Cryptonite’s Legend
A trusted social network for entrepreneurs on a journey to make a mark in time.
The lore of our Personal Legend
In the world’s best-selling novel by a living author, The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho tells the story of an Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago on the road to find the meaning of life. Along the way, Santiago meets the old king of Salem, named Melchizedek, who tells him to sell his sheep, go to Egypt, and introduces the idea of a Personal Legend.
‘Your Personal Legend is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their Personal Legend is,’ the King counseled. ‘When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.’
A Personal Legend is our spiritual calling and purpose to strive for something greater than ourselves. A Personal Legend is bigger than a ‘mission’ or ‘vision’ — it’s a combination of all that we are and will be the legacy we leave behind.
Santiago also got some sage advice from a camel driver on the way to see the King, ‘If you can always concentrate on the present, you’ll be a happy man.’ All great spiritual traditions agree that the secret to a good life is in the present. If we pay attention to the present and improve upon it, what comes later will be even better. Each day, in itself, offers us the potential for a new eternity.
As the Catholic mystic and Trappist monk Thomas Merton once observed, ‘Every moment and every event in every person’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in our minds and wills. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost because people are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love.’
Borrowing from the wisdom of King Melchizedek, and Merton’s reflections, Cryptonite’s noble cause is to provide an online home where a global community of pilgrims can gather and conspire to help each other achieve their Personal Legends.
Our network effects
With the advent of online social networking, it has become obvious that we are all nodes at the center of our own network. In his riveting lecture featured in the video below, Canadian clinical psychologist Dr. Jordon Peterson reminds us that our daily effort to achieve our Legend has far-reaching network effects.
If we have learned anything in the social networking era, it is that our actions not only affect our own fate, but the fate of everyone we are connected to. We are not merely insignificant little specs in a world of 7 billion people. We are all part of a network and how we operate matters. The average person living in the developed world will get to know at least a thousand people in their lifetime. And each of those thousand people are connected to another thousand, which means we are all one person away from 1 million people and 2 persons away from a billion. Each of the ideas we share and actions we take are like dropping a stone in a pond, they ripple out into our network in ways we can’t even comprehend.
Cryptonite recognizes that a small change in one’s career plan or startup idea in the present can create explosive new opportunities over the long term. We want our members to get the most out of every moment and trust that Cryptonite and their fellow members are watching out for their interests at every moment, 24/7. If our members can stay awake and execute on their Cryptonite network effects, they can build game-changing enterprises, and enjoy more productive and prosperous careers. Cryptonite multiplies enterprise value and member wealth.
A safe and directed global tribe amongst tribes
Cryptonite achieves its Legend by offering global entrepreneurs and risk investors a directed, peer-to-peer, trusted network that accelerates the rate they meet innovation experts, learn what’s on the cutting-edge, pioneer partnerships, and organically bring their own Legends to life.
First-generation social networks are aimless and entropic — they have devolved into chaos and have lost most of their original value. Conversely, Cryptonite is led by our editors and community of Wizards, who have deep domain experience and can direct our members to the innovation trends and new companies that matter. Cryptonite has a distict world view whihc is pro innovation, and pro entreprneurs. We have a bias is for people who want to teach and learn. Like Steve Jobs once reminded me, every great entrepreneur stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before them. This structure gives Cryptonite a purpose — une raison d’être — and thereby helps members leverage their time rather than waste it.
Historically, the greatest value found in most social networks has been within interest-niche forums and groups. As Reed’s Law underscores, as the number of Tribes multiplies, the economic value and network effects of Cryptonite will grow exponentially. In this spirit, Cryptonite Tribes are created and led by Tribal Chiefs recruited primarily from within our Wizard ranks. Given the number and complexity of innovation and industry sectors represented by the Cryptonite community, Tribes offer members a deeper and more focused structure.
We have designed each Tribe as a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO. Initially, the Tribal Chief sets up the rules for the Tribe, and a blockchain ledger automatically records all community actions and transactions without manual intermediation. Over time, the Chief’s control over the Tribe transfers over to the community, or subset of the community, who votes on any rule changes. This pre-programmed design assures a safe and fully transparent environment.
