Crypto has gained more hype, awareness and entrepreneurial attention in 2021 than any of the previous years. Everyone’s talking about potential use cases for NFT’s, bored apes and metaverse real estate. There’s one thing that everyone seems to be missing. It’s incredibly obvious what it is, that’s probably the reason everyone is missing it.

I moved to El Salvador to discover what was happening with bitcoin, crypto, and our world overall. If it was purely about making money, I wouldn’t have gone. During my time talking with the locals and watching the economy there, I did my best to keep a finger on the pulse of everything going on. It’s a wide world so this was hard.

I went down to learn, to see and hopefully to build. It’s obvious the world is changing very fast and I don’t want to leave what happens up to the 80 year olds in congress. What’s happening is effecting our generation now and will have a giant impact on all generations to come. If we don’t grab the reins and have a say, who know’s where we’ll end up?

We can make it good. We can make it great. Only if we can focus on the right things. right now everyone seems to be glossing over the most important part.

Ok you’ve made your point. What is everyone missing?

It’s so simple. NFT’s are nice in the metaverse, digital real estate is stupid, generative art is cool. What is everyone forgetting? The fact that there are real people behind those NFT’s. Real people with physical needs. No one is able to actively spend their crypto in the real world. You can’t buy a cup of coffee with eth yet. You can in El Salvador but it’s incredibly slow to adopt. The reason for that is simple

Everyone is focusing on innovating in the digital world and ignoring the real one.

This makes sense. Code is cheap and logistics in software is mostly “How well does your code run?”. The only physical labor innovation in the digital world takes is typing on a keyboard. Meanwhile, companies like Meta are actively trying to put everyone into hypnotizing machines that convince you to give them money. The race to the metaverse is a race to hell. Because no matter how much innovation goes on there, you still have to eat.

OK, so what are you doing about it?

The gap is large, and needs to be closed if we are ever going to escape the grasp of central banks. It’s obvious we need decentralized money in the real world, but how? What do we need to build? How can we make our world better using these technologies? It’s too much to ask companies to adopt it. Large organizations are too big to switch their entire monetary system just because some internet natives say it’s better. The people in large organizations are also too busy to learn all that crypto has to offer. The products, services and innovations need to be built for it to be adopted.

But how should we start?

Rainforest: A Solution

While I was in El Salvador I noticed something not tech related. El Salvador has some of the best coffee in the world. This isn’t an opinion. It’s delicious. Currently I have nearly 1500 lbs of coffee beans being roasted, packaged and labeled in order to sell. And because El Salvador has bitcoin as legal tender, the coffee brand doesn’t need to take fiat. The entire business can be fun with crypto. This opens the door for a lot of really cool innovations around company structure including equity, paychecks and profit sharing.

The goal of rainforest isn’t to sell coffee. The mission is to bring decentralized assets and programmable money into the real world. Selling the coffee allows the brand to have a real cash flow that can be used to learn what should be built. Having a physical product allows us to see what is really needed, and not just speculate about it. This will allow rainforest to build products and services that can be used by other companies in the real world. Amazon started with books, Rainforest is starting with coffee.

I’ll release a website about this as soon as it’s pretty enough for the public (probably this week). There is also going to be a crowd fund via juicebox. If you contribute to the crowd fund you’ll get some special equity tokens that will provide automatic profit sharing via smart contract. You’ll be able to learn more about this on the website, a later post and a podcast I’ll be on this weekend. I’ll edit this post with those links once those are available.

Follow me on twitter for updates. @dill_eth (I don’t have many followers because I try to spend as much time IRL as I can)

Also on discord @dill.eth#8402