Rebranding to m0n3y and Writing Crypto Docs Like You're 10

The DAXSO → M0N3Y rebrand commit, the burn-to-earn explainer for degens, and an ELI10 walk-through of zk-shielded notes that does not mention the word "circuit" once.

“The reason I write docs first is so the design constraints write themselves once you have to put them in plain English.”

— me, in the m0n3y origin post

Five weeks after that origin post landed, the docs site needed a rebrand and three new pages. The commit is 60aced9 — :fire: Rm old / added new pages on 2025-03-30. The diff:

Renamed DAXSO Documentation Site → M0N3Y Documentation Site everywhere.
Stripped out a stale “companies I’ve worked at” component listing five brands that didn’t belong on a privacy-coin docs site.
Added a new sidebar section: “Explain it Like I’m 10”.
Added three pages: simplified1.md (what is the project), simple_monitization.md (how does the burn work), detailed_simplified2.md (full process explained for ten-year-olds).

The interesting question isn’t what I rebranded — that’s a string find-and-replace — but why the ELI10 pages got written at all. Crypto docs traditionally come in two registers: 200-page yellowpaper, or git clone && pnpm i. Neither registers reaches a normal person. This is the post about the third register.

The rebrand wasn’t just cosmetic

The diff to src/components/docs/companyList.tsx removed five entries:

- {
-   name: "Ping.gg",
-   linkName: "ping.gg",
-   link: "https://ping.gg",
- },
- {
-   name: "Nexiona",
-   linkName: "nexiona.com",
-   link: "https://nexiona.com",
- },
- {
-   name: "Layer3",
-   linkName: "layer3.xyz",
-   link: "https://layer3.xyz",
- },
- {
-   name: "EcoToken",
-   linkName: "ecotokens.net",
-   link: "https://ecotokens.net",
- },
- {
-   name: "Civitai",
-   linkName: "...",
-   link: "...",
- },

These were companies I’d worked at, listed in a “Trusted by” / “Used by” component on the original DAXSO docs theme. They had no business being on the m0n3y docs site, because they’d never used m0n3y. Lying about deployments is the original sin of crypto docs and I refused to start with a pre-existing lie.

The replacement was a single one-entry list with a placeholder — better to have no logos than fake ones.

The Twitter handle also changed:

-  twitter: "haydenaylor",
+  twitter: "dev_skill_issue",

haydenaylor is my civilian Twitter. dev_skill_issue is the persona I wanted publicly attached to a privacy-coin docs site, because the project’s pitch was deliberately adversarial to the consensus crypto narrative and I didn’t want it on my real-name handle yet. Two different brands, two different surface areas, one Astro deploy.

ELI10 as a docs register

The new sidebar section was titled “Explain it Like I’m 10” — a nod to ELI5 with two extra years of complexity budget. Why ten and not five? Because a five-year-old doesn’t have the abstraction layer for “money on a network” but a ten-year-old has at minimum heard of Roblox/Robux and Pokémon cards, and I can build on either.

Here’s the opener of simplified1.md:

Alright, crypto degen! Let’s break this down into something simple and fun. We’re building digital cash that works like real cash but on steroids—private, fast, and unstoppable. Plus, there’s a token ($M0N3Y) that ties it all together.

Note who the second person is. It’s not “the user.” It’s “crypto degen.” That’s a deliberate audience choice. The page exists because:

Crypto degens are who actually arrives at the docs. Not your mom. Not the journalist. The 24-year-old burned by three bridge hacks who still wants to learn the next thing.
They’re allergic to corpo-speak. Words like “leverages” and “synergistic” eject them from the page. “On steroids” lands.
They have crypto literacy but maybe not crypto-math literacy. They know what a wallet is. They might not know what a Pedersen commitment is. The page meets them at exactly that level.

A page that’s properly aimed at an audience reads like a friend at a bar explaining what they’re working on. A page that’s not aimed reads like a law firm. The m0n3y ELI10 pages are deliberately the former.

The Pokémon analogy for token burn

simple_monitization.md is a 84-line explainer for how $M0N3Y token burning maintains supply pressure without being a security. The opening:

Imagine you have 100 limited-edition Pokémon cards. If you burn 20 of them, you only have 80 left. But here’s the cool part: those 80 cards are now rarer than before, which makes them more valuable. That’s how token burning works in crypto.

The Pokémon analogy is load-bearing in a way most analogies aren’t. It maps:

Pokémon cards → tokens (each one fungible-ish in a series, but bounded supply)
Burning a card → burning a token (the on-chain Burn instruction, which destroys supply forever)
Card rarity affecting price → token scarcity affecting price
Limited print run → fixed-supply or capped-supply token

Where the analogy breaks is also where the doc is honest about the mechanism: Pokémon cards aren’t fungible (your charizard isn’t my charizard); tokens are. So I added the next paragraph:

Tokens are like cards that are all literally identical — the value comes from how many exist, not which one you have. Your $M0N3Y is exactly the same as my$ M0N3Y. The supply going down lifts every wallet equally.

