TCRs Will Rise Again

Not long ago, a series of acronyms dominated mindshare in crypto. Think ICOs, DAOs, NFTs, and, for a brief window, yes, TCRs.

The lattermost, or token curated registries, remains the most obscure today, but in their initial wave TCRs were a mechanism that many creators and teams experimented with. For a time I myself worked at JPG, which used TCRs to build a curatorial layer for NFTs.

Crypto’s first wave of TCRs either succeeded as self-contained, indefinite artistic projects, or, like in the case of JPG, failed to gain breakout traction. Either way, in recent years this primitive has fallen into relative obscurity as attention moved on to hotter things.

Yet, as I do with DAOs and NFTs, I still maintain that the best days of TCRs lie ahead of us, and that’s simply because TCRs offer a fundamental utility that can be extremely useful if done well, namely onchain self-regulating lists.

The crux is, how can you collect, organize, and update information atop an open, permissionless environment like a decentralized network? It’s a question that remains as relevant as ever today (as Ansem’s new z500 index shows), and TCRs are one of the possible answers here.

The way they work is pretty straightforward, but they can be endlessly extended and customized as with anything onchain.

In the traditional TCR model, someone puts forward a stake, e.g. tokens or reputational XP points, to propose a new entry to a list, and others can vote to approve or challenge the proposal. If the proposal succeeds, a new entry gets added to the list, while failure blocks the entry and leads to a loss of stake.

Fundamentally, then, this primitive gives you the possibility of creating and using trustworthy decentralized directories onchain. Sure, if you don’t need open permissionlessness, then a company’s servers can be your source of truth, but then you’d face things like bias and the specter of a single point of failure.

Accordingly, TCRs are an onchain means to cultivate info in a more neutral, more censorship-resistant, and more decentralized way, plus they can be extended and customized in basically endless ways. This is why I still continue to pay attention to anything I see around this category.

So the space might still be sleeping on them, sure, but TCRs have more potential use cases now than ever before, and I’ve seen this reality firsthand through a number of new projects in 2026. Whether a true resurgence is coming remains to be seen, but these projects have made me think that the demand is increasingly there for the necessary conditions.

For instance, consider Newsworthy. I don’t think it’s still active, but it landed earlier this year, and it’s instructive regardless.

Here, AI agents and World ID-verified humans submitted tweet URLs as proposed news entries by bonding a small amount of USDC, after which other agents could stake to vote keep or remove over a fixed window.

Successful curation earned rewards in the project’s token while poor submissions risked losing their bond. It was a classic TCR flow, but with the unprecedented twist of being largely powered by autonomous agents scoring events in real time. I’m certain we’ll see more projects experiment in this vein going forward.

Another newer example to consider is decentralized listings on zSwap.

Here, the interface’s token selector is governed by a TCR that sits on top of the project’s DAO. Members lock zOrg shares inside a zOrgz NFT to signal support for particular tokens, and those signals continuously determine visibility onchain. It’s a clean demonstration of how a TCR + DAO combo can solve the old centralized listing problem in a fully permissionless DEX.

Relatedly, I know TokenWorks is currently thinking through how to manage letting community members permissionlessly add and remove NFT collections from the Fake World Assets gacha, and they’ve pondered $FWA voting toward this end. They may choose a different design, e.g. Hyperliquid-style auctions, but if they do go the voting route, we’ll have another new TCR experiment live on Ethereum to consider.

As you go further along the spectrum toward recreation, the possibilities remain wide open. My favorite onchain game right now is the monster battler Stomp, and I recall from their old docs that they’ve built explicitly with a mind toward the possibility of players later introducing their own content, e.g. new mons and new moves, and using TCRs to navigate the mons lists and rulesets in a decentralized way.

Again, these examples above are just tastes of what’s possible with TCRs right now, but they’re also previews of things that we’ll be seeing much more of in the years ahead if my hunch here is correct. The truly autonomous DAOs to come and will likely depend on infra like TCRs, as will other onchain advances, so keep this thread on your radar.