Crypto started with fun.
It was people finding their people in strange corners of the internet, bonding over ideas that felt fringe, and then building things together. Out of that weirdness came something alive, experimental, and joyful—a culture that blossomed into the industry we know today.
But along the way, much of the original spirit has been lost. The industry now often looks more like Wall Street than a community group chat, consumed by PvP token price speculation and endless tribal battles between L1 ecosystems, protocols vying for users, etc. And rather than fighting the establishments as bonafide outlaws, we’re begging them to regulate us and buy our bags. The celebration of collaborative tech development, the “us vs. the world” feeling, and the core components of the original crypto ethos are all dampened.
As a proud cypherpunk, crypto OG, and co-founder of JokeRace, David Phelps wants that to change. Under the dual leadership of himself and co-founder & CTO Siobhán (whom Phelps describes as an “operational dev genius”), the project has emerged as a refreshing reminder of what building in crypto can, and maybe should, look like.
Phelps is no stranger to calling out the industry’s flaws. In conversation, he described crypto as “headed in the wrong direction,” comparing it to the French Revolution’s slide from royalty to terror to Napoleon: a revolution that overshot, then settled somewhere in between. And yet, despite his critiques, he hasn’t lost hope. Open-source code, permissionless systems, and the falling costs of building make it easier than ever for small teams to create what could shift the tide. For Phelps, the real chance at course correction lies in rediscovering crypto’s roots: people forming communities, making things together, and, above all, having fun.
That belief runs straight through JokeRace.
Inside JokeRace: Contests With Real Stakes
JokeRace is a platform for onchain contests—simple, fully customizable social competitions where anyone can participate by voting.
Contests can be as lighthearted as picking the best Twitter thread or the community’s favorite venture capital firm, or more on the strategic side, like helping a company decide how to organize a new points system. The premise is simple: people vote, and those who back the winners earn rewards for participating.
For creators, teams, and companies, JokeRace functions as a novel marketing tool. Setting up a contest is free, and the incentives are baked into the mechanism itself. Organizers can add extra rewards if they want, but they don’t need a big budget to attract attention. Contests generate their own momentum as participants show up, vote, and spread the word.
The model has already proven powerful in practice. When Kraken used JokeRace to crowdsource the name of its Ink L2 mascot, the winning entry inspired a meme coin launch that 100x’d overnight, supercharged by the social consensus that JokeRace had established. In that sense, the platform acts as more than a marketing tool: it’s a distribution and incentive engine, capable of turning collective decision-making into outcomes with real-world and onchain value.
Building on this foundation, the team recently launched Vote & Earn: the core mechanism that now defines JokeRace. In the model, people buy votes on a price curve, with earlier votes costing less and carrying greater potential upside. The funds from those votes flow into a shared rewards pool, and if your chosen entry wins, you earn a share of that pool. In other words, conviction is rewarded: the earlier and more confidently you vote, the more you stand to gain.
This dynamic has already produced striking results. In Avalanche’s recent “Community Showdown,” early rounds generated a few thousand dollars in rewards, but by the semifinals, voters were collectively earning close to $50,000 from a single contest, and the event wound up generating $1.5 million for voters in total. In just around two months since launch, Vote & Earn has driven $1.6 million in onchain volume, showing how much appetite there is for gamified, incentivized decision-making.
The potential use cases extend far beyond memes and marketing stunts. For DAOs, Vote & Earn offers a way to make governance participatory and engaging instead of bureaucratic and dull. For streamers and content creators, it’s a lightweight distribution tool that rewards fans for supporting their favorite work. Even in product development, teams can run contests to name features, prioritize roadmaps, or crowdsource creative campaigns, ensuring decisions carry the weight of social consensus while rewarding the community that shaped them.
Phelps’s recent reflections reveal how much nuance goes into building an app like this. One of the biggest challenges, he explains, is balancing whales and everyday users. Crypto apps are built on transaction volume, not subscriptions, which means a small group of whales can drive the majority of activity. They provide critical liquidity, but if they’re prioritized too much, they risk extracting value from smaller users. The key, as Phelps sees it, is designing mechanics where whales subsidize conviction voting by retail participants, rather than dominating them.
