The past, present and future of Network Services
The following outline contains thinking drawn from Decred: Forks in the road and is the result of ongoing possible through the ongoing research and development to on-chain governed networks such as Decred, Edgeware, Kusama and Polkadot.
The parable of the Blind Men and an Elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows…
Engaging, understanding and empowering different perspectives and varying visions is key to building successful, resilient and productive communities over the long term.
In the existing speculator focused and tribalistic crypto-currency paradigm it is nearly impossible.
In addition, the evolution of token based networks makes the task of coordinating different groups in different geographies, demographics and cultures challenging.
Existing forums for community discussion including Matrix, Reddit, Telegram and Discord, are not optimised for nuanced and cohesive discussions that expand the addressable conversation, whilst current design thinking for governance forums, processes and tools is moving inexorably towards ever greater standardisation and specialisation - at the expense of fostering the sort of messy, chaotic and meandering artistic experimentation that by definition cannot be easily boxed up in into pre-ordained and easy to understand standards, deliverables and metrics.
As a result, current approaches to on-chain governance tend to separate voters and proposers into two clear factions operating in an increasingly adversarial environment as holders naturally evolve to become defenders of large treasuries that proposers aim to access.
In addition, the current proposal process ends with voters approving funds into a ‘project multsig’, that leaves the funded team successful in one part of the process (getting funds approved) but left entirely on their own to figure out delivery of what is in essence something that almost always needs to mesh with a complex and ever changing underlying system.
This leads to proposals taking far longer, teams being paid far less, whilst voters get irate at the time taken and call for more oversight, which leads to mistrust, which further exacerbates tensions, which further degrades the governance process and the culture of the project. Both sides move apart, and lessons are never learned.
In the same vein, despite seeming like a good idea in principle, treasuries denoted in a network’s primary ‘governance’ token tend to engineer unbounded opportunity into a finite bucket, whose relative value rises and falls at the whim of the market, playing havoc with the psychological disposition and social dynamics of those who propose, approve and manage spending.
With this said - we are incredibly early in this new era of what we might eventually understand as digital polities. With the evolution of on-chain governance, organisation, funding and interoperable multi-chain networks such as Polkadot, we are beginning to see a path to a more humane era of crypto - one that can prioritise and reward contribution over speculation.
Taking the optimistic long view these foundations can enable the creation of fluid on-chain organisations that will trade, barter and collaborate more efficiently, equitably and imaginatively than we have seen in the more extractive and individualistic era of ad supported media that gave us influencers and the platforms that facilitated their rise.
As with all technologies, this expansive new capacity for coordinating deliberately around common - dare we say, public goals, will also enable and advance huge civil ructions around the world - as existing methods of societal control come up against a far more powerful and coherent organising enterprises than seen with the revolutions sustained through social networks.
Ahead of us lies a fascinating near future, opening up avenues of exploration and possibility, expanding the creative potential of connected minds at unprecedented scale and speed - introducing new narrative realms, that will may be able to rediscover the magic of an enchanted, rather than a mechanistic age.
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
David Graeber
Collectives over companies
Next generation networks such as Polkadot are dependent on sourcing creative contributions from a network of peers funded via on-chain governance - a new phase of crypto-evolution that requires a flexible framework for identifying, understanding and aligning the often competing interests of key network participants.
These networks demand active and sustain contributions from a melting pot of multi-disciplinary expertise - success is dependent on dissolving inter-disciplinary boundaries and cultures, not reconstructing them again on a shared ledger.
Blockchains are ultimately social technologies for coordinating humans who make meaning within emerging social constructs that exist as a shared hallucination in the imaginations of connected minds - in this regard, they are not just financial, or organisational systems, but resolutely artistic experiments that allow us to discover and generate new knowledge.
The ability to actively cross-fertilise ideas, talent and technology through on-chain governance processes is at the heart of creating novel, rather than predictable outcomes that are generally the result of either pattern matching to pre-existing successes in crypto, or a company in startup mode, developing a pre-defined product to slot into existing markets.
With this in mind, we believe that the evolution of network services is a key part to facilitating an emerging process that seeks to optimise its form, function and purpose for a coming era of collectives, rather than companies.
Lessons from Edgeware
Edgeware was incubated by founding team Commonwealth Labs in partnership with Substrate developers Parity and the Web3 Foundation. It did not raise funds in a token sale, but instead launched using an innovative lockdrop where ETH holders locked their tokens in a smart contract for 3,6,9 or 12 months - sacrificing the opportunity cost of using the tokens elsewhere.
