Startup Feature: Alignment Economy Foundation | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

All right. Do you ever stay awake at night thinking about where your children be able to have the same wealth building capabilities that you had? Or also know some folks don't have children, in which case you may wake up thinking, "Should I have children?" And then there's a few of us that stay awake thinking, "Oh crap, another kid's coming. What am I going to do?"

So, I think if we think about it, we've all made money by working a job, starting a business, investing. Maybe some of us has inherited wealth, right? Is that going to be the same shot for our kids coming up here in the future? So, I'm Matt McCormick. I'm the executive director of the Alignment Economy Foundation.

We're a 501c3 nonprofit modeled after the Linux Foundation. We have created a self-funding universal basic income. It's essentially human attention on the blockchain. And today I want to talk about how that works, but more importantly talk about why a new economic scoreboard is actually needed. But first I want to talk about horses.

So, if you think about pre-1886, the best way to move from point A to point B was to ride a horse, right? And that was a rational way to move. In 1886, we invented the first car, but it took decades of iteration, structural build, culture change before it became a no-brainer of why the heck would you take a horse, you should drive the car, right? The Model T came out and that was able to make this work. I want to argue that we're kind of facing the same thing right now with our financial system.

Throughout history, there has been centralized fiat currencies that have we've used for transferring value. They've always eventually failed. And being able to try to think through with blockchain and Bitcoin coming out, it proved that decentralized consensus works, but we've yet to find that Model T of money to actually reach the mass adoption. And so, I think the question is why? So, blockchain's been around for about 15 years.

There's We say about 3 trillion in market cap. Um but if you think about it, like no one is actually using this. We have the regulators here. We have the intelligence agencies here. We have uh you know, people here using it.

But they're not using it really enough. At most 10% of the world is owning cryptocurrencies. And other than the stable coins, nobody really uses it. And so I think there's two paradoxes that Bitcoin as well as all of its derivatives have run into so far that are preventing this mass adoption that we have set out on our original mission. The first is what I call our first mover advantage paradox.

And so if you bought Bitcoin in 2013 and you held on, you're probably doing pretty well and you're probably not even here today. Right? Uh but your aunt in 2030 is not going to want to buy Bitcoin because it's going to feel like a pyramid scheme at that point. And so currency should reward people for the Excuse me, reward people for the economic value they're adding. Are you contributing to someone's Maslow's hierarchy of needs versus hey, you showed up first kind of thing.

The second one is what I call the deflation paradox. Uh I'd say most of us here are probably familiar with the Bitcoin pizza transaction. So, someone spent uh 10,000 Bitcoin on pizzas. He actually bought a lot of other things that year, not just pizza. Uh and that's obviously worth a lot more today.

And so the challenge is that if you think about um you know, being able to have a currency and be able to spend it, what we're all doing is we're buying these currencies, we're holding on to them, we're hoping they go up in value relative to the dollar, which was that thing we were trying to replace originally. And when they reach that magic number, we sell them and we then use them to buy whatever the heck we need to fulfill our Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And so a currency that no one spends is not a currency. Now, I know what many of you are thinking. You're thinking, "Okay, well, what about stable coins?

They fix this, right?" Uh they are being used in Wall Street. They're being re-wiring the entire financial system. I would say yes, I agree with you. And if I was still making investments in the space, I would be spending all my time here.

Like stable coins are on the path to win, especially outside the United States. Like a dollar-dominated world is going to move forward very quickly here. But, they're still centralized. They're still fiat, just electronic versions, and uh that's not really solving the problem that we originally set out to solve. So, it's really just faster plumbing for a financial system that's outdated.

Another reason that stable coins are not going to save us is AI and robotics. We've heard that a lot this week so far here, right? That as AI gets more and more capable, as robotics get more and more capable, the fiduciary duty of companies is to make profit profit maximize returns. They're going to be cutting jobs. That's going to lead to dollars getting printed, a bit like the COVID playbook.

