How tokenomics became the language of sovereignty, the future of open-source, and why we built Tea to protect it.

I’ve been in and around financial systems for more than two decades. From the rigid structures of traditional finance to the early waves of decentralized currencies, I’ve watched as economic design has evolved from gatekept theory into a living, breathing expression of freedom.

And I believe this with everything in me: tokenomics is a form of speech. It’s an expressive language that lets people coordinate, signal value, and build things that matter. It’s code and incentive. It’s ethics and math. And most importantly, it’s ours to shape. I believe deeply in the freedom of speech, I am thankful that we are allowed to explore these freedoms together in all forms of political climate and ideology. 

That belief is why I co-founded the Tea Network. It’s also why I’ve spent years—since 2015, if not earlier—reviewing, advising, and implementing tokenomic models for projects across the ecosystem. Tea is the culmination of that experience, brought to life through deep collaboration with brilliant minds like Max Howell, Gavin Sambles, and the Tea Association.

But Tea is more than a project. It’s a commitment to the open-source economy and to the builders behind it.

The Freedom to Design Value

When we say "tokenomics," we aren't just talking about vesting schedules or emissions curves. We’re talking about freedom. The ability to define value systems without permission. The freedom to design economies that reflect community priorities. The right to say: "This matters to us. And we’ll build around it."

In a world where centralized institutions increasingly dictate the terms of value, being able to launch an economic system that is validated by usage—not by decree—is a radical act. And it should be protected.

Tokenomics is the economic layer of digital sovereignty.

When communities can own their protocols, define their rules, and share in the upside, we start to witness the birth of something different—not just Web3, but a new phase of coordination.

And if we don’t build these systems well, we risk undermining that future.

“We didn’t build a token. We built a network that respects builders.”

Why Tea Needed Its Own Economic Architecture

At Tea, we didn’t set out to build a token. We set out to build a network. A network that could support thousands of tokens. A system that rewards maintainers of open-source infrastructure not with vague promises, but with transparent, mathematically-driven value.

We studied what came before—some of it good, some of it deeply flawed. Projects that launched without emissions caps. Communities diluted before they were even formed. Misaligned incentives, rug pulls, yield-driven extraction.

We made different choices.

We designed the Tea economy for:

• Long-term sustainability. Rewards are modeled to grow with usage, not hype.
• Permissionless extensibility. Our systems are modular. Entire token economies can be built on Tea.
• Sybil resistance. We incorporate CHAI, our open-source oracle, to validate influence and participation in a transparent, attack-resistant way.
• Community alignment. We gave builders a say, and we listened.

Our tokenomics aren’t just spreadsheets. They’re the blueprint for a values-aligned future.

Ethical Design in a Predatory Landscape

The truth is, many token ecosystems are designed to extract—not to grow. They privilege early insiders, create unsustainable inflation, or lean on opaque governance mechanisms that can be gamed.

We didn’t want that.

With Tea, we took our time selecting aligned partners and market makers. We refused the easy path of hyper-financialized launches. Our mainnet strategy prioritized decentralization over dopamine. Our airdrop mechanics were tuned for contribution, not clicks.

This was not about hype. It was about health.

And health is what sustains.

The Power of Permissionless Tipping and GPG Payments

One of the innovations we’re most proud of—and one that embodies the spirit of what decentralized infrastructure can offer—is our GPG precompile. By enabling native support for GPG signatures on-chain, we can directly associate rewards with GPG addresses, opening the door for permissionless tipping, payment, and incentivization across existing Git infrastructure.

This means developers—millions of them—can receive direct payments and tips to their cryptographic public keys. Maintainers can issue incentivized issues. Contributors can be rewarded for commits and merge requests. And all of it can happen without intermediaries, accounts, or new workflows. Just Git, as it always was—augmented with on-chain incentives.

This is what it looks like when we lean into decentralization.

Open source has always been distributed. From the days of GNU to decentralized version control, this ethos has always existed. And while not every corner of open source will align with this vision, we welcome that diversity. There will be many schools of thought, and many echoes from the past. But we’re proud to be rebels in this space, to take the leap, to try.

Because life is about taking chances. And this—this is one we’re proud to take.

“GPG signatures meet the blockchain—rewarding open-source developers directly, no middlemen required.”

What’s Next: A New Dawn for OSS Economies

We’re just getting started.

Post-mainnet, we’re launching Brew.Fun, a permissionless OSS token launchpad where creators can:

• Deploy tokens tied to open-source projects
• Govern those tokens through on-chain mechanisms
• Route rewards directly to contributors

But that’s not all—we’re also building out the foundational node infrastructure for the Tea Network. These nodes will power storage, distribution, compute, and validation across the network, enabling a fully decentralized backbone for the ecosystems that emerge. It’s an ambitious frontier, and we’re excited to design it with care.

This isn’t just an experiment. It’s a next-generation toolkit for sustaining open-source projects. Imagine a world where every widely used NPM package, Homebrew formula, or GitHub repo can launch its own economy, directly compensating its maintainers in a trustless way.

That world is coming. And Tea is helping build it.

More Than Math: A Map for Human Coordination

When I look back at what we’ve built, I don’t see just smart contracts or vesting curves. I see people. I see communities that will use these primitives to build software, fund movements, or coordinate care.

Tokenomics, done right, is not extractive. It’s expressive. It tells a story about what we value. And in the hands of open-source contributors, it becomes a map for long-term resilience.

I am proud of what we’ve done. And I know we have so much more to build.

A Call to Builders

If you’re a developer, an architect, a maintainer, a dreamer—this network is for you.

Use it. Build with it. Shape it.

We’ve created the foundation. Now the story is yours to write.