Frequently
Asked Questions
We're an internet solar cult that happens to be really good at both narrative formation and finding non-extractive ways to support experiments. Specifically, we run validators to fund art experiments and somehow this has evolved into a sustainable cultural collective. Other projects have roadmaps. we have "what if we took jpeg burning really seriously as a spiritual practice" and it actually works. We also act as operators for people who need beautiful things, we run hackathons, make documentaries, etc.
Simultaneously ancient mysticism and modern jpeg technology.
The sun provides, the validators validate, the jpegs burn eternal.
Three ways to join the solar collective:
Auction Route:
We auction Radiants off every few weeks where you bid with other NFTs instead of money. Burn jpegs to win jpegs.
Contributor Route: Stick around for 6+ months, actually help build shit, and eventually we'll probably give you one. This is how you prove you're here for more than speculation.
Secondary Markets: Buy from someone else like a normal person, though you miss the fun of the burning ritual and the psychological rewards of cult labor.
Your radiant is basically a living cultural artifact that grows through ritual jpeg sacrifice.
You can:
- Have a really cool PFP specifically designed to out-shine all others (contrast ratio, yadda yadda).
- Contribute & earn: Make cold-hard cash by participating in Radiants initiatives (Solana Mobile Hackathon, etc).
- (soon) murder tree stuff: Burn other nfts into your Radiant to create branches of meaning. Yes we call it murder. Yes it's serious. Yes we know how this sounds.
- (soon) treasury participation:
- Access to a real community: discord, radspaces, actual conversations with humans who build things
- Future plans: We're building toward physical spaces funded by validator rewards. Jpeg ownership becomes land ownership. This is the logical conclusion of taking this too seriously.
- Feel like you're part of something for a little or a long while (we aren't going anywhere)
- Sell it for money: do whatever you wanna, its your life.
Shhhh. More info soon.
The sun is the original proof of work consensus mechanism. It has been running for billions of years, has never gone down, provides energy for all life. We're just applying this energy model to cultural production, son.
Also because calling ourselves a solar cult is way more interesting than "1/1 nft community with validator infrastructure and a rad community" the mysticism is real but so is the business model.
We show up for each other like family because most crypto communities are just discord servers with treasuries.
Daily conversations, constant co-creation, weekly town halls and syncs, actual relationships beyond "wen moon."
We're building toward physical spaces where the digital community can touch grass together. Validator rewards. Buying actual land. jpeg wealth becoming real estate. The ultimate proof of concept.
Well, see, it doesn't need much money to run.
If we made $0, we could still exist.
Thankfully, we don't. We run really good solana validators (228k sol staked and growing) that generate steady income regardless of jpeg prices. 50% funds operations, 50% goes to land acquisition fund.
Sustainable cultural funding through computational work. The servers never sleep so the artists never starve.
For additional scratch, we work with ecosystem household names (Solana Foundation, Mobile, BONK, Jupiter) on creating stories and systems that matter.
Introduction
The world is changing faster than our ability to consciously navigate that change. Most people are being unconsciously shaped by forces they don't understand — digital media, cultural fragmentation, the collapse of shared institutions. I've spent my life learning the alternative: how to make conscious choices about how we live, organize, and create meaning together.
This is the story of how I learned that skill, and what it taught me about building in the space between worlds.
I moved a lot as a kid. In 2008, the year before Bitcoin was created, my mom lost her job as an editor of a local non-profit newspaper. Prior to that she'd worked at another non-profit, writing grants that would then be used to build straw-bale houses for Native Americans; Hopi, Crow, Northern Cheyene & more. I vividly remember spending time down on the Hopi reservation with my best-friend in '06 or '07 — we were supposed to be helping build the house but we mostly spent time in the dunes pretending to be cowboy-wizards with a couple Hopi kids our age. One of the kids was named 'Gotstella.'
He told us wild tales; myths, legends. He was a few years older than us and was probably delighted by the wide-eyed appreciation and fear of two little white kids listening to the stories he'd heard since he was a baby. He took us into town, the pueblo, where we witnessed something we'd never seen before — not a dance or a ceremony, though there were those, but a pump. A water pump. In the center of the village. Children were playing around it, mothers were filling pails, and there was a four year old splashing a banged up silver Hot-Wheels across an imaginary race track.