Um more and more money's going to get out there. That's going to lead to inflation. Asset prices are going to continue to rise. Workers are going to demand more money. And this cycle's just going to continue to repeat because just like the internet, AI and robotics are only going to get better going forward.

Our current economic system, the scoreboard's broken. Now, the only feasible outcome that some people say about this, they say, "Oh, we'll have universal basic income." You'll hear Elon or other people talking about this. The challenge with dollar-run UBI is that it's government money. It's fiat money.

You're going to get the same problem. It's just wearing a different hat, right? Inflation's going to continue to take off. If you start giving everyone uh $100,000 a year, that's not going to help, right? It's going to cause inflation.

So, I want to slow down here for a minute and talk about this isn't really theory. Like this is already happening. Rome is starting to fall a little bit. I don't think the boomers quite realize how hard it is for folks under 40 these days. And you could show all the charts of, okay, housing prices have gone up compared to salary or cost of tuition has gone up or uh the two-income trap and you know, falling birth rates.

But, you can't really convince people with data, right? You need to use emotional stories. So, there's kind of the old joke of uh if you had a firm handshake and made eye contact, right? You got a job a long time ago. Versus today, uh you're competing with thousands of people on LinkedIn.

I don't know if anyone has told the robot uh sorting packages against the intern a couple weeks ago. The intern did win. But, then the robot kept going for like 200 hours, right? So, this is going to this is going to keep going. You walk into McDonald's, there's a kiosk and Wendy's has AI taking your order, right?

Uh this is going to keep happening while the Fed keeps printing. And so, we need to come up with some sort of new way to think through this. My notes are falling. So, there tends to be kind of three possible reactions when people think about this situation. So, most people are going to uh kind of tune it out.

The first one there just keep scrolling on your phone, look at the next Tik Tok video. Uh hey man, did you catch the game last night? I think uh that team won, right? Okay. The second one is uh people are being a bit more Luddites or saying, "Hey, let's burn down all the data centers.

They're not necessary. Uh let's get rid of this." And that's going to keep moving us towards Rome falling, right? Like Idiocracy is going to become more and more of a documentary going forward. There is a third option, which is a bit more of instead of just pointing out the problems, let's try to create solutions uh for this going forward.

And these are kind of the distributed systems and what we're trying to do here of if we could create a new economic scoreboard, a new way to play the game, we could maybe enter a new Pax Romana. And that was kind of the peak 200 years of Rome. And not saying that this is going to be a utopia, but we could at least avoid sliding further into the digital dark ages. So, I'm going to talk about the alignment economy now and kind of how this works. And there's kind of three unique buckets.

I'm not going to go into the full uh details today. Um have a QR code at the end or come grab me and I'm happy to share the white paper or give you access to the code. There should be little cool icons on there, but they don't seem to be showing up. Okay, well, it helps. So, the first one is uh daily point allocations.

And so, the idea here is that every person has 1,440 minutes of attention each day. That's how many minutes you have in a day. So, we would kind of airdrop or give you 1,440 points in your account. So, the what this is solving is that first paradox of the first mover advantage. So, whether you join us 10 days from now or you join 10 days from 10 years from now, you would still get 1,440 points put in your account each day.

The trouble is that's going to cause inflation. So, that goes to point number two. Point number two is what we call rebasing. Uh this is a bit more kind of uh something you talk to the everyday person about. Those that are really in crypto, this would be kind of like burning, right?

So, we're going to burn a set percentage of points each day. And before there was two little pies there. So, one big pie, one small pie. And the idea is that if you have 1% of the points pre-rebase, you would still have 1% of the points post-rebase. Points would be less than what you had before.

And but so, this will remain maintain your purchasing power within the system and limits inflation or deflation because we're shifting the point values. The third point here is what we call proof of human. And so, I'm that's giving out points every day uh is going to attract agents, attract bots. People are going to want to game this, hack this. Can I have multiple accounts, thousands of accounts, cheat it?

