The Real Revolution of Crypto
Akemi: To create a publicly funded technological platform, what would the operating system or agreements have to be to give rise to that?
Raamayan: Well, let’s look at Uniswap.
Uniswap is a decentralized exchange, a crypto exchange. I’m sure many of you have heard of Bitcoin. You’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Bitcoin. Most exchanges happen either OTC (over-the-counter) or they happen on a centralized exchange.
A centralized exchange is always someone taking a cut and a making a profit. It’s the same capitalistic system which extracts more value towards fewer people.
We must share information, knowledge, resources, and users.
There’s a lot of risk in decentralized exchanges because your money is stored on wallets, which are held by centralized exchanges. These often get hacked.
The same problems appear in centralized institutions where protocols liken to Uniswap have existed to allow a buyer and a seller to meet without any intermediaries. To exchange with their own wallets.
We now have a process for exchange that is decentralized. The collective and the community participate by adding their money to liquidity pools.
The community adds their money to a liquidity pool, which allows for the transaction between buyer and seller to take place, and the community gets a percentage of benefit from the liquidity pool. Uniswap doesn’t get anything.
However, Uniswap runs off a series of tokens and those tokens are also governance tokens. They have financial value and those who are holding it can participate in a decentralized governance of that platform.
The code is open source. It’s developed all by a core community. Community gets to decide how it grows, and yes, those who created it probably are holding some tokens and can benefit, but the majority of it is distributed and decentralized amongst the community. Now, that type of protocol is the future of finance. That’s why people are so excited about “defy” and decentralized finance because it does that.
These are the beginning stages. These are the tested experiments of how to create decentralized models that are owned and governed by the collective and they’re working. Already, over $30 billion has gone through Uniswap itself and they are one of many decentralized exchanges. That model is going to scale and grow, especially when it creates incentive models that benefit all the different players involved who are participating.
If you use the protocol, you get governance tokens, as well as tokens that hold financial value and you can sell.
If you’re a developer on the ecosystem, you can get grants in Uniswap to keep developing.
If you’re a liquidity pool provider, you get a percentage of what you’re providing.
All the incentives are built to support the people in the ecosystem that are supporting it. That’s the genius. That’s what we can do today.
Akemi: So, what I’m hearing is that you’re rewarded for using the platform and potentially, the public is building and being rewarded for doing so too.
Raamayan: I have to check and see if there’s a centralized company for Uniswap somewhere, how that actually works and what that hierarchy looks like. I don’t actually know. I got to do a little bit more digging in there, but on a protocol level, it seems to have a lot of the infrastructure for what this post-capitalistic technology infrastructure could look like.
Akemi: It just takes someone who’s brave enough to implement this at the beginning of a platform’s inception to actually do it.
Raamayan: Yeah. There’s a lot of work to do.
Competition is only relevant when you’re self-serving.
Do we separate the token for payment and the token for governance? There’s problems when you have a governance and a payment token together and a decentralization of it.
So, it’s not like there’s no issues to solve, but these issues are exciting issues. They’re issues for our generation to really look at.
This is a real revolution of crypto. This is where the rubber meets the road.
Capitalism was still shrouded in many of the new infrastructure systems. A lot of people who wanted to get rich quick and make a lot of money on their tokens. That’s fine. It is what it is. But underneath there are a lot of people who came into this because they wanted to change the nature of systems today.
They wanted to build something better that’s owned by the people, and gets people out of the rut of the hierarchical capitalistic trap. Those people are the ones who I’m speaking to right now.
If you’re one of them, know that our time is coming to do that work.
Our time is here to unite together as a force of good to do that work. The people who are aligned with the right heart, the right intention, the right reason for being here, who truly want to create systems for the good of the whole — we cannot compete with each other. It’s antithetical to a post-capitalistic model.
We must share information, knowledge, resources, and users.
If you’re operating on the same guidelines and principles, automatically our users should be the same. We should be building cross blockchain integration with each other because we’re building selfless ecosystems.
Competition is irrelevant in that type of model.
Competition is only relevant when you’re self-serving. It’s a big breakthrough for people. Competition is only relevant when you’re self-serving. As soon as you move beyond that, competition doesn’t exist and there’s only systemic incentive for collaboration.