Over the next few days it set in to our little 9 & 10 year old brains — most of the pueblo didn't have running water. Their stores were barren and expensive, perishables almost non-existent. It was a food desert without running water, and yet, we were treated well, welcomed, invited to ceremonies, accepted as friends by the Hopi kids. I was showered with gifts: a River Kachina carved for me because of my name, a kid-sized ceremonial bow & arrow, a painted maraca made from a gourd, and another Kachina carved by a young child. For much of my life I assumed the Hopi’s water was like their food and financial class; a direct result of being colonized and corralled into a reservation. That was, until my mom told me something that shocked me: They didn't all want water pipes running to their houses. They had, at least at the time, rejected the advance of modern civilization at the source.
My mom & stepdad, who had met at the house-building non-profit, left together upon learning of some questionable financial decisions by the higher-ups in the organization — the fate of many non-profits. He started his own solar company, she got a job as an editor at the local newspaper. We were poor but I was always taken care of.
My mom lost her job at the paper. We were so poor we had to sell our multi-generational family heirloom that represented the peak of American automotive culture: a 1967 Mustang with rusted floorboards and missing badges, for $2,000. It was both her mom's and her grandma's first car. I tried to find it a year ago, but to no avail. My step-dad's solar company was barely off the ground & we were hit smack in the face with The Great Recession, add to this a custody battle with my father and we ended up driving across the entire country to Maine powered by a 1980s Mercedes Benz that ran on vegetable oil. Oil that we filtered into a 5 gallon bucket from KFC. It was a lovely balance of the smell of french-fries putting us down American highways, scant money to pay for diesel, & rejection of foreign wars for a lighter, tastier kind of oily muck.
We landed, smelling of KFC & stress, in Maine, after a few months of car issues, legal battles, & luxury homelessness (we had beans, tents, & lightning storms). It was a town of 4,000 people, in which I would become intimately familiar with the dynamics of small communities.
In 2014 I made the choice to purchase a MIDI keyboard instead of a Bitcoin. Bitcoin was $350 at the time: I chose the keyboard instead.
I spent the decade in the trenches of learning: audio engineering, music, branding, UI/UX, web design, HTML/CSS, writing, narrative storytelling. The latter third of this decade of which I've spent full-time not only in crypto, but in the Solana ecosystem itself where the lessons were more grand than anything I’d experienced before.
We watched $500 million dollars get flung at bad actors in exchange for some shitty jpegs. Multiples more into memes and speculative fungibles. We were almost infiltrated by North Korean agents. We encountered fraudsters, drug traffickers, and gamblers. We were brought to our knees by a curly haired autistic nerd and his methed-out sex parties. We tried to coordinate hundreds of thousands of disparate voices from every creed, color, nation, and financial class. I watched my friends investigate hundreds of rugs, other friends almost lose their homes, other friends make a living off of art for the first time, other friends make and lose millions in the giant internet casino. I sold a piece of art to someone for the first time in my life (definitely didn't cry & show my dad). Then I sold another, & another.
What I realized, with some help from my friends, was that we were living through a preview of something much larger. The breakdown of consensus reality wasn't just happening in crypto — it was everywhere. The fragmentation into competing tribal narratives, the collapse of shared truth and the half-baked cover-ups that people thought would suffice, the ultimate retreat into increasingly isolated digital realities and the ways those realities fracture when intruded upon. We were just experiencing it in concentrated form.
We've learned things nobody else on the earth had ever even thought about, often for good reason. But we also learned invaluable lessons about human interaction, money, and the strange venn diagram that is the overlap of greed & desire and hope & aspiration.
Because there is something special here, something mostly untapped, something that allows us to sit through massive fraud, political & economic instability, & the extreme financial volatility of the industry we work in. We've learned to build meaning and community under conditions that would have been unimaginable just decades ago.