The launch came at a time when there were fears over Ethereum’s long term viability and so a bet on Polkadot, and Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood was seen as a kind of hedge on the technologies future direction. As a result over 1.2m ETH was committed, through direct participation and via the smart contracts of Binance, Coinbase and established governance projects such as Aragon, as well as the locked funds in Parity’s own multisig that had accidentally been frozen.
With no ICO and a broad and fair public distribution that compared favourably to other projects, excitement was high for what Edgeware could achieve as the first smart contract chain and potentially parachain in the Polkadot ecosystem.
From the start it was positioned as a platform to entice ETH holders to a project that would incubate governance experiments through the use of Substrate's application specific, low-fee, multi-chain interoperable , on-chain governed and treasury spending systems.
The project had been positioned as a platform for incubating governance experiments, however the broad distribution ensured Edgeware would itself become the experiment.
With over 90% of the token distributed to the public in the lockdrop, the door was opened to a community of holders who could mediate the decision making powers of the founding team. The result was deadlock between large holders and the founding team who disagreed principally not on what to fund, but on how to fund, an impasse that led to the departure of the founding team.
Decent Partners joined the project around this time, building bridges between both groups and the broader community, bringing lessons learned from research, analysis and contribution to an older form of on-chain governed network - Decred.
The primary motivation was to unblock Edgeware's frozen governance and reinvigorate the project's potential to become a truly decentralised and grassroots incubator of initiatives that could objectively claim to be developed on a credibly neutral platform for the benefit of the network public good.
With the founding team departing, hype disappearing and the token price falling, the project became a kind of ugly duckling of the Polkadot ecosystem - where are the investors? Where are its partnership announcements? What is its use-case?
With no lead team to direct proceedings, a large dose of naivete and nothing much to lose, it was left to a random group of contributors to self-organise around the Substrate’s most basic tools in an attempt to figure out what a network such as Edgeware might make possible - funding a range of experiments across art, culture, media and technology, to teams from around the world.
The most complex endeavour involved the incubation and creation of an entirely new parachain network that secured a crowdloan slot in Kusama via entirely on-chain processes, without ever forming a company or raising external capital, delivered at a fraction of the cost of venture funded initiatives who are still struggling to onboard users - in the last 30 days, there were just over 10,000 active addresses on Kusama and its nearly 35 parachains.
Edgeware —> Kabocha
By beginning development using Substrate’s simplest possible technical foundations and by including contributors in the creative development of a parachain mediated entirely through on-chain governance processes we are able to develop valuable knowledge and experience that then informs the next iteration of the tools we build and the projects we enable.
Kabocha commissions creative projects that make waves, retaining genesis assets, shares and rights in the projects we fund - together. Think of us like a Web3 version of Disney…
It is an experiment in crafting new realities through direct participation, collaborative creation and shared values.
Its ownership and governance is fair, transparent and decentralised at launch thanks to its genesis in the Edgeware community.
The project was curated from a wide range of contributions and aligned proposals, all funded by Edgeware. You can view the relevant proposals here.
Edgeware recoups it’s bring up costs 1:1 in KAB, enabling the solo chain to build a stake and governance rights in its incubated offspring, and as such a voice in Kusama. Currently Edgeware controls c. 1% of the supply.
This aligns to an emerging strategy for Edgeware to be the foundation for a fully on-chain Parachain Farm, seeding and nurturing projects and helping them onboard and mature in Kusama (and then to Polkadot), bringing with them a collective of contributors with proven governance and development experience.
In this model Edgeware will fund and then recoup, setting the stage for its own value to to tied to the long term success of its parachain offspring and in turn to the success of DotSama.
Introducing Kabocha - an experimental Kusama parachain incubated by the Edgeware community
This resolutely grass-roots process delivered through patient cycles of R&D runs counter to the accepted wisdom that large investment and marketing hype are the secrets to driving adoption and utility of the parachains surrounding the relays.
Kabocha currently has no liquidity of its native token, no external investors, no marketing hype and no lead team and yet the development process continues through the slow and patient recruitment of creative talent motivated to contribute to its artistic mission - with a primary focus on developing creative projects that can in turn bootstrap adoption of unique new forms of identity, rights and value accrual native to Kusama.
Defining a Network Service Provider
The emerging role of a Network Service Provider (NSP) is relatively simple to define but complex in its undertaking:
An NSP onboards external talent, teams and projects to on-chain governed networks - curating, communicating and formalising proposals that are approved through the votes of a decentralised network of token holders, before ensuring the careful deployment and management of approved funds, the successful delivery of agreed milestones alongside the timely reporting of issues, progress and lessons learned through the project.
