract fails, if confidence cracks, the same reflexive forces that drive us up could pull us down.

That’s the real test of any system like this: whether it has enough grounding in reality to survive the market shocks that will inevitably come.

And that’s why we believe Artizen is the good kind of glitch.

It’s built on real foundations. The dollars that flow into the Revnet are locked in USDC—fully transparent and redeemable at a rising floor. Each token is backed by the Endowment’s treasury, fueled by real platform revenue and our growing collection of cultural Artifacts of lasting value.

So even if belief wavers or momentum slows, the structure remains. The floor holds. And the cycle can restart. It’s belief—anchored to reality.

If we’re right, this becomes a perpetual motion machine for creativity—each transaction feeding the culture that gives it value.

That’s the real money glitch.

Not infinite wealth for speculators, but infinite support for creators.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week until the story ends or the rocket explodes.

Read Previous → Episode 1: Spark of Inspiration

From the age of eight, I was obsessed with filmmaking. Claymation first, then 3D animation and lots and lots of weird docs in high school, followed by short films, musicals and music videos, underwater madness, mockumentaries, and real documentaries.

I get a free ride through film school, but as graduation looms, I’m haunted by the same question every artist must ask: How the fuck do I pay my bills?

I need a hit. Something big—something that will launch my career.

One night, after improv class, I stumble into a performance by the Edmond Bulldogs. Most sketch makes me cringe, but this is different—absurd, oddly wholesome, and piss-your-pants funny. After the show, I introduce myself to Mitch and Dave, the performers.

“Hey, want to make a pilot?”

Little do they know I’ve got zero experience in the TV industry. But I do have a credit card with a $10,000 limit. And, it turns out, that’s enough.

Two months later, we wrap the pilot. And it’s not crap. I’ve made lots of crap, so I know crap. This is not crap. Might even be good. But what now? How do you sell a TV show?

I camp at Barnes & Noble. Every book screams: get an agent! The magical gatekeepers of Hollywood. I didn’t know any, but my friend Nick Jayanty—big personality, missing a tooth—seems perfect for the role. Nick cold-calls every network. Weeks of silence. Then, out of nowhere, the phone rings.

It’s Jackie French, a big-time producer at MTV. Somehow, a friend of a friend got our pilot to her assistant, who played it for the interns. They loved it. And, apparently, laughs from the interns is the gold standard. We fly to LA and pitch MTV’s head honcho, an intimidating woman with dead eyes—mob boss in a floral muumuu. She likes that the interns like it.

Greenlight!

Everyone is barfing

MTV gives us $350,000 to reshoot the episode—an amount so huge I have no idea how to spend it. But we find ways. Our ragtag team balloons to a crew of 60 professionals. Executive producers, line producers, associate producers... God, why do we have so many producers?!

After months of grinding, we’re finally ready to shoot.

Day one, disaster strikes. I arrive on set buzzing with excitement, only to discover half my crew got botulism last night at dinner. People are in the hospital, barfing their guts out. We soldier on, but the barfing spreads. The Texas heat is merciless. Like an oven, we bake on set—the air thick with the hot stench of barf. My stomach churns. I run outside to barf between takes.

Soon, everyone is barfing.

By the end of the day, I’m drenched, exhausted, and questioning every life choice that led me here. The only laughter on set is the delirious, half-crazed kind that bubbles up between dry heaves.

Miraculously, the crew pulls through, and a week later, we finish the shoot. I lock myself in a dark room, chugging Red Bull, furiously editing. We add flashy visual effects, an original score—the works.

It looks incredible. I ship it off to LA for a test screening.

As a victory lap, I rewatch the original pilot—funded with credit cards. But after five minutes, panic sets in.

What have I done? The old pilot is better. Way better. It’s weird, authentic, and the jokes land. The new version? Over produced, flat, and forced. Fuck! I just blew $350,000.

A week later, Jackie calls. It’s a pass. The interns don’t like it anymore.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 3: Hurricane Party

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Every enduring system needs rhythm — a heartbeat that governs how it grows.

In nature, we find rhythm in the seasons and in the tides. In economics, the markets move in cycles of boom and bust. For the Artizen Endowment, our rhythm is the minting price of ART tokens.

Money flows in. ART flows out. Each mint happens at a price that doubles on a fixed schedule. One dollar today buys twice as much ART as it will in the next cycle. The pattern repeats—steady, simple, unstoppable.

Like Bitcoin, the minting schedule is locked in code:

• Genesis: three short cycles, each doubling every 35 days

• Growth: seven cycles, each doubling every 120 days

• Scale: annual cycles, doubling every 365 days — forever

Our issuance schedule allows the supply of ART to grow quickly at first—fueling the Endowment’s expansion—then slow as it matures. This mirrors how growth unfolds in nature and in markets: rapid acceleration that gradually tapers at scale. It’s a rhythm that rewards early believers while welcoming new participants along the way.