As the broader culture splinters into warring tribes and people retreat into ideological bunkers, the world needs metaphorical Noah's arcs of belief — new structures that can preserve what's valuable while adapting to radically changed conditions. Many will revert to existing religions and ideology structures in response to these ever-increasing dynamics.
Radiants is an attempt at finding, building, & creating an arc — together. Not a fortress against change, but a vessel for navigating it consciously. It is not a goal; it has no explicit long-term goal: rather, it is a vehicle.
Curate & Reject
In the Modern Age we experience an oversaturation of information. Art, music, and content are produced at an exponentially increasing rate. AI can make beautiful images that would have taken a human a lifetime to produce. There is too much for any human to handle: war, politics, clickbait, thirst traps, engagement farms & more. In many ways, blockchain is no different — we've lulled ourselves into a false sense of scarcity, as if the vast majority of the assets we engage with can't be reproduced tomorrow with a simple fork of an existing protocol or yet another “new” launchpad.
In an age of information superabundance, knowledge is no longer power — curation is. Accessing vast, esoteric, & scarce knowledge is easier than it ever has been in all of human history; you don't even have to search Google anymore — there are AI's that will do that for you. The emphasis has shifted from merely accessing data to curating it meaningfully.
Curation evolved from the Latin verb "curare," which means 'to care for," into a modern condition termed as 'curationism.' This evolution suggests a greater overall trend in how we humans interact with the world — there is far too much to care about, so we must select, organize, and limit the things we are able to care about. Core to this process is rejection — a word that often carries a negative connotation. In an age of excess, curation becomes the mechanism to filter noise and ensure our assets broadcast more meaning than they absorb.
Radiants is a community for the curators; the rejectors, not because we lack the desire to be all inclusive but, rather: it is impossible to do so. It is also for those who love what we have curated as much as we do.
Identity, Alchemy, & Symbology
In the nascent days of NFTs, their allure was rooted in simplicity: art, existing purely on-chain. Generative tech allowed for the proliferation of unique variations under a single identity, spreading across the internet with the speed of a meme. They grew into something more than art — they became an intersection between identity and currency, intertwining internet micro-cultures with financial gain.
What emerged was something unprecedented: profile pictures that solve the individual-collective identity paradox at global scale. As digital media fragments us into "dividuals" — identity markers that represent group affiliations rather than whole persons — NFTs became the perfect vehicle for this new form of consciousness. They allow simultaneous individual expression and tribal belonging, personal ownership and collective meaning-making.
In our shift from literacy-based to digitally oral culture, NFTs function as tribal totems in the truest sense. They enable what oral cultures have always required: visible symbols that signal status, values, and belonging while allowing for personal expression within the collective. The value of a digital asset lies not just in its rarity or artistic merit but in its unspoken but broadcasted value set: a promise of belonging, identity, shared goals and ethos that enables both individual sovereignty and collective communion.
This is why the most successful NFT projects accidentally stumbled upon shared values and tribal identity, often without recognizing their core essence. They became profound symbology: tokens of association, emblems of shared beliefs and values broadcast across the entire internet in memetic fashion.
Blockchain Alchemy
In many ways, our experiments in Web3 parallel the alchemical experiments of old — but with a crucial insight that most miss: value, like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed, only transmuted. When a protocol or DAO airdrops tokens worth $1 billion, that value doesn't materialize from nothing. It emerges from the collective energy invested — thousands of hours of development, community building, marketing efforts, and the hopes of participants who believe in the vision. The "creation" of value is a misnomer; we simply transmute existing energy from dispersed human effort into quantifiable digital assets.
This conservation principle explains why blockchain projects are uniquely volatile and why so many fail catastrophically. Unlike traditional startups that need only achieve product-market fit, crypto projects face a double alchemical challenge: they must build both a compelling product AND sustainable token economics. Each requires different forms of energy transmutation, different timing, different participant behavior. Most projects attempt this dual transmutation without understanding the principle of equivalent exchange: you cannot get something for nothing.
The greatest failures in crypto history weren't just fraud; they were failed attempts at shortcutting the natural cycles of value transmutation. As any alchemist knows, rushing the Great Work leads to volatile reactions and inevitable collapse. Fireworks require tremendous energy to appear briefly; sustainable value requires patient cultivation over time.
