Primer · assume zero knowledge
What is a tech tree, and why are we drawing one?
Written for someone who has never played a video game. Warm, fast, no condescension.
Games figured out something true about the world.
In strategy games — Civilization, Age of Empires, StarCraft, and a small mobile one called The Battle of Polytopia — you don’t start with everything. You start with almost nothing, and you research technologies one at a time. Each unlock costs resources. Each unlock opens the next.
You cannot skip. You cannot research Philosophy before Writing. The path is the point.
That map of what-you-can-reach-from-here is called a tech tree, and it turns out to be a shockingly good model for anything that grows: an economy, a career, a company — or a blockchain.
Why Polytopia specifically?
Polytopia is a stripped-down strategy game — the whole thing fits on a phone screen. Which makes it the cleanest possible model, because it only keeps the rules that matter:
- Tribes start with different technologies already unlocked. Some tribes are simply born ahead.
- Some technologies are dead ends. They cost a fortune and lead nowhere.
- A few unlocks are wonders — and wonders actually win the game. Everything else is just moving pieces around.
Those three rules describe the blockchain industry with uncomfortable precision. So we drew the board.
The one idea you need: a demand sink.
Everything on this board is in service of one thing: getting people to keep using something.
A demand sink is a product people would be genuinely upset to lose. Not "engaged with." Not "excited about." Upset to lose.
Crypto has spent fifteen years and hundreds of billions of dollars searching for these. It has found two. This site is the map of what everyone else is doing instead.
Try it — you can’t skip a tier
Click to unlock. You can’t reach the third until you’ve reached the second.
How to read the board
- center
- the start — a live mainnet with nothing built yet
- outward
- more advanced — each tier costs more and depends on the last
- gold
- a wonder — the only tiles that actually win
- dagger
- a dead end — proven not to work, at scale
- dot
- a spawn tech — a tile a chain can be born already holding