That realization has shifted his focus. While JokeRace is open and fun for anyone, its near-term growth will likely come from participants like whales who are comfortable putting real capital to work. Longer term, though, he sees the opportunity to broaden participation—onboarding new communities into crypto by creating net-new applications that couldn’t exist in Web2. “I don’t think our job is to recreate Web2 with financial incentives,” he says. “I think our job is to create new things that literally could not have existed before.”
By attaching real stakes to participation, JokeRace has turned voting from a symbolic act into something both fun and financially meaningful, bringing crypto’s core ethos of community-driven experimentation back into play.
JokeRace reflects crypto’s playful, community-first ethos; that’s no accident. Its design—equal parts experiment, entertainment, and incentive mechanism—mirrors the worldview of Phelps, who sees apps not as tools for solving problems, but as playgrounds for creating joy.
Building for Fun
Ask David Phelps where his passion for building apps comes from, and he doesn’t hesitate: “Because I like having fun with my life, and applications are ways for people to have fun.”
It’s a counterpoint to the standard startup mantra. Founders and VCs alike are trained to ask, What problem are you solving? But Phelps challenges that premise. Sure, some businesses are built on problem-solving, but many of the most transformative applications in culture and technology weren’t responding to any explicit demand.
“Is Angry Birds solving a problem? Is Grand Theft Auto?” he asks. The answer, of course, is no. The real breakthroughs often come not from utility but from entertainment, from media that unlocks entirely new ways for people to spend time, connect, and express themselves.
This fascination with media and its evolution has shaped much of Phelps’s work. Years before JokeRace, he was writing about how fan communities, not just creators, were capturing the real upside of internet culture. While the 2021 crypto narrative fixated, in part, on creators monetizing their audiences, Phelps pointed out that fans were often the ones trading, speculating, and building value around cultural artifacts. Meme coin traders, not the artists themselves, were the ones capturing attention and profit.
For Phelps, this inversion was revealing. He recognizes that the most exciting opportunities often emerge where nobody is looking—where no one has declared a “hype cycle” or written a future-of-tech think piece. Cars, iPhones, mobile games: none were begged for, but all became global phenomena because they were fun. And when they arrived, they didn’t just entertain, they unlocked entirely new behaviors and industries. “It’s the thing no one asked for,” he says, “but once they start using it, it’s really fucking fun.”
That’s the space Phelps gravitates toward, and his philosophy of building apps around joy and counterintuitive spaces set the stage for his eventual entry into crypto. But his path into the industry didn’t start with memes or cultural experimentation. It began with something far more practical: credit card fees.
Getting Into Crypto
Phelps first came across crypto before the 2017 bull run, but it was that cycle when the technology clicked for him in a deeper way. At the time, he was running a tutoring firm catering to high-end clients, most of whom paid with American Express. That created a painful problem: steep payment processing costs.
“We were paying a bunch of money to credit card fees,” he recalls. “And I thought: there’s going to be a future where everything transacts through smart contracts. You won’t have to deal with these middlemen.”
His company had been an early user of Stripe Connect, and Phelps spent hours on negotiation calls with the payments giant. The economics were eye-opening. American Express charged higher merchant fees than Visa, which meant Stripe was losing money on some of his firm’s transactions. Stripe resisted giving ground, and Phelps saw firsthand the inefficiency of a system designed to extract rent. To streamline operations, he automated everything with Stripe—billing, invoicing, and accounting—eliminating the need for an administrative support team.
For a while, Phelps doubted his vision of crypto removing the middleman. He came to understand that credit cards operated as “bribery systems,” offering consumers 2 percent in rewards while charging merchants 4 percent and pocketing the spread. Without a similar mechanism, crypto payments would struggle to compete. Yet the idea of permissionless, programmable money stuck with him.
That conviction has aged well. In a twist of irony, Stripe itself is now experimenting with its own blockchain infrastructure: an affirmation, in Phelps’s view, of where things are headed. “Permissionless programmable money is still so fucking exciting,” he says. “I’ve not lost that enthusiasm for what’s possible with it.”
A Day In The Life As JokeRace Co-Founder
Phelps’s early conviction in permissionless money eventually pulled him deeper into the world of building. Crypto wasn’t just a thesis for him anymore; it became a canvas for creating. And as he shifted from observer to founder, his days took on a rhythm defined less by abstract ideas and more by the grind, chaos, and small rituals of startup life.
