Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-27
Grey metaverses: favela economies in web3
I Forty pesos an hour
In 2021, in Cabanatuan, the Philippines, some three thousand people play a collectible-creature video game every day to earn a token they then swap for pesos. The peak reaches 300 dollars a month, against a local average wage of 220.
Ten months later the token has lost 99 % of its value. People go on playing for two more months. That last part is the datum: not the boom, the inertia.
“An economy is defined not by what it promises to pay but by what people do when it stops paying.”
II Anatomy of the grey
Grey does not mean illegal. It means unaccounted: work that produces value recorded in a ledger no ministry reads.
It has three constant traits:
- the income is real, the labour category does not exist
- the risk is borne entirely by whoever has the least capital
- the infrastructure is supplied by a third party who answers for nothing
Those are exactly the three traits of informal work as it has always been. The novelty is not in the structure: it is that the structure is now auditable in real time and invisible all the same.
III Table of the split
| Role | Contributes | Takes |
|---|---|---|
| asset owner | initial capital | 40-60 % |
| player | 6-8 h daily | 40-60 % |
| protocol | the ledger | a transaction fee |
| regulator | — | 0 |
The empty row is the interesting one. There is no fiscal capture because there is no category; and there is no category because nobody wanted to invent one in time.
IV An objection to this text's own title
It is worth dismantling here the word that heads this piece, because it does more damage than work.
Calling this a “favela” is an aesthetic loan: it takes a real place, with a history, neighbourhood organisation and conflicts of its own, and uses it as a synonym for picturesque precarity. It is the gesture that turns neighbourhoods into texture.
And it describes badly. A favela is a territorial answer, rooted, with memory. This is the opposite: delocalised, with no neighbours, no ground, dissolved the moment the price falls. If an image were needed, it would be the mining camp — it arrives, extracts, leaves, lays no street.
The title stays because it is the one in circulation. But it describes nothing.
V Accounting ritualsafe
-
01
Think of some activity of yours that generates value for a platform.
-
02
Estimate the monthly hours you give it.
-
03
Divide any income it has brought you by those hours.
No new accounts, nothing to connect. The result is your hourly rate in the grey economy — and usually the figure surprises you not by being low but by never having been worked out.
VI Coda
If value that is not accounted for gets produced anyway, then the grey is no margin of the system: it is the system running with no duty to account.
And the records will remain —every transaction signed, dated, indelible, perfectly public— documenting with notarial precision a job no country ever got round to admitting existed.