Thesis

Our inspiration and philosophy to dive into the decentralized economy.

Web Origins

The internet was built and initially operated on open protocols directly controlled by a nascent community. This gave predictability, allowing people and organizations that ran on them the certainty that rules would not arbitrarily change without notice.

During this first epoch, young companies like Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Youtube thrived in this context, while Web 1.0 platforms like AOL or Compuserve lost their lead.

During the mid-2000s until the present day, the most prominent technology companies developed software, leveraged by huge investments in infrastructure that significantly outperformed the old open protocols of the 90s.

With the advent of smartphones, tablets, and wearables, apps became the main drivers of internet traffic and information consumption.

Users were left with no other logical choice but to migrate to this novel and highly centralized service that operated on top of the foundations of the internet such as the TCP/IP protocol. The foundations remained the same, the usability and user interface layer was new.

As billions of humans gained access to a wealth of free, real-time information never seen before in history, startups, small companies, content creators, consumers, and other groups were left with no choice but to move their businesses to these Siren Servers (as Jaron Lanier called them in his seminal book “Who owns the future”). Not doing so, meant bankruptcy, being bought or absorbed by them, or being left to ostracism. You needed to be where audiences were.

The dark side of this exponential acceleration also meant that users became hostages. Content creators often saw their livelihoods altered by the constant changes in each platforms’ playbooks, which tweaked their algorithms or terms of service to meet their needs to meet profit margins and stakeholder's exigencies.

This context stifled innovation, leaving it in the hands of a handful of highly powerful players. Users became the product, and services of the harvesters. Users volunteer, freely, their information, behavioral and emotional archetypes, social networks, needs, desires, fears, their whole selves. All of this, in exchange for instant gratification, recognition, the illusion of completeness or achievement; smoke and mirrors. Companies harvest all of these variables and turn them into revenue.

Web 3: the third era of the internet

The internet is a network that consists of a core layer (TCP/IP) that connects every communications device on the planet. Human thought, infinite as it could be, is bound by the limitations or flexibility that we have designed on this layer.

Computers (through their users) are free to choose the software they want. With the right incentives, any idea can rapidly propagate across the internet and by extension, the planet, and human civilization. The internet as we know it is where creativity and design cross paths.

In the coming decades, it is highly probable that the core layer will be rebuilt. We may even be witnessing this process today with decentralized cryptographic networks such as Bitcoin, but most prominently, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and a stream of new blockchains that support smart contracts.

Crypto combines the best features of the first two internet epochs: community governance and decentralization. Still, in its infancy, blockchain technology is taking the steps necessary to overcome its limitations: speed and capacity to relay information across its intervening nodes. And with it, challenging the current centralized services on which billions of humans transact, do commerce, interact and store their history.

Blockchain technology compels its participants to work together; to strengthen and grow the network. Because the network works for them so do the benefits that can be reaped. The relationship is not parasitic anymore. It posits a world without centralized entities and shifts power dynamics back to the users, instead of the benefit of a few.

But all of this is not without growing pains. Crypto networks should be able to scale and increase their throughput if they intend to onboard the billions of captive users living under the centralized model. Usability needs a big boost. Even though in the past 5 years we have witnessed great strides forward in terms of user interfaces and friendliness, crypto remains an obscure, hard to understand, and operate ecosystem for a still immensely wide array of user groups.

The future is about overcoming these limitations, creating the services that make the underlying complexity invisible; offer scalable and agile services that rival the status quo.

Decentralized networks have brought back that wild west feeling of discovery, the potential for anyone with the right skill set to make a deep imprint in how we will interact with each other in the future and democratize innovation back again.

Today marks the moment where we can bring back the fundamentals that made the internet a civilization revolution and improve on them now knowing what did not work in the in-between.

We believe in the value of decentralized systems from the first era of the internet. We aspire to become a catalyst for the untapped potential of web3 and the crypto industry as a whole. Crypto Networks are a powerful way to develop community-owned networks and provide a level playing field for 3rd-party developers, creators, and businesses.