But how do we keep ART from endlessly inflating?

Every time someone buys ART, our smart contract checks two prices: the current minting price and the open market price. If the market price is lower, it buys ART from the market. If minting is cheaper, it creates new tokens. This happens automatically with all purchases—no humans in the loop, no switches to flip.

Early on, the minting price will often be cheaper, so more ART will be created. But as the price doubles cycle after cycle, minting becomes rarer. Over time, most new capital will flow into buying ART from the open market instead of minting new tokens. There’s no single turning point—just a smooth, continuous transition from expansion to equilibrium.

Redemptions close the loop. Holders can burn ART at any time to redeem USDC from the Endowment. Each burn reduces supply, tightening scarcity across the system. A 10% fee applies to every redemption—rewarding patience, feeding value back into the Endowment, and gradually lifting the floor for everyone who remains.

Together, these mechanics—minting, buying, and burning—keep the system in balance. When capital flows in, new ART can be created. When demand shifts to the market, supply tightens. When holders redeem, supply contracts further. What begins as inflationary growth gradually becomes fixed, and eventually deflationary, as scarcity takes hold.

The result is a market that rewards conviction. The earlier and longer you hold, the more the system works in your favor. A rising floor protects the downside. A doubling ceiling pulls value upward. Between them, the market breathes—expanding and contracting with trust, participation, and time.

A new engine for creative capital—designed to scale, built to last.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

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OBSESSED is a living memoir of my 17-year quest to build Artizen — from idea to escape velocity and beyond. New episodes every week until the story ends or the rocket explodes.

Here it is. The brutal truth of how I built Artizen into an “overnight success” after nearly two decades in the salt mines. We’ve awarded millions to creators and built something people want to be a part of.

Artizen might still explode. A thousand things could trigger a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” But for the first time, we’ve reached escape velocity—and I can see the stars.

Now is the time to tell our story. The story of grit—five failed startups, bankruptcy, and countless panic attacks. The story of rage at our broken institutions—stiffing the artists, scientists, and builders who make the world rich. And the story of love—friends who believed in me, family who sacrificed for me, and my wife, who stood by me as I set our life on fire.

But mostly this is the story of obsession—the kind that fuels you, haunts you, and keeps you tethered to the mast until the ship sinks or the storm break.

Because obsession beats talent.
Obsession beats discipline.
Obsession wins.

Spark of inspiration

It’s 2007. I’ve been awake for 49 hours, gripped by creative mania. My boss, Jen Grogono, and her co-founder, Kip McClanahan, stand frozen. An explosion of post-it notes and whiteboards fill my office. Diagrams, mind maps, flow charts—every inch covered in wild ideas, the fever dream of a mad scientist.

Jen and Kip hired me to help scale content at OnNetworks. This? This wasn’t in the job description. But after a soul-crushing decade in the entertainment industry, I finally cracked.

The way we fund art, music, movies, culture… it’s broken. The hoops we force creators to jump through, the impossible odds stacked against them. It’s a rigged game with dumb rules that reward conformity over creativity.

And then it hits me—the spark of inspiration. If it’s all just a game, why not flip the board? Invent a new game for creators to play. Open to everyone. With fair rules. Where fans and companies team up to fund the best projects. Where creators compete on merit, not insider connections. Where projects win by making a real impact.

I gather all the whiteboards in my small, windowless office. For two days straight, I scribble, erase, and redraw. Each mark feels like a revelation, a breakthrough. Finally, it’s done! Adrenaline surging, I march down the hall to summon Jen and Kip.

“It’s like a giant vacuum cleaner. But for money!” I point at some dotted arrows on the whiteboard. “You see, it sucks up all the cash. But instead of dumping the cash in the trash, we blast that vacuum in reverse and make it rain on creators!”

Jen and Kip stare at me like a crazy person.

Oh shit. I’m totally fired.

Five generations of poor artists

My mom is a jazz singer. My dad is a composer and author. My uncle Paul played sax with Leonard Cohen. And my uncle Eagle was an indie filmmaker whose debut feature, The Whole Shootin’ Match, inspired Robert Redford to create Sundance. Grandma Lolo was in the movies and played in my grandpa’s big band. And my great-grandpa was a vaudevillian acrobat who performed with all the greats like The Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, and Blackstone the Magician.

Growing up surrounded by creative people taught me the joy, beauty, and power of art. But it also laid bare a harsh truth: being an artist often meant living on the edge, a constant hustle to make ends meet. In my family, art was never about making money—it was a calling. And yet, the toll it took was real. Being an artist feels like a vow of poverty.

But I was happy to take the vow. My DNA demanded it.

Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen

Read Next → Episode 2: Everyone is Barfing

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