ABLE Nation Layer 2 // Nonzero

This post discuss the cultivation of ABLE’s Treasury, how we may achieve it, and how it will underlie Layer 3 of ABLE. If you don’t know what ABLE is, start here.

The second layer is all about creating value for the Nation. It’s taking the Treasury facilitated by the money game, itself partly a signal of the belief of people in the vision, and backing it, and the ABLE token, with growth in participants, funds, decentralized functionality, and community. As much as we may want to otherwise, there’s no nation building to be had without great wealth and power. Layer 2 is about continually accruing this wealth while leveraging it into materializing the full vision.

This layer could have been named “Growth” rather than “Nonzero”. However, as we know from our observation of the progress of the social order throughout human history, the simple act of facilitating more non-zero-sum interactions tends to lead to growth.

Shifting any network into reliance on more and more ways of collaborating, or on constructive competition, versus zero-sum or even destructive competition, frees up energy and resources. And the more decentralized the system is, the more the new fruits get distributed to all of its participants.

Like similar meta-layer constructs before it — religions, ideologies, governments, nations — ABLE Nation, and its Treasury, allow individual actors and communities to come together under a uniting flag, one that implies a shared vision, a collective aspiration, but also a down-to-earth code of conduct, rules of engagement — business and social — here reinforced by Decentralized Ledger Tech (DLT) and its “code as law”.

Indeed, DLT is the special sauce allowing ABLE Nation — or a similar construct arising and succeeding where it failed — to become a more efficient, more rewarding construct to partake in. In these times where even the mighty US is showing signs of buckling under its own weight, it’s useful to remember that our latest and greatest meta-layer technology originated centuries ago, in a completely different age and era of human existence.

ABLE Nation poses the question — quite familiar to people deep in the blockchain and DAO space— what kind of society can we build when we update our organizing principle to be running at Internet speeds and with DLT security, immutability, and transparency?

The ABLE Treasury is the first, and most material, instantiation of the Nation and its ability to nonzero inefficiencies away. By opting-in to the Nation and depositing in the Treasury, one gets a share, a stake, in the wealth of the nation. Most of the first readers of this text are likely able to dream up the immense benefits themselves. Here is a list of some of them, and I implore you to mention more in ABLE’s social channels:

Macro

• No reliance on opaque, centralized nation and bank policies deciding what to do with what is, by all accounts, your wealth. Holding ABLE, you can always know exactly what you own and what your buying power is; you’ll never be a pleb in someone else’s game again.
• “Money printing” in its current form is gone, as well as the perverted Cantillon Effect; if the nation — you — decided to “print money”, you’d get the exact share of it, immediately. If the decentralized governance decided to do something funny with it, you could simply withdraw and leave.
• A great dampen on secret military-industrial-governance type deals. The more we migrate to open and transparent systems, the less capital can influence policy without you knowing about it.

Micro

• Particularly in the current DeFi space, it’s hard to keep track, and small buyers get eaten up by whales and gas fees. Opting into the ABLE Treasury allows you to enjoy its growth through the best growth strategies available. Conversely,
• For builders, there’s no need to figure out business plans, token allocations, creating a new community from scratch, and other such activities detracting, and directing energy away, from the creative act itself. If you find a way to grow the Treasury, either through new code or new deal, you benefit the entire Treasury, your share in it included, as well as get rewarded directly for your efforts in the form of a fee from the proceeds.
• As the Treasury grows in wealth and power, it will achieve bargaining power beyond what is allowable to each individual. Instead of trying to become a whale, one can contribute from their unique skills and expertise to grow the decentralized whale that is ABLE Nation.

ABLE Nation and its Treasury become a form of Keiretsu — automatically. A global, human-based and owned, inter-linked set of value-creating, smart contract based business strategies.

Different products built in the Nation, leveraging its growing Treasury, and interfacing with each other from the implicit viewpoint of cooperation, can outmaneuver any stand-alone business. Possibly, even the type of easy money-lego-synergy seen in the DeFi space.

With proceeds going back to the Nation and Treasury you’re a citizen-stakeholder of, including those of your business partner, the need to fight for every last penny, the worry about getting screwed in a deal, is much, much reduced. With these motives taking a step back, we’re all one step closer to slaying Moloch.

There’s nothing stopping ABLE from playing zero-sum games with entities outside of it, of course. We still live in a world governed by an illusion of separation, with people and entities trying to one-up each other in zero-sum ways, and so the survival of our new entity depends on it. However, it is my hope that we prioritize growth through the unique attributes of this new tech and approach over other means. When we grow big enough, we won’t need to “conquer” centralized nations, banks, and other services: we’ll collaborate with them to slowly provide a better service to and through them, eventually transcending and including them.

Email didn’t have to conquer the post office, but it sure as hell is nicer to have an Internet-facilitated post and delivery service. <- I know we can have a better example here.

The Treasury may be more efficient than even the latest projects from the DeFi space. Take harvest.finance as a test case: if we were to instantiate such a program under ABLE’s Treasury, we wouldn’t need to:

• Charge a 30% fee from earnings. All earnings just go back to serve you in the Treasury.
• Create a new token and mess around with all that nonsense.
• Create and continually rely on speculation-driven, artificial yield-farming incentives to drive people to use our specific service.
• Stake or lock up tokens to participate, wasting time and gas fees.
• Worry about buying and selling another token or about the taxes this implies.

An ABLE-run harvest like strategy would simply harvest whatever is willing to provide us with free magic Internet money to exchange with currency we’ve deemed worthy of placing in the Treasury.

Of course, ABLE doesn’t just harvest. ABLE wants to focus on seeding.

What can we seed, together as a decentralized, online nation? What can we build that leverages the unique advantages this model brings? How can we be of benefit — first to each other, as ABLE nationals — and then to the entire world?

What use can we create for the ABLE token, a Terra basket currency for the decentralized web, a dollar-denominated share in the Treasury of the Nation, that was not possible before?

What would you do with a giant Treasury, waiting to be wielded by you — an ABLE citizen-stakeholder who could come up with the best way to utilize it?