Free and Fair Money... sort of.

Circles ($CRC) is a big idea. The kind you can only get when pure ideology and pure technology smash into each other (and reality is there, but only partially involved).
https://aboutcircles.com/

It's, as you would expect, a bit mad. Which makes it interesting.
https://blockworks-research.beehiiv.com/p/money-without-gatekeepers

But it's such a simple idea that it's not the only one of it's kind.
XEN ($XEN) is the same idea and much the same core implementation only much much madder. It is the result of ideology and technology smashing into one and other with any input from, or knowledge of, reality.
I highly recommend minting some.
It's near free to do so (depending on the blockchain you use, and you can use many).
I've been minting it for over a year and it was worthless when I started and it's worth even less now so you'll not be ostracised by your peers for speculating on crypto; instead you'll be losing a very small amount of money very very slowly (I believe this is also called 'learning', though most of my paid education saw me lose much larger amounts of money much more quickly).

Ore ($ORE), on Solana, is what happens when reality is involved in the ideology + technology equation. It's a version of PoW and the above. It's much more rooted in the practical side of things, though practical as things stand today, which is still very much the on chain defi casino. Which carries different longer term challenges to the two more ideologically drive projects above.

As tradfi more and more ruins the fun and innovation of crypto (e.g., "let's put stocks on the BLOCKCHAIN!. Wow! This is so INNOVATIVE! Trading digital representations of stocks on a centralised crypto exchanges will change EVERYTHING!") it's good to still see people pushing the technology to do things that haven't been done before and open people's minds to properly new ideas.

Even if these first versions are a bit (or a lot) mad and ultimately go nowhere, the fact they're out there and you can trade/burn/send them in anger means we're well on the way to the really valuable stuff several iterations/re-imaginings down the track.

I wrote an article about XEN and ORE a while ago on Bulb, look it up if you're interested.