EQUILIBRE

Software has been eating the world over the past few decades and it is now coming for finance, law and the public sector. We are a group of researchers and institutional, long term orientated investors pursuing a world at social, economic and environmental equilibrium. We intend to share our thoughts, experiences, tools, frameworks and in depth comments on exciting projects around stateless money, open finance and sovereign compute. We find ourselves at the verge of the next multi decade innovation cycle which will lead to the biggest migration of value in the history of humankind while providing the tools we urgently need to solve the most pressing problems of the 21st century. Throughout history the way how humanity collaborates and governs resources has been drastically altered only a few times, e.g. during the agrarian or industrial revolution, each of which took at least a few hundred years to fully unfold. We are living in the age of the information revolution which might only take one life time to fully unfold and it accelerates through knowledge and data. During each of those revolutions the mega political power structures have been shifted from small groups of hunter gatherers, through empires, feudalist kingdoms and finally nation states. The gun powder revolution democratised access to violence at the cost of the feudalists and their knights just like the printing press broke the church’s monopoly on scripture and education. We believe that the occurrence of decentralised cryptocurrencies will replace fiat money with the effect of reshaping the way we govern resources and coordinate in the future. Based on the same decentralised technologies like stateless money we expect a new, open, transparent and inclusive financial system to rise over the next few decades which democratises access to economic opportunity for everyone with an internet connection. Value and financial contracts become natively digital and programmable what increases efficiency by orders of magnitude. We expect to move all sorts of assets on decentralised infrastructure, like bonds, derivatives, stocks besides the creation of new assets like VR worlds, tokenised revenue streams, derivatives on startup success / failure, prediction markets and much more. Financial engineering becomes borderless. The export of cryptographic technology and devices was restricted by US laws until 1992 and slowly eased until 2000. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies took the privilege of developing surveillance technologies at global scale with unprecedented levels of efficiency over the past decades. Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and most recently Chris Wiley demonstrated how vulnerable and fragile our democracies as well well as our mostly uneducated or indifferent populations are. Despite severe hacks, mind manipulation at broad scale and the rising power of GAFA and secret services it is still challenging to raise the public’s awareness for privacy and self sovereign compute. However, we think this is going to dramatically change within the next decade — early signs are new regulations like GDPR or Mark Zuckerberg claiming that the future of facebook will be all about encryption and data controlled by users only 10 years after claiming that ‘privacy is no longer a social norm’. Developments in cryptography (e.g. zero knowledge proofs, secure multi party computation) and edge compute will underpin a massive swing towards self sovereign user data and control.