In 2008, I attended a presentation by economist Brian Beaulieu of ITR Economics. He and his identical twin brother Alan had built a reputation for remarkably accurate economic forecasting — their firm maintains a 94.7% accuracy rate at four quarters out.

That day, Brian wasn't talking about the next quarter or even the next year. He was talking about the 2030s. He laid out the case that demographic trends, debt levels, and economic cycles were converging toward a global depression — not a recession, a depression — hitting around 2030.

I walked out of that room unsettled. Not panicked, but changed. The question lodged in my mind: If he's right, what should I be doing now?

Over the years, I kept coming back to the same thought: communities with local food networks would be more resilient than those entirely dependent on global supply chains.

It wasn't complicated. If your neighborhood has people who know how to grow food, and systems for trading that food with each other, you have options. If you're entirely dependent on trucks from a thousand miles away stocking shelves at a store you don't control, you're exposed.

The 2020 pandemic gave everyone a glimpse of what supply chain disruption looks like. Empty shelves. Farmers dumping produce while families went without. A system optimized for efficiency, completely unprepared for shock.

But I'd been thinking about this for twelve years by then. And I'd already tried to build it once.

Harry Weller was one of my best friends. We were roommates after college. Harry went on to become one of the most successful venture capitalists in the country — nine years on the Forbes Midas List, led NEA's East Coast practice, backed companies like Groupon. When I told him about LocalRoots, he got it immediately. He saw what I saw: this wasn't about building a company, it was about building resilience.

Harry believed in it enough that NEA funded it.

We built the first version as a centralized app — a marketplace connecting local growers with buyers. We gave it a real shot.

But we couldn't quite make it work. The timing wasn't right, the model wasn't right, something wasn't clicking. We made the hard decision to shut it down.

Harry passed away unexpectedly in 2016. I think about him when I work on this.

Shutting down that first attempt taught me a lot. The core idea was right — people want local food, and backyard gardeners have surplus to sell. But the execution needed to be different.

This time, I'm building on blockchain. Not because crypto is trendy, but because it creates infrastructure that no single company controls. If LocalRoots disappeared tomorrow, the networks we've helped create should continue. That's the point.

And I'm taking a two-phase approach:

Phase 1: Launch the marketplace with stablecoin (USDC) payments. Prove that it works. Build a real community of sellers and buyers. Track everyone's activity with a points system we call "Seeds."

Phase 2: Once the marketplace has traction and market conditions are right, launch the $ROOTS token. Airdrop tokens to everyone who helped build the network early. Their Seeds convert to real tokens.

This version is built on Base (Coinbase's L2 network). The approach is slower, but smarter. We prove the value before we tokenize it.

LocalRoots is a marketplace connecting backyard gardeners with neighbors who want local food. But the marketplace is just the mechanism.

The real goal is getting more people growing. Every new gardener strengthens their community. Every backyard that produces food is resilience that didn't exist before.

Brian and Alan Beaulieu's forecast points to economic trouble in the early 2030s, with a bottom around 2036. ITR Economics has been consistent on this thesis since their 2014 book "Prosperity in the Age of Decline." You can learn more about their forecast at itreconomics.com.

Whether they're exactly right or not, the preparation is the same. Build local food networks now. Get more people growing. Strengthen communities before they need it.

I've already built this once. Now I'm building it better. And I'm looking for people who want to build it with me.