Civic Crypto

01Three layers matter to public institutions

Of the five things bundled under “crypto,” only three touch public institutions today.

02Where things stand on Sep 30, 2026

The money is moving faster than the law: stablecoin supply sits near $303B while the federal rulebook is still a proposal and the market-structure bill has just failed. Each row carries a status that says how the figure was read. Secondhand means a tracker’s number reported by someone else, which is exactly what the lab’s first dataset replaces.

Supply held near $290B from 2025-10 to 2026-08 while Bitcoin fell more than 50%.[src] That decoupling is why this page treats stablecoins, and not the price cycle, as the civic story.

03What it means for a village and for Illinois

For a village like Pingree Grove, crypto’s near-term effects are indirect: they run through banks, bond markets, and state tax law, not through accepting tokens.

04The strongest bull and bear cases

The bull case wins on Treasury demand and the bear case wins on payments and records, which gives the lab testable hypotheses instead of a verdict.

05The scoring rule

A prediction only counts if it was written down, with a probability, before the outcome. Try it on the four Illinois outcomes. Set your probabilities, then lock them: that is the registration moment, and after it only the world can move. Then flip outcomes and read the Brier score. Always saying 50 percent scores 0.25 no matter what happens; the only way to beat it is to commit, and the only way to be caught is to commit wrong.

06Three first studies

Start with the Illinois forecast because it has a hard deadline, then audit Wyoming continuously, then test whether crypto’s claimed payments benefit exists in villages at all. Treat every threshold as a placeholder, and set it before touching the data. That ordering is what preregistration buys.

0790-day plan to the January 1 gate

Register Study 1 by Oct 21, 2026, publish the Wyoming dataset in November, and have three registrations and one preprint on record before the Illinois tax takes effect. Every box below is derived: a registration milestone reads its study’s block, the disclosure milestone reads the disclosure, and the build fails once any date and its 3-day grace have passed with nothing recorded.

08The lab: five surfaces, one rule

Treat jakelawrence.xyz as the front door and put everything citable in a permanent outside home, because the site has no audience yet and DOIs and registrations are what make work credible on day one.

Two design choices make it a lab rather than a blog. Every essay links to the registration and dataset it rests on. Every dataset links back to the essays that used it. Pingree Grove Studies is the first research program inside the lab, and civic crypto is the second.

Register on OSF and deposit on Zenodo now. Treat arXiv as a later step, because its rules since January 21, 2026 favor people who already have an arXiv record or a personal endorser.

Practical path: Preprint the protocol and first results on an OSF-hosted community server, then ask authors of the closest prior work for an arXiv endorsement once a finished paper exists. A likely fit is cs.CY (computers and society) or econ.GN (general economics), which is stated from general knowledge and not checked.

09Sources, and how this page stays honest

Three pages were opened in full in the original reading; the rest were read as search excerpts, so treat their figures as approximate until the lab pulls primary data. Stablecoin supply and tokenized Treasury totals come from secondary trackers, and the lab’s first dataset pulls them directly from the feeds below. A source marked verified was checked against the primary document on the date shown, and what was found is written beside it.

Every figure here is a constant in a downloadable dataset, keyed to its source and the source’s access level. The derived numbers (the tracker spread, the Treasury multiple, the Jan 18, 2027 latest effective date, the cloture shortfall, the FRNT reserve ratio, the day counts, the Brier scores) come from small pure functions, and the site’s tests re-run them in CI. The three studies carry registration blocks that start empty; a test reads the real clock and fails once a register-by date passes with neither a DOI nor a dated skip, so a green build cannot mean nothing was due. CC BY 4.0. Refresh cadence: quarterly, and immediately after each of the two legal dates (2027-01-01 and 2027-01-18) to score the registered predictions.

Program two of the lab, beside Pingree Grove Studies. The counting discipline comes from How Would I Know?, the field-data method from The Legibility Gap, and the reading of public ledgers as civic data follows What the State Keeps. The full catalog is at /research.