“Petting the cats is the most important piece of this,” Phelps laughs. Every morning starts the same way, with his cats waiting impatiently for their daily ritual. Then comes the less predictable part: Telegram. Some days it’s flooded with messages, triggering a frantic game of whack-a-mole. Other days it’s quiet, which can feel worse. “You’re like, I’m fucked, why is no one messaging me? We must be in terrible shape,” he says.
That anxious push-and-pull is the baseline of founder life. But what Phelps loves is the variety. No two days look the same. Some weeks, he’s buried in spreadsheets and math models, obsessing over how to design ideal price curves for JokeRace contests, calculating how rewards should be distributed, what kind of power laws apply, and how to structure incentives so the mechanics are both fair and engaging.
Other weeks, he’s immersed in design work. Phelps has sketched much of JokeRace’s site in Figma, working side-by-side with his front-end developer to refine layouts, visualizations, and user flows. Recent efforts have focused on bridging experiences, educational elements for first-time voters, and creating what he calls “the cleanest, most beautiful entry page” possible for contests.
He also wears the business development hat, dedicating two days a week to back-to-back calls with interested parties. These sessions are equal parts sales pitch and product feedback loop, giving him direct insight into how people respond to JokeRace in the wild.
And then, of course, there’s the online persona. Shitposting, Phelps admits, is another vital part of the job. His voice on Twitter is as much a community-building tool as any deck or pitch call.
Finally, there’s his own addiction to the product itself. He finds himself compulsively refreshing live contests—like Avalanche’s bracket showdown—to watch participation and rewards flow in. “I do spend an inordinate amount of time just kind of refreshing contests,” he says. “But I think that’s good. I’m addicted to our product.”
His obsession reminds me of some of the best founders I’ve personally come across. They’re building something they actually really enjoy using and focus on their vision rather than appeasing others. Some of the world’s largest applications came from a similar impulse, like Facebook and Twitter.
Staying in the Game
Hearing about Phelps’s day-to-day mix of math, design, outreach, memes, and monitoring, my next question was naturally, “What keeps you in the game?” For him, the answer comes down to gaining inspiration from people driven by meaningful purpose.
“It’s the people who stick shit out,” he says. He points to peers like Eigenlayer’s Sreeram Kannan, who are “really obsessed with actual usage for real applications of things.” These peers focus on building for end users, rather than chasing what Phelps calls the “infra Ponzi” of endlessly stacking infrastructure on top of infrastructure with no one at the other end.
The technology itself plays a role, too. For all of Phelps’s sharp critiques of the industry, he still finds joy in tinkering with permissionless systems and experimenting with new primitives. “Honestly, the tech itself is just really fun to play with,” he admits. “And it’s really fun to build.”
But staying motivated in crypto isn’t just about ideas, it’s also about finding your people. For Phelps, the timing of his entry into the public conversation mattered. He started tweeting in 2021, a period when curiosity around crypto was surging. The attention helped him connect with others, some of whom became close friends and collaborators. “If I started tweeting the stuff I’m tweeting today from a new account, it would get zero attention,” he reflects. “But back then, people really wanted to learn.”
Those relationships now span multiple circles: infrastructure thinkers, deep protocol developers, app builders, media operators, and artists. For Phelps, cultivating these overlapping networks is a way to avoid getting stuck in a single bubble. “All these different parts of the space, which are very contentious with each other, actually do need to go together in order for this to work,” he says.
He’s also self-aware about his own tendencies. “I’m kind of ADHD brain,” he explains. “I’m a broad thinker. I connect things across domains, but I’m not a deep thinker.” Surrounding himself with people who dive deep helps balance his associative style, while he, in turn, brings them perspectives from outside their silos. That balance of mindsets—broad and deep, associative and focused—has become a core part of how he stays sharp as a founder.
Building the JokeRace Team
After hearing what sustains Phelps personally as a founder, I wanted to understand the people around him: the small team that turns JokeRace from an idea into a living product. So I asked him what his team was like, and what he looks for in the people he wants to keep long-term in this industry.
Today, JokeRace runs on a team of four. There are co-founders Phelps and Siobhán; zho, their front-end developer, who brings JokeRace’s designs to life; and Tavvi, their marketer, who recently launched the “Joke Games” experiment of frequent contests and team-building campaigns.
When it comes to evaluating teammates, Phelps applies the same principles he values in founders: commitment and vision, paired with a willingness to update priors and adapt when wrong. “A lot of building a startup is being wrong,” he says. “Your goal is to be wrong a lot and quickly, and to learn from it.”
