A New Year message to Charles
Charles,
You have often said that you value honesty, and I believe you mean it. In your End of Year Thought, you explicitly asked for honest engagement. What follows is exactly that.
I come from a country ravaged by successive tyrannies.
That lived experience is why your message stirred conflicting emotions in me—hope intertwined with dread.
Years ago, your talks inspired me to believe that a different future was possible for countries like mine. You articulated a vision where blockchain—could empower people directly, allowing them to build systems worthy of their dignity, outside the grip of predatory elites. I believed deeply in that vision. Many of us did.
Yet year after year, that promise fell short.
Not because the technology lacked capability.
Not because the ideas were unsound.
But because of misguided execution and misplaced priorities.
Listening to this year’s message, I felt inspired once again—but also haunted by the familiarity of that inspiration. I fear the disappointment that may follow if the same structural issues remain unaddressed.
There was never a compelling reason to believe that African politicians or politically connected business elites would be more receptive to people-empowering blockchain tools than the Western politicians and legacy institutions you have so often and rightly admonished. Power behaves the same everywhere. The incentives do not change with geography.
Where you were right—very early on—was in identifying Africa not as a place for elite partnerships, but as a place where people-centered systems are most urgently needed.
That role for Africa was never about courting presidents, ministers, or CEOs.
You do not need to travel the world to court politicians.
You do not need to spend millions of your own money.
What is needed—what has always been needed—is far simpler and far more difficult:
Build the tools and infrastructure that allow people to onboard themselves and solve their own problems.
Identity and reputation primitives.
Group and community structures.
Recoverable and delegatable accounts.
Low-friction recurring contributions and payments.
These are not “applications.” They are public infrastructure.
And they must be financed by the treasury, because the protocol is the direct beneficiary of real human onboarding—not IOG, not bureaucratic structures at Catalyst or CF, and not Intersect members who are largely incentivized to build their own shops using treasury grants. The evidence is already clear: Catalyst is littered with unused projects, and goodwill alone does not produce systemic adoption.
Grassroots adoption tools cannot be built as side projects, grants, or one-off initiatives. They must be built the same way the protocol itself was built:
deliberately, publicly, relentlessly, and as shared infrastructure.
That is why, ultimately, this cannot be outsourced.
What is needed now is your leadership—not as a traveler or fundraiser, but as a steward of the original vision—to spearhead a focused initiative that treats grassroots adoption infrastructure as core protocol work.
The people are ready.
The need is undeniable.
The treasury exists for precisely this purpose.
What remains unanswered is whether the will to align vision with execution will finally materialize.
I hope this year proves different—not in rhetoric, but in structure.