Valence

Crypto is the medium through which society will produce the next generation of digital institutions. Valence's purpose is to maximize long-term, permissionless collaboration by empowering these new institutions.

Digitization, by its nature, is a reduction of fidelity. Reduction is simultaneously a strength and a limitation of digital institutions. Simplicity engenders robustness, while constrained expression also bounds the institutional behavior that protocols can model.

For this reason, digital institutions should be specifically designed to account for the context of their constituents in order to represent their local interests. Scale is then a matter of increasing the capacity for protocols to coordinate around shared goals and build institutional power from the bottom up.

Today, bridges are designed to facilitate the permissionless transport of messages or security among protocols. Valence is a new kind of symbolic bridge, a tool that enables the free flow of economic and political capital toward shared ends. Long-term, permissionless collaboration begins with the will to trust. Credit is unique in its power to build trust over time—and so Valence takes its first step with protocol-to-protocol lending.