That balance between conviction and flexibility is critical. So is diversity. Phelps compares building a team to starting a band: too many companies hire four guitarists and forget the drummer and bass, he notes. He prefers teammates who complement rather than mirror him—people who can challenge his thinking, fill gaps, and balance his own chaotic tendencies. “I want to know what they bring that we don’t already have,” he says. “Not just in skill set, but in cognition and approach.”
Culture matters too. In Phelps’s view, good vibes and humor go a long way toward preventing burnout. “People think burnout is just hours worked,” he notes. “But a lot of burnout comes from not enjoying your job.” Jokes, excitement, and lightheartedness are as much a part of the culture as code.
Finally, Phelps insists on surrounding himself with people who are smarter than he is. “If I’m building a good team, I should be the weakest member on it,” he says. “I should be able to set a decent bar, and everyone else should be able to beat it.”
All of this is easier to achieve with a small, tight-knit group. “I’ve consistently seen companies destroyed when they raise too much money and hire too many people,” Phelps explains. “You think that having 20 people will make you move faster, but you actually move slower because of coordination costs.” With just four people, JokeRace can stay nimble, experiment quickly, and avoid bottlenecks.
And for all the hats he wears, Phelps is the first to admit that operations aren’t his strong suit. That’s where Siobhán comes in. “She’s a master operator,” he says. “I like to be the frontman—the one on Twitter, the one out in the open. But she’s the one keeping everything afloat. We’re here because of her.”
Phelps on His Evolving Approach to Building
When I asked Phelps how his approach as a builder has shifted as the industry has changed, he pointed to one major evolution in his thinking. Early on, he was fascinated by the reputational data blockchains could produce, the idea that votes, signals, and preferences recorded onchain could become as valuable as the financial layer. He imagined fan communities forming DAOs from their shared support in contests, or even dating apps powered by thousands of preference signals across categories.
But over time, he’s come to accept that reputation is downstream of financial incentives. “It’s not that reputation isn’t there,” he says. “It only happens if people are financially incentivized to participate in the first place.” The key UX that crypto uniquely provides, in his view, is the ability to earn. That’s what gets people through the door. Without it, you might as well build a Web2 product with good UX.
That realization has shaped JokeRace’s positioning in what Phelps calls “distribution-fi.” For JokeRace, adding financial incentives to things like demo days or community events doesn’t just drive participation, it creates a durable record. Voters have a reason to learn about projects, support their favorites, and then discover communities they might join. On the other side, leaders and investors can use JokeRace contests as a kind of living leaderboard: a snapshot of what’s resonating in the market, anchored by both attention and money.
“In some ways, it’s like Product Hunt with money,” Phelps explains. The difference is that the financial layer makes it harder to game the system and protects against bots, while also rewarding the very people who engage most.
Zooming out, he’s encouraged to see more attention on apps that generate actual revenue and real usage, rather than endlessly layering infrastructure on top of itself. Platforms like PumpFun and Hyperliquid have shown that crypto apps can make money, and that without end users, the rest of the stack doesn’t matter. “Everyone is coming around to the fact that you need end users with revenue,” he says. “App builders have been saying this for years.”
Building Where It Matters
Crypto has no shortage of noise. The past few years have seen waves of hype cycles, infrastructure experiments that never touched an end user, and founders who mistook their Twitter following for proof of substance. The space rewards attention, but lasting companies are built on something else entirely: vision, execution, and the stamina to keep going even when the spotlight moves elsewhere.
David Phelps embodies that balance. His work on JokeRace is at once playful and serious—a reminder that crypto’s roots lie in communities having fun together and that fun itself can be a powerful distribution mechanism.
What stands out most is how much of Phelps himself is baked into the product. He pets his cats, shitposts, sketches designs, and refreshes contests obsessively. He works with a small team where everyone matters. And he admits his weaknesses openly, leaning on peers who balance him out. This isn’t a founder chasing the meta. It’s someone who’s unapologetically himself, building the thing he wants to use, the way he thinks it should exist.
That kind of conviction has historically produced some of the world’s most transformative applications. If crypto is going to move past infra-for-infra and into apps people actually love, it will be because of founders like Phelps—builders with a clear vision, real grit, and a bias for creating things that are fun, meaningful, and new.
When they win, the whole industry moves forward.
