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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Aggregators are incentivized to limit composability. By contrast, the value of a web3 token may actually increase when composed with other systems. The money flowing through web3 is mediated by open source smart contracts, rather than closed source software owned by corporations. This feels completely asymmetric. I cannot imagine a Facebook or Goog... See more

Perhaps most interestingly, there are some potential new opportunities by which protocols might actually be much more sustainable. In the last few years, with the development of cryptocurrencies and tokens, it has become theoretically possible to build a protocol that uses a cryptocurrency or a token that has some value attached to it, with the val... See more

This relationship between protocols and applications is reversed in the blockchain application stack. Value concentrates at the shared protocol layer and only a fraction of that value is distributed along at the applications layer. It’s a stack with “fat” protocols and “thin” applications.