And so, instead of using uh necessarily, let's say, proof of stake or proof of human, excuse me, we're using proof of human instead of proof of stake or um you know, mining for math, we have our miners focus on, okay, is this one account a unique human owning this account? And we do that in a decentralized fashion. Again, happy to go into details later if anyone's interested. But the idea is that we have a 0 to 100% ranking, right? So if I say, "Okay, I know Ian.

I've met him. Yep, this is a person. Let's give him 100%." But then maybe you get a message from Ian on Telegram, and they created that account 7 days ago. They would maybe have like 10%, right?

So these are ways to help kind of solve some of this proof of human approach. We approach this as an arms race. Proof of human is probably the hardest problem in computer science and is not fully solvable. And so the idea here is that there's an ongoing arms race that the minor ecosystem would use to fight back against bots, against nefarious attractors to solve this. So, we're all here because we agree the financial system needs an update.

And to go back to my original question for your kids or your hypothetical kids, do you think they're going to be able to build wealth the same way you did? I believe the answer is no. Clearly no. A new economic scoreboard is going to have to evolve if society is going to remain coherent. And we have this new technology that works really well, uh but not well enough because it's still very rational to use the dollar.

It's still very rational to use stablecoins. A lot of people are riding horses still, and we need to come up with a better model to have money. So, I personally believe that the alignment economy is probably one of the best ways to do this. Uh it is a bit of a moonshot project, but we've been able to uh you know, solve that first-mover advantage paradox. We've been able to solve that inflation-deflation paradox.

And set us up for a framework, a world where going forward with AI and robotics, if human labor is less valuable, how can we have an economic system going forward? So, we've got the white paper done. We have the nonprofit set up. Uh we have some open source code. Our next step is to do uh detailed review of that, and then launch the private the public uh test pilot chain.

And then once you get the proof of concept, we do a much larger re- re- after that. So, I'll stop there. Thank you so much for the time, and uh looks like we got about 3 minutes for questions. If anyone has a question, otherwise uh thank you.

The first mover advantage. There There is again, we can't solve all these problems necessarily, but how we make it a little less attackable and yes, so if I'm doing this for the first 10 years and no one ever joins, but suddenly it becomes big, I would have that first mover advantage, but it would be a bit smaller or at least there's that basic income that you're getting each day, even when you join 10 years from now. So yes, it isn't it's an unsolvable problem, but we're trying to minimize the the effect of it. It's a good question. Any other questions?

Yeah. I I so in terms of my opinion on that, I had don't have it on these slides, but I really think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and like what is the tangible value that you can provide to society? Like what are you good at? What value can contribute? You can help build houses, you can help give people food, like think through parts of those systems or can you consult for companies that are building data centers cuz we need AI to solve cancer.

Like there's there's look at problems that the world has and then solve those. That's the same thing that's going to happen here, right? Just because we give everyone a bunch of points every single day, okay, it's great. I still want lunch. Like who's going to make lunch?

Like who's going to kill the cow to make the beef kind of thing, right? We need people that are able to farm and do all those different activities. Anything else? Yeah. Yes.

It's a good question. So kind of like what are other UBIs and how does this relate? I've shied away from this UBI thing for a long time cuz like maybe my politics don't really lean towards that traditionally and it gets very polarization. Some people love it, some people hate it. But I I think the case I'm trying to make is that the economic scoreboard just isn't going to work.

Like we have to come up with something different. And I do think there will be many different pilots of this. There's already some governments that are giving out handouts with their fiat currency. Uh I have yet and I'd love to meet anyone else who has a cryptocurrency based blockchain that is thinking about this. I really think you have to come up with these U3 unique things of like got to give them the points, got to figure out the inflation problem, and then got to figure out the nefarious actor problem.

And if you can't solve those three on a blockchain way, you're just going to be left with okay, giving everyone dollars every year and that's just going to cause massive inflation. All right, I think we're done. Thank you very much, everyone.