Blockchains are Bureaucracies par Excellence

May 6, 2019 Mario Laul

In an earlier post, I likened decentralized networks to fields - social arenas of symbolic and material production within which interested actors compete and cooperate over network-specific resources.

The promise of blockchain and related technologies is that these arenas can be set up in ways that minimize trust requirements, reduce concentration of control over data, and enable free, censorship-resistant transactions in an increasingly global and automated setting.

In this post, I propose this development represents an important step in the evolution of bureaucracy. That may sound counterintuitive given this term’s common association with inefficiency and excessive paper-shuffling. But once we understand the essence of bureaucratic organization, it will become clear that blockchain networks are actually bureaucracies par excellence.

Value Capture and Quantification: Cryptocapital vs Cryptocommodities

April 26, 2019 Chris Burniske

The majority of cryptoassets are shaping up to be capital assets in nature, whereas many early examples like bitcoin are better characterized as commodities, with a subset poised to become commodity monies. Within the burgeoning capital asset field of crypto, some closely resemble equity, others more closely resemble debt, and others have a bizarre enough mix of capabilities and value streams to be unrecognizable from prior renditions of capital assets. As part of explaining why governance assets have value, Joel has done an excellent job of laying out foundational principles behind capital, which is a piece that should be read before continuing here.

DeFi Liquidity Models

April 10, 2019 Alex Evans

As the potential of open financial protocols becomes clearer, some applications are gaining adoption faster than others. Maker dominates in terms of value locked and volume transacted. Compound and Uniswap trail, but are well ahead of 0x, Dharma, Augur, and dydx when it comes to liquidity. The rest have yet to show up on the radar. Looking at the three dominant protocols reveals a design advantage with respect to liquidity: none of them require users to find a specific peer to take the opposite side of a trade.

Mario Laul

March 13, 2019 Mario Laul

At the end of 2017, I started providing research support to Placeholder. It was a part-time role and I never took the opportunity to officially introduce myself via the blog. Better late than never!

I am happy to announce that I’ve now joined the team full time. In addition to supporting investment due diligence, my research efforts will focus primarily on the topic of cryptonetwork governance.

My background can broadly be described as social sciences. A few years ago, I completed my graduate degree in technology governance which translates to a mix of development economics, innovation studies, and public administration. Prior to my current role at Placeholder, I worked as a research assistant to Carlota Perez, focusing on the modern history of financial innovation and public policy in the UK, Germany, and the US. More recently, I had the opportunity to hone my analytical skills at the European Commission where I mainly worked with investment and financial data on one of the EU’s largest grant portfolios.

I’ve always had a keen interest in sociological theory, and each fall, I teach an introductory course on the sociology of culture to undergraduate art students in my home country of Estonia. I'm excited to leverage this background in my approach to decentralized networks, as I’ve previously done here.

Maker Network Overview

March 1, 2019 Alex Evans

Since launching Single-Collateral Dai (SCD) in December 2017, Maker has become one of the most widely used protocols on Ethereum. A diverse ecosystem of borrowers, currency users, keepers, and speculators continues to drive rapid growth of the system. This report presents Maker as a network of heterogenous actors, examining the activity of each of its key stakeholders in an attempt to isolate the key economic drivers of the system. The focus will be on analyzing SCD’s first fourteen months of operation, while providing a few projections on the network’s future. The analysis is broken down by stakeholder group: CDP Creators, Keepers, MKR holders, and dai users.

This is not intended as an introduction to the inner workings of the Maker system. Readers unfamiliar with the Maker system should consult the MakerDAO Whitepaper and Placeholder’s Maker Investment Thesis prior to reading this report.

FOAM Thesis

February 25, 2019 Joel Monegro

Location services are critical to the global economy, but GPS infrastructure is surprisingly fragile, the data layer is effectively a Google monopoly, and personal location data logged and sold without user consent. To help solve these problems, FOAM is building a decentralized location services network which (1) reduces our reliance on GPS satellites, (2) provides open access to key metadata such as geocoding and points-of-interest, and (3) guarantees permissionless access and user agency through the use of open standards.

Cryptonetwork Governance as Capital

February 19, 2019 Joel Monegro

Capital is, in essence, the power to organize the economic resources of a social system, and its worth a function of how much of those resources can be directed to the holder’s benefit. This understanding reveals the inherent value of cryptonetwork governance as capital, and helps us understand tokens with governance rights as new kinds of capital assets.

The Defensibility of Middleware Protocols

February 14, 2019 Chris Burniske

Interoperability of state and value is likely to place downward price pressure on layer-1 blockchains that have no monetary premium, while enabling strong middleware protocols to achieve cross-chain, winner-takes-most dominance in their respective services. While not a perfect mapping to traditional use of the term middleware, these protocols can be thought of as anything sitting just below the interface layer (i.e., the applications the end user interacts with), but leveraging the lower-level functionality provided by layer-1 blockchains and interoperability protocols.

Crypto Hedge Funds Vs. Venture Funds

February 2, 2019 Joel Monegro

Cryptonetwork founders, unlike those starting traditional equity businesses, now have to think about the fund structures of their investors. This is because the liquidity of cryptoassets brought the hedge fund model, which carries an active trading bias, to early-stage tech investing, a field historically dominated by venture capital. If you’re raising money for a cryptonetwork, each model has pros and cons depending on your goals, but understanding how they operate is key to making good decisions about how to structure financings.