Through this evolving process the NSP gains deep experience in the challenges of decentralised governance, grant funding, value capture and community development, which in turn then informs the recruitment of the next wave of talent, the establishment of new processes, the iteration of governance technologies and the discovery of new avenues of opportunity.
To date, the primary challenge has been to maintain a focus on the basic super-powers of Substrate’s emerging organisational structures, grant funding, value capture, talent distribution and communication protocols, when more traditional approaches to marketing have tended to focus on telling the story of more complex and exciting use-cases and visions.
By starting in the most chaotic and adversarial situation possible, rather than in the rather calmer waters of sister networks Kusama and Polkadot, which have both benefitted from centralised council structures and the engagement of the core development teams of Parity and the Web3 Foundation as well as large investors, we are approaching this new paradigm with a clear focus on the most complex, difficult and wonderful part of any system - the people.
Driving network public R&D
Decent Partners is focused on delivering against the essential purpose of the collective, rather than optimising its performance on any one metric that will inevitably gain or lose relevance over time. In this way, we ensure primacy of a long term mission, hardwiring a culture of adaptability, change and evolution into the core philosophy of the initiative.
Our purpose:
We deliver network services to on-chain governed blockchains through the applied research & development of tools, processes and projects that expand the creative potential of connected minds and in turn the development of network public infrastructure, goods and services.
Our incubation approach is entirely network native:
We use income from spending proposals to fund operational overhead and to source and develop new talent whose ideas, products and services we bring to public networks.
We develop proposals in open partnership with a resolutely anti-discipinary, culturally diverse and geographically agnostic network of contributors.
We steward them through the governance processes, on-chain governance and ensure projects are delivered, whilst maintaining clear communication with funding groups.
We leverage the experience gained through this onboarding process to refine and evolve existing tools, processes and networks and to develop entirely new approaches, optimising for the essential purpose of the collective at all times.
We bring funded projects to life through independent media projects akin to a (network) public service broadcaster, telling the stories of the initiatives born from and connected to the collective.
We structure, purchase and offer network services between collectives and to external organisations and parties priced in the native token of each network, developing a functional internal economy based on emerging knowledge and talent.
We develop diverse methods of value accrual through the development of novel forms of on-chain collateral ensuring long term alignment between networks and contributors whose ideas and contributions do not currently constitute a core part of network value accrual and narrative.
We create, and capture value through the creation, negotiation and collection of licensing and service revenues based on these novel forms of on-chain collateral analogous to open-source IP.
We scale projects through an emerging funding and development lifecyle that is open, transparent and public.
A network native business model
To ensure long term alignment to this north star we currently operate the following business model:
network service fees
At the core of the model is a simple but consistent fee structure that we charge to on and offchain organisations:
A 10% network service fee (NSF) on all proposals we make to public networks on behalf of the collective.
In the case of external organisations who would like access to talent, projects or IP created by the collective and its network of partners we chargen fiat and then purchase services in the native tokens of the relevant groups.
The NSF scales across the full funding range of proposals and financing arrangements and can be seen as a voluntary R&D tax paid by on and off-chain organisations approving spend.
The NSF is covers the basic costs of sourcing, developing and managing proposals through their full lifecycle and includes costs for fund management, payroll, accounting and for managing the high volatility present in network tokens.
In time we imagine this fee will develop into an on-chain VAT/TVA type model, incentising commerce between other NSPs that develop in an emerging internal economy - with recoups of this fee available from an internal network taxation system.
network service loans
Currently public grants do not accrue any value directly whilst venture funding takes a share of equity or tokens and demands a return on invested capital which drives project teams towards shorter term incentives, we aim to address that with network service loans (NSL) which improve conditions for contributors:
Income from NSF is used to offer 0% loans to new talent.
In return creative teams assign some genesis assets in the form of an NFT and an appended piece of media that collectively represents the cultural collateral of their earliest ideas - imagine the lyrics of Yesterday scrawled on a beer mat by a young Paul McCartney, the pencil drawn figure of an instantly recognisable Mickey Mouse sketched by Walt Disney or YayYoi Kusama’s colourful sketch book.
The only terms we stipulate are that the research and development funding we provide is rooted in our essential purpose.
Loans are recoupable at a later date as projects become revenue producing.
