Dear Alex,
Anjan wanted to share something with you about Sid Sthalekar and reputational currencies. When we talked about it, I told him there isn't really an article out there that does justice to what this field is attempting. So I offered to write one.
I've been circling these questions for nearly a decade. I know the people doing the work. Here's what I think you should understand: why it matters, what it actually is, and why it connects to something at the heart of what Anjan is building.
The Short Version
Sid Sthalekar and Sacred Capital are building infrastructure for a formal economy of reputation. Systems that let you own, control, and port your social capital across contexts, rather than having it locked in Uber's database or LinkedIn's servers or nowhere at all.
Sthalekar ran South Asia's largest trading floor, then spent four years at Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram running a gift-economy restaurant where meals have no prices. That experiment proved something: trust-based coordination actually works, at least at small scale. Sacred Capital is his attempt to scale that logic using Holochain, a computing framework where you actually own your data. The core thesis: in distributed systems, reputation is primary. Money becomes a derivative of it. Your 4.9-star Uber rating, your standing in your local maker community, the fact that three people will vouch for you in a new city—all of this is real wealth. It's just invisible to our formal systems. Sacred Capital wants to make it visible and portable, without flattening it into a single score that can be gamed.
Three ideas structure the work:
- Typed currencies. Reputation isn't one number. Model it as distinct dimensions—craftsmanship, responsiveness, care—and communities can set their own thresholds without Facebook deciding what "engagement" means.
- Contextual portability. You can export "reliability in the vintage radio repair guild" rather than just "reliability." This avoids the brittleness that comes when everyone games toward a single global score.
- Agent-centric architecture. Your data lives on your device, not on a shared ledger everyone has to agree on. Scale comes from communities composing with each other, not from one network getting big enough to matter.
Why I'm Writing This
In March 2018, I published one of the first public introductions to Holochain. I wanted to explain what Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun—the people behind the MetaCurrency Project—were building to an audience that mostly knew blockchain. Later that year, I helped out on the Holo ICO, which got me deeper into the ecosystem. I spent the next several years inside it.
In 2020, I sat down with Sid for an hour-long conversation that's still up on YouTube (link). We talked about neighborhoods as an organizing principle, about the shift from scale to resonance, about why sixty percent of commerce in India still runs on trust networks rather than formal systems. It remains one of the more substantive explorations of his thinking that exists publicly.
One thread among many in my intellectual life is Generative Anthropology—Eric Gans's framework for understanding how humans coordinate without killing each other, and why formal systems of representation matter for that. It's worth noting, for context, that Peter Thiel studied under René Girard at Stanford in the late 1980s. Girard's mimetic theory became foundational to how Thiel thinks and operates. Generative Anthropology develops and in certain ways corrects Girard's framework. I mention this not to claim authority but because the lineage matters: the questions about coordination, value, and representation that animate reputational currencies have deep roots, and the people working on this are—whether they know it or not—engaging with that tradition.
I've also been a friend of Anjan's for over five years. I've been inside Daylight's company membrane three separate times, in different capacities. Currently I serve as something like an agent of his voice in the community—responding to people on X, Discord, Reddit, wherever the conversation is happening. I've invested a lot of time into understanding what Daylight is actually trying to do, beyond the product you can buy today.
The Founder
To understand Sacred Capital, you have to understand the unusual arc of its founder.
Sid Sthalekar was born in Mumbai in the 1980s, before India liberalized. He describes growing up in a "weird Soviet socialist economy"—two brands of cars, one television channel—that was simultaneously radically diverse at the cultural level. He spoke four or five languages and didn't think of it as remarkable. His parents came from different parts of India and had no common tongue except English, so that's what they spoke at home.
In the mid-1990s, as an eleven-year-old, he witnessed communal riots in Mumbai. He describes India making a collective trade-off in that period: "If we're willing to mute our cultural identities just a bit, and start getting into this monoculture of watching Friends and chasing Nike shoes, there was something worth building here." He was among the ten or fifteen percent who benefited from the liberalization wave. Business school at IIM Ahmedabad—India's premier—then institutional equities at Edelweiss Capital, where he ended up running what was then South Asia's largest trading floor.
