230409 Sitges, 9 d’abril de 2023
The ReFi ecosystem is growing. It’s now been a couple of years in which it has evolved and started to manifest itself concretely.
Projects have been developing different levels of infrastructure that will make possible the implementation, experimentation and actuality of alternative financial and overall incentive structures that challenges current institutional structures that mostly monopolize the means of human coordination, that have failed to address the crucial problems that humanity faces, such as climate change, poverty, war and inequality.
While the system has been boasting itself of its capacity of solving problems for decades, it becomes ever more apparent that it is incapable of solving the problems that are more crucial. What may have appeared to be isolated problems that humanity faced has shown itself to be mere symptoms of a systematic disease. However, systemic problems can’t be solved by working on each one of the symptoms individually, it would be like a whack-a-mole. In the game you’re always eventually beaten by the moles - you can’t defeat the moles.
The current (and historic) order of the world have however left little room to alternatives. It has been so much time that people truly believed that any alternative fot humans to organize and take control of its own future that it may have seemed that no alternative is possible.
It is, however, exactly in the moment when no authentic and impactful alternative seems to be possible, that true hope appears. While the current system is unable to address the systemic problems directly, it has allowed the development of the preconditions with which people would be able to overcome the barriers to its self organization.
It was exactly the idea and ideology that all problems of humanity could be fixed by optimizing its processes through the use of technology, while maintaining its logic and organizational premises mostly intact - that brought capital, and thus energy, to the development of technology that allows people to organize autonomously in a way that could challenge the current organization of society and its relations and transactions, economics. Current decentralized technology - such as the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, decentralized data storage, such as IPFS or Arweave, torrent, and so on… - have been made possible by previous development and ideological work. However, it may have been only with the major influx of capital to the area that it can catalyze its development to bring about real organizational capabilities to sustain itself. Just like in chemistry providing heat to a system increases the movement of particles, and thus increasing the changes that particles may get to connect with each other forming stable structures, the influx of capital, and thus financial energy, can increase the probability and facilitate structures to be formed.
With this background many projects and groups organized as DAOs, started to appear. While the concept of DAOs remain mostly subjective, different groups started to self organize under thus identity. This organizations were then able to coordinate its own funds, work, people and financial incentives.
The ability of projects to organize and coordinate work at least partially in a decentralized way through DAOs proved itself to be feasible and able to get some momentum with the explosion of projects working mostly on infrastructure development - focused mostly on DeFi protocols and DAO tooling. If it has shown to be viable for these fields then it may be for others as well.
On aspect of DAOs that have already been mentioned before is its autopoietic nature…
- It is exactly the fact that we’re not able to agree on what a DAO is that makes us truly subjective to the movement
- it is exactly the ambiguity surrounding the concept of a DAO that allows for a greater range of interpretations and perspectives, which in turn fosters the growth and influence of the movement.