Collaboration, contracts, and the tyranny of platforms

1. Sustaining collaborative innovation among independent projects is a governance problem.


2. A core part of governance is determining an optimal division of rights to control project decisions across various stakeholders.


3. Blockchains frequently require participation of multiple independent platform layers to deliver functionality to end users.


4. Some of thes

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Smart contracting platforms like Ethereum and Solana address the two most important components of coordination: global market-based standards upon which further innovation can build, and a source of digitally native trust production. They create a peer-to-peer contracting environment and streamline human coordination.

The beauty of blockchains and smart contracts is that they are under-explored spaces in which you can look at problems through a news lens – specifically those related to capital formation, coordination and automation.

Blockchain-enforced execution of agreed contracts using consensus and transparency can, in numerous cases, reduce the need for the bureaucratic and hierarchical layers—the slow processes of legal and social recourse—that usually exist to coordinate humans to make decisions together.

In the past, trust was purely social (think the caveman days). Then it switched to trusted institutions (banks, governments, companies) which was a step up, but we still had to rely on the other parties goodwill, or their incentive to behave in the right way.
The problem today is that institutions have become the sole gatekeepers of trust. We are st

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Centralized trust creates negative externalities even when those at the center remain trustworthy. As the market expands, a purely person-to-person approach breaks down and would necessitate the presence of intermediaries. Intermediation, on the other hand, serves many roles, but also imposes costs, especially when the intermediary is a private com... See more

Objective systems seem desirable, relying entirely on machines and not fallible and opportunistic humans. There is, however, a catch – machines may be running the code, but humans are acting on it. A subjective system might be able to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate transactions in a way that an objective one could not. Concepts l... See more