Yeah, that was a silly year we'll never get back, but they seem to be on track again now.

"Cryptocurrency nonsense" was an idea to create a local economy around Red as an open-source project, based on community-provided services and backed by an ERC-20 token.

Think of it as a solution to the class of problems of the current interest, such as financial compensation to FOSS maintainers, incentives for contributors, tipping high-quality learning material and insightful blog posts, etc.

This didn't pan out in the near-term though. Part of this blockchain move was also a nod toward Rebol's ideas concerned with distributed computing and decentralization (another hot topic): IOS and X-Internet, albeit with smart contracts instead of Reblets. [1]

[1]: http://www.rebol.com/ios/ios-intro.html