The whole page does this — analogy first, exact mechanism second. That’s the ELI10 pattern: build the intuition with a model the reader already has, then hand them the precise rule once the intuition is in place. It’s the way physics is taught at high-school level (rubber sheets for general relativity) and the way crypto should be too.

The “Full Process Explained Like You’re 10” page

detailed_simplified2.md is the most ambitious page. It’s a 141-line walk-through of the entire private-cash transaction lifecycle, from “your wallet has a key” to “your transaction is on-chain and nobody can tell it was you,” explained with elementary-school analogies. A few of them:

Elliptic curve cryptography → “magic lock & key.” The pubkey is the lock; only the matching private key opens it. No mention of base points, scalar multiplication, or BN254. The reader doesn’t need any of that to use a wallet.
Hash functions → “smashing a clay tablet into dust.” You can’t reconstruct the tablet. But anyone who saw the original can verify the dust is from that tablet by smashing the same way and comparing.
Pedersen commitments → “sealed envelopes with a wax stamp.” You commit to a value by sealing it; you can later prove what was inside without unsealing.
Merkle trees → “a school registry: each class makes a list of who’s there, the principal collects all the class lists into a school list, and the district collects all the school lists. To prove a single student is in the district you just need their class list and the chain back up.” This is the cleanest analogy I’ve ever found for Merkle trees and I’m honestly proud of it.

The page never uses the words “circuit,” “witness,” “Groth16,” “Poseidon,” or “Cairo.” Those words are not part of the audience’s vocabulary and translating them would be paying a tax for no benefit. If the reader wants to know what hash function is actually being used, they’ll read the technical docs in the next sidebar section.

Why ELI10 instead of an FAQ

Most docs sites would address the same problem with an FAQ. “Q: How does the privacy work? A: We use zk-SNARKs…” This is worse than an explainer page for two reasons:

FAQs are reactive. They answer questions someone has already half-formed. The ELI10 page is proactive — it walks the reader through a model that anticipates the questions before they’re asked.
FAQs fragment the mental model. Each Q&A is independent. The reader walks away with a list of facts, not a mental model. The ELI10 page is a guided tour that builds a mental model — by the end you can answer your own questions because you understand how the system fits together.

The cost of writing an ELI10 page is significantly higher than writing an FAQ. The benefit is that the reader actually retains the information.

What got cut from the rebrand commit

Look at the diff to src/config.ts:

 export type OuterHeaders =
   | "Monopoly M0N3Y"
+  | "Explain it Like I'm 10"
   | "Usage"
   | "Deployment"
   | "Contributing";

I considered four other section names before landing on the one that shipped:

“For Beginners” — too patronizing.
“Plain English” — implies the rest of the docs are not in plain English (mostly true, but rude).
“Concepts” — academic, opaque, the same word every other docs site uses for the same purpose without delivering.
“How it Works” — the most generic header in tech writing; impossible to remember.

“Explain it Like I’m 10” works because it’s:

Tonally consistent with the rest of the docs (the project’s whole brand is irreverent).
Specific about the audience contract (the reader knows what level the writing will hit).
Self-deprecating about the assumption it makes (the writer admits the topic deserves an ELI10 explanation, not pretending it’s already obvious).

Section names are a small thing that get re-read every time someone navigates the sidebar. They’re worth thinking about.

Trade-offs

Why ship ELI10 docs for a project that doesn’t have a working mainnet yet? Because the docs are how I gather feedback on the design. People who read an explainer of how the system would work will tell me when the design is unintuitive, in ways that someone reading a yellowpaper won’t. The docs are a feedback loop on my design, not just a deliverable for the launched system.

Why rebrand the whole thing once instead of a gradual migration? Because Astro is statically built and grep-ing-and-replacing strings across an Astro repo is a 5-minute operation, while gradual migration creates a months-long window where the brand is inconsistent. You lose more user trust to inconsistency than you gain by a phased rollout.

Why keep both simplified1.md and detailed_simplified2.md? Because the first answers “what” (what are we building?) and the second answers “how” (how does it work step-by-step). Different reader, different page. Some readers only need the first; some readers will read both.

What this taught me

The 60aced9 commit isn’t a coding commit. It’s a writing commit. But it’s one of the more important commits in the entire m0n3y-web history because it’s where the project committed to a specific audience. Once you decide that the docs are for “crypto degens who arrive after a bad week of bridge hacks” rather than “investors evaluating Series A,” every other writing decision falls out of that.

The rest of the m0n3y stack — the wallet (v3, the NFC cards), the SDK (day one, test suite), the AMM (compressed) — all inherited that audience contract. They use the same voice, the same Pokemon-card-tier analogies, the same admission that the math is ugly under the hood and that’s fine because nobody has to look.

You can write a privacy coin’s docs in two ways: as a math tutorial, or as a heist film. The m0n3y docs picked the heist film. I think it was the right call.