I was washing dishes when it clicked.
Not the first time I read about it. Not when I checked the numbers. While washing dishes, thinking about something else, and then suddenly it landed.
They don't pay for advertising. Not anywhere. And somehow 180,000 people a day are playing this game.
I put the dish down and stood there for a moment.
I've worked in other people's homes most of my life. I know what it looks like when a system runs on someone's effort without that person fully realizing it. Sometimes it's fair. Sometimes the structure looks generous on the surface but something quietly doesn't add up. I've learned to notice the difference. Not always immediately. Sometimes it takes standing at a sink.
What I understood that night was that the people putting tokens in they're not just waiting for a number to go up. They're replacing something. Something that would otherwise cost the project real money. And because of that, the money that would have gone somewhere else comes back around.
I sat with that for a long time.
Not because it seemed wrong. Because I wasn't sure what it made me. I've spent forty years being useful inside systems I didn't design. I know what it feels like when the terms are fair and when they just look fair. This one I genuinely couldn't tell. I kept turning it over.
What helped was the behavior. A hundred million tokens staked within weeks of staking going live. I've raised four children. I know the difference between people following noise and people who did the math quietly and then moved. That looked like the second one.
And the game was actually making money. Real money. From people choosing to pay, not from tokens printed to make a chart look healthy. That part I understood. I've managed household budgets long enough to know the difference between income and borrowing with extra steps.
Still. I think about the people who came in without reading the details. Who staked because the number looked right or because someone said it was worth it. I was almost one of them.
The nanny doesn't own the house. But she notices when the arrangement changes.
Do you know what role you're actually playing in this or did you not stop to look?
