Crypto is a show we’ve seen before - and it’s absolutely epic. At the last Renaissance, communities recreated their world. They transformed their medieval world into the modern world that we know today. Everyday people set up wallets for double-entry bookkeeping and created a proto capitalism. They smashed the like button on the printing press, shared revolutionary ideas, and generated a market for media, and learning, at scale. Early adopters didn’t buy their way into the culture. They used weird-looking techno-art to redefine what was valuable, what had meaning in the universe, and the nature of work, learning, and reality.

History may not repeat, but it rhymes. Their ledger-based finance is our cryptocurrencies. Their printing press, our Web3. We’re early, and the gut-wrenching volatility is a leading indicator that the change matters. These changes tend to follow a pattern, first finance, then art and identity, followed by work, education, and, ultimately new worlds - meta and IRL. The change is slow, then already done. For education, that means learning out loud about how to use the new tools, interacting with communities and their improvement initiatives as curriculum, and learning how to bet on oneself and one’s students in new economic models. At the last Renaissance, communities embraced a new type of social coordination to recreate the nature of learning itself. Rarely do you get a chance to do the same. It’s an epic opportunity. Make the most of it.