This is the fundamental tension in our space: the technology enables rapid experimentation with value forms, but the underlying principles of transformation remain bound by natural law. Anyone who tries to shortcut time participates in failed alchemy, accepting that the volatility and failure rate of their experiment increases exponentially.
But when done consciously, blockchain alchemy offers something profound: the ability to dissolve old forms of value and organization (solve) and reconstitute them into new configurations (coagula). We burn outdated symbols — whether NFTs in the Murder Tree or legacy financial instruments through tokenization — not to destroy value but to transform it into forms better suited for our emerging cultural moment.
The true goal of alchemy was never just transmuting lead into gold; it was transmuting the alchemist. Similarly, Radiants exists not merely to create new NFT mechanics or novel art forms, but to transform the people who participate. The materials: the art, the programs, the validators, the NFTs, the community infrastructure, the retreats, are the crucible. The participants are both the alchemists and the substance being transformed.
We are learning to build meaning and community under conditions that would have been unimaginable just decades ago, developing practices for conscious navigation of technological change rather than being unconsciously shaped by it. Each experiment in value transmutation teaches us something about the deeper patterns of how humans organize, create, and find meaning together.
The world is filled with ingredients that can be mixed into this crucible: some combinations amplify the worst aspects of digital fragmentation and speculative mania; others create genuine sanctuary and sustainable cultural production. We hope to reject the former and curate the latter, understanding that every alchemical reaction generates unpredictable second-order effects in our rapidly changing media landscape.
The goal is not to choose between ancient wisdom and modern technology, individual sovereignty and collective belonging, but to achieve their conscious conjunction through patient, careful work.
The Problem With Old Words
We refuse false choices. The world of old wants you to choose: red vs blue, capitalist vs communist, freedom vs collective belonging, ancient wisdom or modern technology, taking things seriously vs having a sense of humor about it all.
But this forced “choice” is a distraction from the dance that is life itself. The magic happens in the “yes, and.”
Our words are decaying faster than we can replace them. Every major communication technology produces universal changes: something is enhanced, something becomes obsolete, something previously obsolete is retrieved, and when pushed to the extreme, effects reverse.
Digital media is now more similar to pre-industrial culture than it is to the culture of the late 20th century and early 21st. We are retrieving orality as literacy is on the decline. We argue about outdated terms like capitalism and socialism based on not the texts that coined the terms, but rather the opinions from those speaking, orating, on the subject of their own belief. Few people read, but everybody listens, watches, and speaks. We argue about capitalism vs socialism while anyone can fork your code, pirate your software, or create a direct competitor with a single prompt. The former ideological categories were never eternal truths — they were products of print, radio, and TV culture: like PBS, only made possible by viewers like you. Red vs blue, capitalist vs communist, left vs right. These all assume clear conditions that no longer exist: clear boundaries between nations, stable institutions, controllable flows of information and value.
We’re living through the collapse of what media theorists call “consensus reality.” Our formerly shared sense of facts, expectations, and concepts about the world emerged with mass literacy and direct-to-consumer broadcast. It was never a conversation nor consideration of what you should and should not believe: you were told a story, you had a binary choice to be for, or against it: was it red or blue, good, or evil. As we transition from literacy to a digitally oral culture, we’re not just seeing political change but the breakdown of the entire framework that made our categories meaningful.
In place of consensus, we have competing tribal narratives, each with their own version of truth, their own sacred and profane categories. When value flows through borderless networks that no state can control, when anyone can create currency or organizations outside of traditional systems, when facts themselves become superabundant and lose their authority, the old frameworks become not just irrelevant, but actively harmful. They force us into battles over territory that no longer even exists.
The old words fail not because we’re bad at politics, but because the media environment that gave them their meaning has fundamentally changed. We need language that describes what is actually happening, not what we think is happening based on our 20th century assumptions about societies.
Radiants is an exploration of what works, not a question nor an answer, but a comradery; a grand quest.
under the Rad public license