On June 18th, 2026 at Web3 Summit in Berlin I got to do two things I had been looking forward to for a while. The first was presentation on what I call The K-Hole Economy and the Permanent Underclass. The second was sitting down with none other than Yanis Varoufakis for a 20 minute Q&A, where I finally got to ask him the questions about crypto and web3 I had been sitting on for years. I even made it on to Euronews with Yanis!
The recordings are coming and I will share them when they are out. For now, here are five things I took away from the conversation.
1. Varoufakis approves of the blockchain
Varoufakis is not a crypto skeptic when it comes to the technology itself. He told me that blockchain is his go-to for decentralization and that it is very useful. He even mentioned how during his time as finance minister of Greece during the Greek Crisis, they had a blockchain based monetary system ready for the country to move to if they were to leave the EU.
His main critique of crypto applies to Bitcoin and its fixed supply. As a macroeconomist he thinks this is a catastrophe because it disallows flexibility and I agree as I’ve made similar arguments in my book. However he clearly understands that the underlying system is a politically important infrastructure to understand and utilize rather than dismiss the whole thing.
2. Crypto is not cloud capital
If you have read Technofeudalism you know cloud capital is at the center of his argument, it is networked machinery built to study your behavior and then push it in whatever direction its owner wants. So I had to ask him whether crypto was a form of cloud capital to him and he said no, not at all. Something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, properly decentralized (even if flawed), is not cloud capital. However he believes that stablecoins are becoming a form of cloud capital.
For me it’s clear then that for Varoufakis, crypto represents an opposition to cloud capital. Or at least it can be. I think this deserves more thinking but aligns with my thinking that crypto capital is often opposed to cloud capital or big tech and thus is an interesting place to be in politically and I think is a reason why he chose to come to Web3 Summit.
3. Be a class traitor, not a moralist
At one point in the Q&A I asked, “how should the left engage with speculative capital?” I was curious because it is a very contradictory place to be in if you consider yourself part of the left. His answer is simply to be a class traitor. If you’re going to do it, at least help left wing movements if you make some money.
He was anti-moralism because a moralist spends his time deciding which technologies are pure enough to touch. A class traitor takes the resources and points them at the thing that produced them. That is part of the reason why I do this work, and it was a good reminder to hear him say it without any reservation.
4. Blockchains are a good fit for allocating public housing
This one was almost too on the nose for me. I asked whether there were real problems around technofeudalism that crypto could help with, as opposed to problems the industry invents for itself. He said yes, and the first example he reached for was social housing.
He thinks blockchain has a lot to offer for running social housing, and specifically for allocating it in a way that is fair and democratic. The hard part of social housing was never the construction. It is deciding who gets which unit and being able to show the process was not rigged, which is the kind of thing a shared ledger handles well.
I will be honest about how validating that was, because I wrote about this exact idea back in 2020, back when it was not a comfortable thing to say to a left audience. Hearing it come back at me unprompted from Varoufakis was a crazy feeling.
5. The Monetary Commons is a blockchain
One of his most recent writing projects was on his Monetary Commons proposal, which outlines more concretely a futuristic democratic monetary system. Imagine downloading an app from the Central Bank that gives you a digital wallet so you don’t need to have an account with a private bank. The transactions are free, and you collect the overnight rate the central bank usually pays only to private banks, which is higher than anything those banks pass on to you. As money shifts out of private banks and into these wallets, it squeezes the private banking system and runs the money multiplier in reverse.
When I read it, it read like he was describing a blockchain without ever using the word, so I asked him about it. Turns out he was absolutely referring to a blockchain. When I asked why he did not just say so, he said the Monetary Commons is a piece of political economy and he did not need to bring up the technology to make the case. Technology is a tool for him and he is not fetishistic about it.
It was truly an honor to be able to speak Yanis Varoufakis and certainly a career highlight. Thanks to everyone who was there in support and those who have been supporting me over the years. I definitely would not have gotten here without your support. And big thanks to the Bread Cooperative team who has been helping me build out applications adjacent to Varoufakis’ ideas into reality.