Given time, the talent we back and the R&D they deliver will naturally make its way into projects, application or services that makes use of the networks to which Decent Partners acts as a NSP - currently Edgeware and Kabocha, but hopefully soon Kusama and Polkadot.
network service stakes
When there is a core requirement to develop underlying infrastructure that is essential to the development of the collective, we will incubate network public parachains, such as the identity and rights management focused Kabocha and take a network service stake (NSS) in the process.
We take a 1.5% governance approved stake in these networks.
The NSS is approved post launch through a community mandated proposal, rather than in the genesis state to ensure public transparency, accountabilty and regulatory clarity.
network service assets
Many blockchain projects are attempting to bridge on-chain and off-chain networks through legal arrangements that naturally introduce trusted third parties since the two systems are not compatible - e.g. an on-chain vote may conflict with an off-chain legal agreement, but for the network, and its decentralised system of peers this transaction is judged to be complete.
A Network Service Provider such as Decent Partners attempts to square this circle, by bridging on-chain organisational structures and off-chain corporate structures by acting as a trusted steward of networks and their participants, who are able to increase or moderate the voice of the NSP by adding or removing their votes through delegation.
As well as accuring native on-chain cultural collateral to its reserve, the collective also invests in off-chain assets, resources and services, that then benefit the people and projects that it nurtures on behalf of on-chain networks, creating a positive feedback loop that drives network effects in all areas.
In time we expect to transition the curent corporate structure to a Community Interest Company (CIC), which has the useful capability to enact an ‘asset lock’:
The Asset Lock is designed to ensure that the assets of the CIC (including any profits or other surpluses generated by its activities) are used for the benefit of the community.
Assets can be used as collateral: The Asset Lock should not been seen as a bar to the CIC using its assets for normal trading, or other business activities, and meeting its financial obligations.
For example, a CIC may take on a commercial venture with the purpose of generating profits to support its objects. If the venture fails and makes losses the CIC must still meet its contractual obligations in regard to the venture even if this means depleting its assets or selling some of them to meet its debts.
Network value accrual
With an entirely network native business model the requirement to make profits falls away, since core value accrual is based on stake in shared public infrastructure, charging fees in native tokens, the open graph of relationships built around novel forms of emergent identity and the increasing resonance of cultural collateral that roots the zero day history of exciting creative projects and presents foundations for a store of values narrative.
The arrival of OpenGov
The next phase of Substrate development relies on a new model of liquid digital democracy known as OpenGov (formerly Gov2) - a model that is now in active experimentation in Kusama.
Alongside enabling many proposals to be launched in parallel, which was not possible in the previous implementation, the update also allowed for different tracks of proposals - allowing on-chain governance processes to target different origins and subsequent capabilities within the technical core.
At one end of a spectrum that includes a number of origins is the Root track that can change the runtime of the network, somewhere in the middle are the Big, Medium and Small Spender tracks, whilst at the other is the Tip track that allows small payments to be directed to contributors.
Owing to the existential dangers of network upgrades, only one Root proposal can be active at any one time and it runs more slowly - whereas Spending Tracks can enable up to 50 proposals to run in parallel whilst tips are to run a thousand proposals simultaneously.
OpenGov’s move to release the shackles of more rigid governance structures through both parallel and weighted proposal formats has in turn made it more difficult to understand for newcomers - and seemingly more complex in its structure.
However when we approach the design with an understanding that OpenGov offers an entirely new design space then we can free ourselves to develop new network native organisational forms and creative projects optimised for its multi-dimensional capabilities.
In the near future, the power users of this system will be governance delegates - on-chain organisations that are backed by the votes of token holders, who can pledge a kind of advance support to an on-chain collective based on their trust in the group to be a positive force in the network’s development in terms of funding decisions, decision-making and ultimately creative direction.
By vesting their voting power in a governance delegate, holders effectively grant this new generation of network service providers a stronger voice in the network, even if they are not large holders themselves.
By accruing voting power, these collectives can then approach the more traditional forms of governance with initial support baked in - meaning their request for funding from Kusama or indeed Polkadot doesn’t rely on a cold start.
We can compare this process to the emergence of validators who secure nominated proof of stake (nPoS) networks such as Polkadot through the support of nominators who pledge their tokens to staking providers (validators) in return for not having to operate the system themselves. Validators therefore do not need a large stake to pledge upfront, though some do.
Validators take a commission for this service but must maintain core infrastructure and reliable uptime to ensure they remain trusted by both the network - which slashes groups who fail to provide a good service which in turn impacts the relative returns to nominators who can withdraw their support.
