In the back room of a Miami Airbnb, Arjun and I were four hours deep into conversation. The question at hand: “Why is everyone here so hyped on crypto?”

I had spent the prior five years heads down at SaaS startup Drift and — besides mining Dogecoin on an old laptop in 2014 — I had mostly missed crypto. I wrote it off as a fad.

But after our chat, I was galvanized. I spent the rest of the trip glued to my phone reading everything from Solidity documentation to the Ethereum rollup-centric roadmap. A few weeks later, I left my job to find a place in it all.

Different people fall down the crypto rabbit hole for different reasons. The global supercomputer. Unstoppable money. Cheaper remittances. 24/7 markets.

Here's what hooked me: crypto's potential to unlock new ways for people to work together.

Coming out of lockdown, seemingly everyone around me was rethinking their relationship with work. Friends were leaving their 9-to-5s to build online lifestyle businesses and move to the mountains. Anti-work and FIRE subreddits were gaining traction. On the internet and in my own circles, the vibe shifted from putting work above all else to finding sufficient work to sustain a great life.

Worker co-ops, local currencies, the "sharing economy," and other cooperative economic models have been on the rise since pre-pandemic. I think these represent only the start of what's to come as more people explore new ways of working. And crypto offers a platform for us to innovate on and distribute these models more easily than ever before.

In the year since Miami, I’ve spent most of my time working with Flashbots to help increase the transparency of Ethereum. I’m proud of what we built with mev-inspect and am fortunate to have worked with the incredibly smart and passionate team there.

Now, I'm leaving work again, this time to build a company in collaboration with Paradigm as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Paradigm has been a part of my journey from Arjun’s crypto-pilling, to learning about MEV from Charlie, to deploying some of my first contracts with Georgios’ dapptools template. The firm has an inspiringly clear perspective on the future of the space and an unmatched research team working to build it alongside their portfolio. I feel extremely lucky to collaborate with Arjun, Matt, Fred, and the whole team to bring these ideas to life.

More to come and much love,

Luke

Particular thanks to Arjun for his patient explanation and constant guidance, Nick and Nikhil for help getting this post in words, and Robert for bringing me into mev-inspect, being a mentor throughout and a friend today.