He was there for 2008. Lehman Brothers was one of his biggest clients. "To just show up in office one day and these icons—in business school I grew up admiring them—and overnight it's gone. And the fact that there was no blowback, the fact that there was no skin in the game, really hurt."
By 2010, he walked away. He and his wife spent the next years traveling India, visiting ashrams and intentional communities. They landed at Sabarmati Ashram—Gandhi's historic headquarters during the independence movement—where Sid got involved with a network called Moved by Love and helped run Seva Cafe.
Seva Cafe has no prices. Each meal is a gift from previous guests. You eat, and you're invited to pay what you wish—or nothing—for someone who comes after you. The cafe has operated sustainably since 2006.
This was formative. As Sid told me: "I got to experiment with my fiat footprint—the way people experiment with their carbon footprint." He discovered that trust-based economics not only work, they work better than market economics for certain things.
The question that emerged: how do you scale gift economy logic beyond small, high-trust communities?
Around 2014, through contacts at the ashram, Sid connected with Eric Harris-Braun of the MetaCurrency Project. That conversation cracked something open. He saw that projects like Holochain were "really about broadening the definition of wealth." Sacred Capital came out of that recognition.
The Problem
Consider what happens when you build reputation on any existing platform.
You drive for Uber for three years. You maintain a 4.9 rating. You complete thousands of rides. That rating is real economic value: passengers trust you because of it, you get better assignments because of it. But you don't own it. Uber owns it. Switch to Lyft and you start at zero. If Uber changes its algorithm tomorrow, your rating shifts. If Uber disappears, your three years of accumulated trust disappear with it.
Sid frames it this way: "Who is Sid, and what if he takes his bag of coins and disappears? Where is the fabric that holds us all together?"
To be clear: the problem here has nothing to do with money being bad. That framing misses the point. Money is one formal system for tracking certain kinds of value flow, and an extraordinarily powerful one. But other kinds of value exist, and they too can be formalized.
What platforms have done is capture forms of value (reputation, attention, social connection) that used to exist in informal, distributed ways. They've centralized these without giving participants meaningful ownership or portability. The critique targets capture, not formalization.
Why Holochain
To build reputation infrastructure where people actually own their data, you need a technical substrate that makes ownership possible. Blockchain seems like the obvious choice: decentralized, immutable, cryptographically secure. But Sid and his collaborators concluded that blockchain has a fundamental architectural problem.
Blockchain is data-centric. Everyone has to agree on a single global state. This creates scalability bottlenecks, and it means your data exists because the network agrees it exists. You don't actually own it. The network does.
Holochain takes a different approach. It's agent-centric. Each participant maintains their own chain of data, cryptographically signed and tamper-evident. There's no global ledger. Peers validate each other's data according to shared rules, but nobody has to agree on everything all the time.
Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun, who built Holochain out of the MetaCurrency Project, call their governing principle "scaled consent" rather than "global consensus." You don't need everyone to agree on everything. You just need people who are actually interacting to agree on the rules of their interaction. This maps much better to how trust actually works.
The deeper MetaCurrency insight: currencies are not just money. Currencies are "instruments that shape and measure flows," what Brock calls "current-sees." Reputation is a flow. Attention is a flow. Care is a flow. All of these can be formalized. Reputational currencies are first-class objects, not edge cases.
The Architecture
The basic structure matters, so here are the pieces:
- Agents — people (or apps) with cryptographic identities. Your data lives on your device, in what Holochain calls a "source chain."
- Membranes — community-defined rules about who gets in, what they can do, what thresholds matter.
- Reputation Grammars — the dimensions a community chooses to track. Not one score but many: craftsmanship, responsiveness, care, whatever they decide matters.
- Reputation Vault (Sacred Capital) — where your reputation data lives, under your control.
- Reputation Interchange — how you export reputation from one context to another, with tags that preserve where it came from.
- Social Sensemaker (Neighbourhoods) — how a community decides to weight, decay, and display reputation. Their algorithm, not Zuckerberg's.
You do something in a community. That action gets signed and added to your source chain. Peers validate it against shared rules. If it passes, it updates the relevant reputation dimensions in your Vault. When you want to join a new community, you can export a credential—"reliability in vintage radio repair"—and the new community decides how much weight to give it. Maybe they count it at 50%. Maybe 10%. Their call.