Polkadot’s success is reliant on the rapid evolution of these collectives - that will in turn become the driving forces of the next phase of blockchain development, since the metric they most demand is users focused on contribution, rather than speculation.
Kickstarting an OpenGov incubator
By utilise Substrate’s basic architecture, we can develop tooling, services and talent that can collectively expand the utility of OpenGov, bringing creative teams together to push the limits of the technology by bringing to life ambitious, imaginative and multi-dimensional creative projects together.
Think the MIT Media Lab - but born on-chain.
Launched in 1985, the lab was formed to explore the potential of the emerging digital landscape by a small team who;
foresaw the coming convergence of computing, publishing, and broadcast, fueled by changes in the communications industry…
As this convergence accelerated, it spurred interconnected developments in the unusual range of disciplines that the Lab brought together, including cognition, electronic music, graphic design, video, and holography, as well as work in computation and human-machine interfaces.
Since its inception it has driven radical innovations in areas as diverse as touchscreens, wearable devices and musical performance, through novel cultural, organisational and funding structures that have acted as a bridge between emerging technologies, artistic endeavours and commercial partners and applications that have driven mass adoption.
Just as the MIT Media Lab was created to experiment at the edges of new possibilities, so we see the opportunity for NSPs such as Decent Partners that bridge both on-chain and off-chain economies to facilitate collaboration between both the emergent collective wisdom of on-chain organisations - who will create impossible to recreate domain expertise in the new design territories OpenGov enables, and external creators, engineers, builders, corporations and governments who offer different but equally hard to replicate talents, resources and experience.
By aiming to establish a governance incubator model that is itself a delegate we can create a process, rather than a new authority, that ensures the incubator pathway remains open to all and indeed is under the express oversight of those who vest their voting power in the initiative - and who can can ultimately remove their votes or support other initiatives.
The collectives kickstarted through the incubator, would then aim to attract votes from holders at all stages of their lifecycle - as well as enable an open door policy for anyone to arrive and contribute their talents to the cause.
We can now see the proposal process not as some fixed outcome - where the perfect document must be created and argued and approved through a binary referendum - but as a more nuanced, emergent and interactive form of collaboration, decision making and talent sourcing that will naturally lead to more innovative outcomes.
Suddenly proposals become economic opportunities for anyone to review/improve/iterate proposals.
Engagement can have a reputational, financial and creative upside, that aligns incentives between all parties better than the current system. It also starts to solve other issues - namely, information asymmetry between voters (who are likely more familiar with the core chain/tech/culture) and outsiders, namely those wandering into the lion’s den - with excitement and energy ready to be pummeled out of them…
The first instances of these collectives would necessarily be abstract, but through fluid development cycles and slow, reliable and sustainable R&D funding, progress can gradually be more easily communicated and understood.
The ongoing sustainability of potential NSPs is paramount - this is not a blank cheque, the point of bootstrapping on-chain orgs has to be a path to active participation, onboarding of contributors and real revenues through both on and off-chain means.
So how do we kickstart and sustain this messy, chaotic and abstract incubator of people and their ideas upstream of the more formalised structures of existing governance processes?
Rethinking the burn to fund R&D
There is no waste in nature, everything is recycled - David Suzuki
Within the current design of Kusama and Polkadot protocols there exists a treasury and a burn mechanism, designed to incentivise the spending of accrued funds.
In the current 7 day spend period on Kusama 730 KSM - $27k equivalent will be burned unless it is utilised via spending proposals.
Currently 99.8% of that spend is unused and the remaining 0.2% is redirected to the Kappa Sigma Mu society.
This current design is hardwired into the pallets, and cannot be tweaked via OpenGov or the previous generation of calls - instead it requires a runtime upgrade via the Root origin in Open Gov.
Within Polkadot, this waste is even more pronounced - in the next spending period 445K DOT will be burned, equating to $2.9m in old numbers.
So far this mechanism has been presented both as a necessary deflationary device and a stick used to beat voters into releasing funds, however it has not had the desired outcome, so perhaps we could rethink its purpose, as a bootstrapping budget, to demonstrate that a lot can be achieved through a little.
Rather than burning money, we can see its value as the pre-ignition phase for on-chain collectives of resolutely anti-disciplinary teams operating at the most abstract possible levels, whose meandering R&D requires the steady and reliable flow of smaller amounts of funding, rather than large spends of the sort required by more mature ideas or product oriented startups backed by venture capital.
