Navigating the Meta Machine

May 10, 2026

With apathy towards crypto intensifying, it’s worth taking the time to re-evaluate if and how you spend your time in the space.

A common argument is that “people will always speculate” therefore attention to crypto will eventually return. I find this argument insufficient. We’ve seen previous modes of speculation, such as NFTs, fail to regain prevalence. With so many ways for people to speculate today (e.g. stocks, options and sports betting), why should we expect people to return to crypto?

I can point to many concrete things to be optimistic about (stablecoins, equity/commodity perps, privacy, etc.), but instead I’ll present a more abstract argument here. Crypto is a meta machine: technology that enables people to create and play new financial games; i.e., it’s the infrastructure that continuously provides us with new things to speculate on.

For some, they master a dominant meta (think early BTC maxi) and don’t concern themselves with the new ones. For the rest of us, remaining in this space is essentially a bet on our ability to adapt to the shift in metas.

(As an aside: You can debate the utility of it all but for anybody that’s studied the history of speculation, it’s hard to believe it’s going anywhere. And looking ahead to a post-scarcity AI future, it’s plausible that all that will remain for humans to do is play games amongst each other.)

So how do we position ourselves to capitalize on this endless stream of metas? As Munger taught us, identifying what to do is hard, so instead we invert and come up with a list of what not to do:

• Refusing to accept that a failed meta is dead. Whether it’s your attention or capital, you need to cut your losses. This opens the space to participate in the next meta.
• Believing a new meta will fail because a previous variant of it did. The longer you’ve been in crypto, the more likely this affects you. E.g. many long-time crypto participants concluded “nobody cares about privacy” and have consequently been sidelined for the resurgence of ZEC.
• Rejecting a new meta because it’s too wonky or divergent from the current meta (see MetaDAO). You have to be able to extrapolate the potential of a meta from first principles versus just comping it against the existing metas.
• Ignoring a new meta because it competes with an existing meta that you successfully mastered. The list is endless but salient examples include BTC and ETH, ETH and SOL, SOL and HYPE, BTC and ZEC.

This is a small list. I’m sure you can come up with many more things not to do. The common themes here are 1) being encumbered by the past and 2) being closed off to the future. If you stay in this space, you’re betting on your ability to jump on the metas that haven’t presented themselves yet. Make sure to keep an open mind lest you get caught playing failed metas of the past.