Why doesn't this just get gamed? A few reasons. Multiple dimensions, each with its own rules and decay, make Goodhart's Law harder to exploit. Membrane costs (invitations, staking, rate limits) and rater-reputation weighting make Sybil attacks expensive. Your data lives on your device, so exported credentials reveal just enough signal, not everything. And reputational currencies stay non-transferable—money can reference them, but you can't just buy reputation on an exchange.
Neighborhoods
Sid calls the organizing philosophy "Neighborhoods." The framing stuck with me:
Centralized economy: Apps and businesses. Specific technology, generic culture. Facebook decides how you interact because Zuckerberg needs to deliver value to shareholders. The culture is optimized for extraction.
Distributed economy: Neighborhoods. Generic technology, specific culture. You can fork a chat tool, a Reddit clone, whatever. But what makes your community different from mine is how you've articulated your culture through reputation systems.
The key insight: reputation is not one number. It's contextual and multi-dimensional. Your reputation as a reliable contractor differs from your reputation as a thoughtful community member, which differs from your reputation as a skilled collaborator. These are distinct forms of capital, meaningful in distinct contexts.
Sacred Capital's architecture preserves this while enabling what Sid calls "memetic bridges," ways to consensually port relevant reputation across communities. He points out that the current bridges between cultures are crude: "The only thing I knew about Thai culture was Thai curry. That's what trade threw up to me."
Reputation currencies enable richer bridges. Not the five-day resort tourist experience, but being hosted by friends, actually engaging with a culture, building real understanding.
In our conversation, Sid put it this way: "The shift we have to make is from scale to resonance. Create something truly beautiful and watch it contextualize around the world."
The Vision
What animates Sid, and what I find most compelling, is the macro vision.
"If every person in India and China starts aspiring to live the American dream, it's game over for the planet. We cannot sustain a billion people looking to buy second and third houses."
The alternative: a wealth system where reputation provides real sufficiency. Where you can say: "The money I have might be fifty thousand dollars, but here's what I have in terms of potential, in terms of reputation." Where holding meaningful standing in fifty different communities is your sustenance, because you can mobilize it when you need to.
Sid points out that sixty to seventy percent of commerce in India today still runs on social coordination: "I can show up in a city in India and because of trust networks in place, I will have access to capital because there are people vouching for me."
The vision is infrastructure that makes this kind of coordination legible and portable, without the paternalism and tribalism of traditional systems, and without reducing everything to a single extractive platform.
What struck me most in our conversation: Sid doesn't romanticize community. "Community is romanticized," he said. "As an Indian, I can tell you it's not pretty. People will burn each other alive. Unless we develop formal systems, I don't think it's very real."
He grew up watching neighbors turn on each other. He understands viscerally that coordination without formal infrastructure tends toward violence. The work is precisely about building formal systems that enable coordination without requiring either platform capture or cultural homogeneity.
Why This Matters to Daylight
I've written at length about Sacred Capital because I think it illuminates something at the heart of what Anjan is building.
Daylight's diagnosis: our devices harm us. They hijack attention, disrupt circadian rhythms, create compulsive usage patterns. The response: build different technology. Hardware and software that serve human flourishing rather than extract from it.
Sacred Capital's diagnosis: our coordination systems reduce value to what can be captured by platforms, by money, by single scores. The response: build different formal systems. Infrastructure that makes visible the multi-dimensional wealth we already create.
Both projects share a fundamental commitment: technology as a means to human ends, not extraction. Both reject the assumption that extraction is the only viable architecture. Both are trying to build alternatives at the infrastructural level.
I don't know whether Sacred Capital will succeed. The challenges (technical, social, adoption) are substantial. When I talked to Sid, he was clear-eyed about the gap between vision and implementation, actively working to close it. But I believe the attempt matters. And I believe understanding it provides useful context for anyone thinking seriously about what technology in service of human flourishing might actually look like.
Anjan and I have been talking about these questions for years. The philosophical alignment between Daylight and projects like Sacred Capital isn't accidental. It comes from a shared understanding of what's broken and what might be built instead.
Let me know what you make of it.
Moritz
Have thoughts? Write back.