David Phelps didn’t fall in love with crypto through a white paper or a protocol. He first heard about it from a friend, who was raving about Bitcoin in its wilder days. He wasn’t impressed, so he passed on it. Years later, burned by credit card fees while freelancing, he found his way back. Not for the drugs. For the disintermediation.
He built a failed start-up trying to automate freelancer payments. Stripe fees crushed it. The realisation? Our “fastest” payment systems were built on layers of middlemen. Reading the Ethereum white paper felt like seeing daylight. Programmable money. No gatekeepers. That part stuck.
But where he really went deep was DAOs. And that’s where the rot appeared. People talked about decentralisation, but what he saw was either chaos (no leaders, no output) or soft tyrannies (one person decides, everyone else votes on flavours of the same thing). Real participation was a myth.
JokeRace is his answer.
It’s a platform where people can create on-chain contests. Anyone can enter. Anyone can vote. But you pay to do both. Which sounds like a UX nightmare until you realise it solves the problem DAOs never could: no one cares until they have skin in the game.
The JokeRace thesis is simple and kind of devious: charge people to participate, and they'll actually want to. Paying to vote creates commitment. Campaigns emerge. Strategies form. You turn governance into gameplay. “Financial incentives make decisions fun,” he says, grinning like someone who knows that sentence will annoy the right people.
JokeRace doesn’t claim to be a better form of democracy. It’s closer to a carnival. But it’s an honest one, and crypto could use more of those.
Phelps isn’t shy about crypto’s other flaws either. Chief among them: marketing. Or more precisely, the illusion of it. Tokens worked as a growth hack, sure. But they also attracted mercenaries, turned communities into yield farms, and taught everyone to exit before the music stopped. “Tokens are a short-term marketing solution and a long-term marketing problem,” he says. Which is why he prefers a different tactic: trolling. He once staged a fake wedding at EthCC, just to see if people would believe it. They did. Some got mad. Perfect.
That mix of provocation and sincerity runs through everything he touches. JokeRace is a half-rebellion on the surface, but underneath, it’s about designing systems people actually want to be part of. Governance that rewards initiative. Communities that self-organise. And incentives that don’t pretend to be anything else.
His favourite film is Playtime, Jacques Tati’s meticulous satire of modern life. His favourite book? Bleak House, Dickens’ takedown of institutional rot and transactional relationships. Not subtle picks. But then, nothing Phelps does is trying to be subtle.
He’s not out to fix crypto with capital-G Governance. He’s out to make caring feel like a game again. One you might actually enjoy playing, even if it costs you.