Since these collectives can receive governance delegation from holders from day one - this opens the door to a steady evolution of creative initiatives that retain the time and space to explore, but are also on the road to aggregating support from token holders who will naturally comprehend value to the network at their own speed.
Some collectives and their ideas will need a few weeks of sustenance before their value become apparent, whilst others may need months or even years for the value to holders to be apparent - but it will be their endeavours and the way we communciate their progress that will form both the narrative heart of the ecosystem and the path to onboarding and scaling contributors.
Currently Polkadot burns 1% of treasury each spend period - given Kusama's chaotic credentials, there is no reason why we cannot progressively invert the current incentives, moving up to 1% of the treasury to match Polkadot and enabling 5 independent research collectives each receiving 0.2% of the burn, or indeed beyond that to 10% of Kusama's supply per period, on the road to incubating up to 50 on-chain collectives.
This ratcheting of incentives not only frees up funding for experimentation - it also begins pressing holders to spend funds a little more adventurously. At this stage in the network's history and development, the danger of not taking risks should be there for all to see.
Platform risk: Ethereum vs Polkadot
Though some forms of governance delegation exist in networks such as Ethereum, holders ultimately have no express voice in the underlying protocol, since they are all organised as layer 2 organisations.
Ultimately this hands off certain responsibilities to developers and influential voices in the underlying protocol, but also introduces the kind of platform risk and capture by special interests that many in Web3 have been seeking to obviate.
In their simplest state, Polkadot’s network of co-dependent parachains all control their base layer via on-chain governance and are therefore better able to coordinate their network over the long term, providing more resilient and predictable foundations - a prerequisite to building a new form of internet and to enabling collectively owned and operated on-chain institutions that can not just last for decades, but also move with the times.
Finally, over a decade into the crypto-currency experiment, there is a path past purely financial and technocratic protocols to designs that can truly empower creative and artistic expression, made possible by sustained and incentive aligned funding, credit assignment and network value accrual whose design philosophy is rooted in human and not mechanistic thinking.
In many ways, we see NSPs as the key solution for driving collaboration, cooperation and creative development between interoperable Substrate networks - crypto diplomats, nipping between shards, negotiating with different communities, cultures and talents, helping to nurture and faciliate trade and industry between on and off-chain collectives to bring exciting new ideas to life.
Mediating the crypto political elites
It has been said that Polkadot is the biggest bet yet on multi-chain maximalism, but it is also unquestionably the biggest bet yet on the power to change and the ability to direct - to coordinate not just on-chain orgs, but a whole armada of chains.
Substrate's on-chain governance is both a technical marvel and a fiendishly complex system that requires the development of a whole new field of expertise, talent development and onboarding processes.
The current tools, processes and variables of the OpenGov system are currently hard to use, difficult to understand and accessible to a relatively small number of individuals since the knowledge and experience barriers are extremely high.
Historically there has been a lack of innovative proposals within Kusama’s canary network to merit its 'chaotic' credentials and it has been hard to onboard new teams through existing governance systems, which has led to a lack of on-chain innovation that pushes the possibilities of the network and its ecosystem.
In addition, this new form of governance is still in its highly experimental stage - today’s orthodoxy, will be tomorrow’s stupidity, simply because a system design can never really be tested until its capabilties are interpreted by its users - more simply put, this experience cannot be taught, it can only be gained through active participation and engagement across wildly different and emergent domains.
Only by contributing to these new systems will we really understand their potential and their pitfalls (of which there will be many).
Further, to leave this learning to a relatively small cohort of experts in the early stages of development invites the kind of influence capture that will ensure the design continues to benefit those who set its standards.
This recursive power dynamic is something that has resulted in the gradual ossification of today’s political establishment, alongside the media and regulatory oversight that seeks to put the brakes on unchecked influence.
Nation states have had many generations to reach their current form - blockchains have been around for a blink of an eye and yet it is clear that the current design is in danger of replaying this same story, simply because the basic incentives and power dynamics lead us there - especially when partnered with the existing incentives of attention based social media.
The good news is, we can witness this imbalance first hand - appreciate its benefits, but also work to mediate its influence - for that mediation will be what ensures a diverse set of perspectives to thrive, for great ideas to find a home even if they are not stewarded by well known names and for resources and attention to be focused on those who are not already a part of the new crypto-political elite.
This is true decentralisation - of human creativity, ingenuity and imagination - a platform to truly unlock the latent power of those who see the world as you do, and perhaps just as importantly, many more who do not…