Making de antifragile
Peru's north coast is one of the driest places on Earth. For perspective, the Sahara gets 4x more rain.
But every 6 to 20 years, El Niño hits the region with heavy flooding, turning the desert into wetlands.
You'd think the wild weather would make it impossible to live there. But people in the Pampa de Mocan have thrived for over a thousand years by building canals and dams that harnessed the floodwaters for agriculture.
What's most remarkable is that these structures weren't designed to just survive El Niño; they were made to get stronger because of it.
With each flood, soil built up behind the dams, storing more water and feeding more crops. Plants grew back thicker, their roots making the whole system more stable.
Chaos was fuel for growth. Stress and volatility made the system better. It's a perfect example of antifragility in action.
There's a big lesson here for our modern world. Our social systems and communities can benefit from embracing stress rather than trying to suppress it. We've done great things by building highly complex and interconnected systems in our economies, governments, and supply chains. But when you stretch optimization to the limit, you lose margin for error. One unexpected shock - like a pandemic or a market crash - can make everything fall apart.
Looking back, this is where we went wrong with the de ecosystem. It started simple with just DeGods. Then the push for higher floor prices added more and more complexity. First DUST, then y00ts, then Points, then multi-chain, then BTC DeGods. To control chaos and suppress volatility, we stopped talking to the community and tried to plan everything in private. Frank was the only external voice for the team.
And it worked, for a minute. DeGods got to a 10+ ETH floor price and we made a lot of people rich:
But tying our success to the wrong goal (number go up) made the whole system fragile.
We won't make that mistake again. de must become antifragile.
We've made the first step: establishing that we're post-price. Let it go lower. The only reason you should hold a de asset is because you want to.
The next step is to completely change how we manage the community. In the early days, "Frank and the team will make holders rich" was feasible - and we actually did it. But de has become much bigger than just "Frank and the team's project" now. Centralized, top-down control will only make us more fragile over time. The goal is now to "help the holders make each other rich".
But there's no way we can just brute force a dramatic culture shift. Not in a community of thousands, spread across multiple blockchains.
The only practical solution is to start small, at a human scale.
History shows us that world-changing movements often start with small groups. In the 1930s and 40s, a group of writers called The Inklings, which included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, met often to talk about and improve each other's work. This led to "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia." In the 1970s, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were part of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of people who loved computers and shared what they knew. This group helped lead to the creation of Apple. Even the hacker culture that has shaped so much of our modern technology began with a small group of passionate students at the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, where they first started exploring computer programming.
The magic of small groups is that good ideas spread fast and get better through feedback and teamwork, and bad ideas die quickly in isolation because there are fewer people to keep them going. Naturally, the best ideas win, and the group gets stronger.
I experienced this myself after joining an On Deck program. The entire cohort had 150 people, but real progress happened in the small "accountability groups" of 8-12 people. In such a small group, ideas had no choice but to be sharpened against each other and passive consumption was forced to yield to active and productive creation.
I believe we should start by making small, purposeful groups within the larger de community. Less than 20 people each, united by a shared interest or goal, communicating often to learn and grow together. As these groups generate wins, they'll attract more participants, we'll start new groups, and de will grow into a more antifragile network.
It won't be a neat, linear process. But that's actually a feature, not a bug. Antifragility comes from messiness - constant experimentating, different approaches, non-stop micro-changes. The point is to grow through stress, not avoid it.