Jake Lawrence · Public Finance / Civic Data / Open Science · Field Data theme
Stablecoins are the one part of crypto with real public-sector consequences right now, and a research lab's best first move is to write down predictions about Illinois' first-of-its-kind crypto tax, with probabilities, before it takes effect on January 1, 2027. The second program of a public research lab, with its three studies drafted and none registered yet, which the page says.
The second program inside the site's public research lab (Pingree Grove Studies is the first). It sorts the five things bundled under "crypto" into the three that touch public institutions today (stablecoins as payment rails, tokenized securities, public ledgers as civic data) and freezes a dated status board of where the money and the law stood on 2026-09-30: stablecoin supply near 303 billion dollars while trackers disagree by six percent, tokenized Treasuries up 1.8 times in seven months, the federal stablecoin rulebook still a proposal after its agencies missed their deadline, the market-structure bill failing cloture 49 to 50, Illinois' 0.2 percent digital asset tax signed and litigated, and Wyoming's state-issued token held under a one million dollar cap. It reads the effects for a village (through banks, bond markets and state tax law, never through accepting tokens) and sets the strongest bull case against the strongest bear case to get hypotheses instead of a verdict. The signature interaction is the scoring rule: set probabilities on the four Illinois outcomes, lock them, flip outcomes and read the Brier score, because a forecast that always says 50 percent scores 0.25 whatever happens. Three studies are drafted with their registration blocks empty on purpose, and a test reads the real clock and fails once a register-by date passes with neither an OSF DOI nor a dated skip. Content-as-code, every figure keyed to a source and its access level (three opened in full, the rest excerpts, said on every row), no DB. Not investment advice, no token, non-partisan.
The two programs of one lab. Pingree Grove Studies publishes what one village's records can make legible; Civic Crypto asks what the newest money and the newest tax will do to that village's banks and borrowing, and commits its predictions to a registry before the outcomes land.
How Would I Know? maps claims to the sources that would settle them and shows how a counting rule flips a verdict. Civic Crypto turns the same discipline forward in time: a claim about a tax that has not taken effect yet is only a prediction if the probability was written down first, and a hedge of 50 percent scores the same whatever happens.
Two field-data boards built to say where their figures came from. The Legibility Gap measures a wartime state's recovery against sources it names; Civic Crypto freezes a status board where most rows are secondhand, labels each one, and makes replacing them with primary pulls the lab's first dataset.
What the State Keeps reads the federal state as a portfolio of held options. Civic Crypto watches the state open a new kind of ledger: Wyoming publishing its token's reserves on a public chain where anyone can check them, and Illinois taxing the flow before the federal rulebook exists.
Three studies about stablecoins, the Illinois crypto tax and Wyoming's state token, each to be preregistered with probabilities before January 1, 2027. Subscribe and you hear when a registration lands, when a dataset ships, and when the predictions are scored. It is the one list for the whole site, so you will get the rest of the work too. No schedule, easy out.
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