Driven by economic alignment
Cryptonite creates economic alignment by quantifying and rewarding a member’s contribution to the community with our CPRO coins, which they can, in turn, use to reward each other, purchase discounted products and services, or trade on exchanges for cash or other cryptocurrencies. Historically, top players operating in the global Silicon Valley have been giving away some of their most valuable knowledge and perspective via word-of-mouth and on first-generation social networks with no reward. Cryptonite provides a marketplace where smart people can share their intellectual capital for cryptos and greater industry influence. Tribal Chiefs and their members also receive CPROs for working towards the unified goals of their Tribe.
Members could also reward CPROs for recruiting quality new members to the community and earn NFT badges representing membership status and credentials for specific achievements within the network. Combined, these forms of compensation and recognition will provide Cryptonite members with a long-term, karma-like stake in the network’s success.
Cryptonite is really a reflection of the great startups that will be introduced and debated on our network. It has a flattish-but-meritocratic leadership structure, a distinct culture, a Wizard admission policy more selective than any top university, and offers a financial upside for the top performers. The Wizard program may feel a bit exclusive, but unlike a Stanford or a Harvard, who are constrained by class size, there is no ceiling to how many people can achieve Wizard status. Cryptonite does not offer ‘legacy’ admissions either, so our qualification standard is even more unbiased and merit-driven than you find at the ‘top’ private universities.
Decentralized and trusted — Take Back the Power
Importantly, Cryptonite is distinguished as the first fully decentralized, ‘trusted network’ brand. Each member is given crypto key access and control over the content, social data, and connections they create. Data security is achieved via distributed storage. Members also use their public/private key pair to sign in, authenticate themselves, and send encrypted messages. This blockchain-based environment assures members that no outside party can de-platform them or seize their cryptocurrencies. Finally, Cryptonite is a completely self-policing platform where members determine on their own who they might want to censor or not.
Little did ‘Satoshi’ and the Ethereum founders know, but by creating a security infrastructure so digital currencies could be trusted without the need for government backing and central administration, they also provided an alternative business model to the ‘customer-as-a-product’ approach practiced by Big Tech. People no longer want to see the online giants make billions trading their personal data like a commodity on the attention economy exchanges. Consumers are repelled by ad tracking and dopamine-driven engagement tactics. Privacy is a human right — a civil liberty. Cryptonite will never sell its members’ data out of principle because our social smart contracts won’t allow it. We will offer a mechanism where brands can pay Wizards CPROs to evangelize their products and services, but there will be no traditional advertising on Cryptonite.
Cryptonite makes its ‘gas money’ by earning a commission on every CPRO transaction within the network and by driving up our coin’s value by boosting its purchasing power over time. Because we are a decentralized platform, only the buyer and the seller (and the CPRO rewarder and the rewarded) will have visibility into their individual transactions. Our interests and those of our members are, therefore, completely aligned.
Creating game-changing outcomes
Cryptonite will measure its success by the number of meaningful relationships and game-changing outcomes (e.g., new knowledge, jobs, hires, fundings, partnerships, customers, and advisors) our members initiate and gain on the network. Cryptonite is designed to optimize results. Our Legend is to provide an arena where good, industrious people can seek each other out, join forces, and make great things happen. CPRO’s market cap quantifies our success by putting a value on what it means to be a Cryptonite member.
The successful networks of the future will have a collective purpose, allow members to own the content they create, and integrate crypto-based incentives that foster wealth creation. They will also offer encrypted features to optimize peer-to-peer collaboration and community action and be bound by social smart contracts that guarantee the rule of law. Cryptonite is proud to be the first of this new generation.
More on Cryptonite [+]
Apply to be a Cryptonite Wizard here.
We would be honored to receive your Top Cryptonite 300 Web3 company nominations by sending a confidential email to theeditor@cryptoniteventures.com, or filling out the Top Company nomination form here.
Join the Cryptonite Telegram Group
Until our network app launches in 2023, we are building a community on the Cryptonite Wizard Telegram Group by allowing our Wizards and and friends to post and share.
Click here to join the Cryptonite Telegram Group.
