Welcome back, Pilgrim. Here’s what’s happened in town since you’ve been away…
Welcome back to the Reformer Newsletter, where we can take a dive into various projects and activities from around Web3 and across the Christian community. You have joined this network to contribute to our collective mission of building for Christ’s Kingdom, and we will use this newsletter as a platform to enable that.
Around Web3
Blockchains are Digital Countries: Lyle McKeany over at Invisible College drops an excellent theoretical discussion on how best to think about individual blockchains, their “citizens” and assets.
The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books: Given our unique place as People of the Book, here is an absolute goldmine for Reformers and Pilgrims to sift and theorycraft. A great longform piece from Elle Griffin, a prolific web2 novelist on Substack currently exploring web3 publishing.
Crypto’s Missing Breakout: I don’t agree with everything in this well-reasoned and beautifully-stated essay, and you probably won’t either. But you owe it to yourself to digest this fascinating piece from Return.
The Trap of AI Consciousness: It’s not (at the time of this writing) a main topic in web3, but this deep meditation on how Christians should approach issues of machine learning and digital consciousness from Adam Graber at FaithTech was too good not to include.
Project Spotlight | Carbon12
If Pr0ph3t’s recent essay Independent Subversive Networks was turned into a Balaji-esque network state, then Carbon12 just might be it’s currency of choice. According to the founders, the Carbon12 ecosystem “is designed to build churches & establish a parallel economy of believers that cannot be disrupted by centralized authority.” This Avalanche-based token ecosystem has a roadmap intended build out an AR social network environment hosted immutably on Arweave, a peer-to-peer shared computational network, and APIs to allow ministries to integrate blockchain-based tithing complete with tokenomic loss protection against value decay in the underlying C12 token.
If this sounds incredibly ambitions, it definitely is. However, it is also exactly the kind of ambition that Reformers exists to encourage. In addition to world-class artistic endeavors and creative implementations of existing technology, we see a future in which Christians harness web3 tools to create fully functioning ecosystems which resource and strengthen the global Church. The fast-changing nature of this space means that we have no way of guaranteeing whether projects like Carbon12 will succeed in becoming “the Christian reserve currency,” but it seems almost inevitable that something like this ecosystem will need to exist in the future to allow the Church to launch a new Reformation using the full power of the blockchain printing press.
Reformers Essay Series
The Reformers community is a network of Christ followers who believe there is an opportunity to spread the Gospel Truth by using the next generation of digital tools we have available, commonly referred to as “web3” or “crypto” tools. We believe this can be accomplished both by educating and connecting Christians in this space, as well as evangelizing to creators, builders, and doers across web3. We can look to past heroes of the faith and study how they operated and engaged in the era in which they were placed so we can learn how to navigate these exciting times.
This week we will look at the life of the Patriarch Joseph as he provides an example for how a manager can apply his talent for stewardship to transforming the institutions and systems of the world to glorify God.
Check out the essay Joseph, Patron Saint of Middle and Upper Management now on Mirror
The Call
The Reformers is a community of Christ followers who want to continuously explore new tools which can extend the reach of His Kingdom. If you want to lean in and support that mission, check out a Reformers NFT, become a patron of the community, get news and updates to start building with us, and help us run this race with endurance.