Maker Thesis

January 23, 2019 Chris Burniske

Credit has greased economic wheels for millennia, and Maker is the world’s first 100% software-based, community owned and operated credit facility. As a family of smart contracts operating on Ethereum, the system offers secured loans of equal cost to anyone in the world. The by-product of loan generation is dai, a stablecoin collateralized using on-chain rules and assets.

Funding Cryptonetworks

January 9, 2019 Joel Monegro

When we invest, we think in terms of funding teams, and funding networks. Funding teams provides the financial capital to build the service. Funding networks supports growth by capitalizing the whole community. They’re very different kinds of investing, but both are essential to long-term network success.

The Cryptoeconomic Circle

January 5, 2019 Joel Monegro

Cryptonetworks are online micro-economies organized around a specific service, and regulated by a cryptoeconomic protocol. The cryptoeconomic circle is a model I like to use to think about how value flows through different participants in these economies.

Cryptonetworks are not Companies

November 30, 2018 Chris Burniske

Joel was the first person that stuck the word cryptoeconomy in my mind. It was mid-2017 and the idea struck me because most everyone was thinking about cryptonetwork valuations (most commonly ICOs) in the context of company valuations. Which is partially why they were considered so obscene.

What the crypto market vaguely understood, though could not fully articulate, is that the prices being paid were for emerging economies. Emerging economies using a protocol in place of the government, specializing in a single (digital) service, and capable of global scale from inception. The good ones, at least.

Theory Follows Price, Price Follows Theory

November 13, 2018 Chris Burniske

Humans have an innate desire to first understand, and secondly reason, about what they see in the world. We go from observing things (facts), to reasoning about those facts (theories), to then applying those theories back on present facts to predict future facts. This habit pattern explains the birth of religion. It also explains how we can expect quantitative models to be formed, evolved, and applied by cryptomarket participants in the years to come.

Productive Capital in Cryptonetworks

November 6, 2018 Chris Burniske

Thus far, cryptonetworks have used their native asset to entice early investment in their economies via two primary pathways:

Minting to supply-siders that install productive capital
Selling to investors that contribute investment capital

While investment capital can ultimately be converted into productive capital, the two are not synonymous, and value doesn’t always make the leap from investment capital → productive capital. Sometimes investment capital can waste away on balance sheets like unused kindling. The question comes down to who is first prioritized, the supply-side that installs the productive capital or the investors that float the investment capital?

The Nouriel in All of Us

November 6, 2018 Chris Burniske

This week crypto has been afire with Nouriel news. After voicing my own disgust at Nouriel’s behavior, Chris King responded: “He’s triggered and we’re triggered. No one really wins.”

Chris is right. We’re all so triggered that conversation between the crypto-community and Nouriel has devolved into an intolerant pissing contest of insults, and such rhetoric between groups goes nowhere. We appear just as badly to Nouriel, as Nouriel appears to us.

I raise it as a reflection now, because a rhetoric of intolerance is dangerously common in crypto.

Resource Distribution and Power Dynamics in Decentralized Networks →

August 13, 2018 Mario Laul

“The idealized vision of more decentralized forms of networking and social coordination triggered by the invention of Bitcoin continues to inspire entrepreneurs and drive innovation. At the same time, it is increasingly acknowledged within the broader crypto community that though the idealists are onto something, these emerging social systems are far from immune to problems and inequalities that have plagued human institutions historically.

This raises a question: how to conceptualize decentralized networks and “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs) in terms of resource distribution and power dynamics, and by extension, governance? One option is to think of these systems as fields, allowing us to use the well-established framework this term has in sociology.“

Decred Thesis

May 12, 2018 Joel & Chris

Decred (DCR) is a cryptocurrency with hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake consensus that enables on-chain governance. Its proof-of-work mining is similar to Bitcoin’s, except each block has to be approved by a randomly-selected group of users who “stake” their DCR. In addition to approving a block, these selected stakers can also vote on changes to Decred’s consensus protocol, allowing them to influence the long-term evolution of the network. This architecture creates a fair system of checks and balances between users, miners and developers.

Click through to read our thesis.

Cryptoassets: Flow & Reflexivity →

April 7, 2018 Chris Burniske

“We hypothesize that crypto’s heightened reflexivity is driven by uncertainty and confusion around the early-stage technology, virality of communication mechanisms, lack of standardized valuation frameworks, regulatory paranoia, and majority retail participation. All of these characteristics are amplified by the liquid nature of this emerging asset class, which creates sub-second informational signals that violently feed back on themselves.”

Information Technology Market Cycles (A Brief History) →

February 20, 2018 Joel Monegro

"Information technology evolves in multi-decade cycles of expansion, consolidation and decentralization. Periods of expansion follow the introduction of a new open platform that reduces the production costs of technology as it becomes a shared standard. As production costs fall, new firms come to market leveraging the standard to compete with established incumbents, pushing down prices and margins, and decentralizing existing market powers."

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