The NARR-Gated Unlocks proposal is an interesting metric and framework. I’m not convinced it improves RSR health in its current posture.
The proposal appears to remain an offchain, unenforceable social contract where “Confusion Capital would retain the right to deviate from this plan.”
That structure is perfectly normal for a centralized company accountable to a board and investors.
But blockchain systems tend to absorb unenforceable social contracts as memes. The Slow Wallet and Slower Wallet followed similar patterns.
- Slow Wallet, 2022–24: “The new Slow Wallet never made a withdrawal until the transfer to the Slower Wallet”
- Slower Wallet / Bitcoin-style emissions, 2024–26: “Most unlocked RSR has stayed in the treasury; on net, Confusion Capital has been a buyer of RSR”
Parts were fulfilled, parts misunderstood, and over time they created distraction, ambiguity, and unnecessary toxicity. Its hard, and maybe futile, to predict the future when there are no constraints, especially to a fractionally vested community that is not in the day-to-day loop.
This is not a critique of those efforts. It is an observation about a recurring dynamic: blockchain projects that rely on promises inherit trust-debt. Over time, that debt can compound unproductive and toxic discourse, or worse. Arguably creating self inflicted headaches.
Social contracts can work early in a project, or later in a mature PMF phase. They become lower productive utility after eight years without PMF.
The Oct. 2025 RSR Health proposal pushed for stronger onchain ownership and transparency, improved comparative metrics legibility, and to compound community-as-capital and attract more capital and allocators. The seven month discourse has been enlightening.
Reserve is pursuing a different path and that is not necessarily a bad thing, its just different, hopefully better! Related: the 2026 PMF efforts, communications improvements, and Top100 inclusion efforts have all been executed refreshingly well.
This has me observing and sanity checking all options.
I respect the steadfast commitment to central control, even though I proposed the opposite. At this point, I am wondering to what value (or painful cost as history has shown) is it to socialize how things will work in the future as if they are community-governed?
Both paths, central and decentralized, have strengths, but straddling the middle is unnecessarily messy, something I would never recommend to a founder.
This is a good reset moment to push the chosen path even further.