The Origins of ixo
As we transition into the new year, I have been reflecting on the origins of our ixo Protocol and how we have developed this over the past decade (yes, decade!).
A collaborative aid marketplace
It is crazy to realise that it was ten years ago, in March 2008, when I made this presentation at an international workshop in London about Using Web 2.0 Technologies (and Social Networking Tools) for Social Action.
The (pre-blockchain era) ideas reflected in these 13 slides were formative to our research and development work over the next decade, as we built what has become The ixo Protocol for sustainable development impact.
In March this year, almost 10 years to the day, we will launch the ixo Network to provide an operating system for the Impact Economy.
Shaun’s presentation touched on how development aid can be more effective through the innovative use of new technologies. He made the case for a web 2.0 based platform which may enable donors, agents and local stakeholders to connect with one another in order to engage in constructive collaboration for development. Shaun posited that this would be a different open marketplace for aid which will allow for the creation of a global network and subsequently encourage direct involvement between philanthropists/donors and projects.
The idea of a Collaborative Aid Marketplace proposed that market participants would become share-stakeholders — which we now refer to as Token Holders. This Collaborative Aid Marketplace is the ixo Network. We believe this will provide a foundational operating system for the Impact Economy.
My thesis was that a decentralized marketplace, powered by tokens (credits) could positively disrupt how sustainable development impacts get funded and delivered, to generate new economic value — in what we now refer to as the #ImpactEconomy
It has been fascinating to watch decentralised marketplaces emerge over the past 5 years, enabled by blockchains and Web 3.0 standards. These new technologies have made it possible for us to deploy ixo Decentralised Impact Exchanges, using smart contracts to coordinate and incentivise market participants to fund, deliver and evaluate sustainable development impacts. Please do find out more about how the ixo Protocol works, by reading and commenting on our White Paper!
My 2008 presentation described how the participants in a collaborative aid marketplace would receive credits (which I referred to as ECOs) for their contributions and activities within the ecosystem. These credits would initially be generated and distributed to all participants in a way that would enable them to immediately begin shareholding and investing in impact projects. This collaborative aid marketplace would be properly democratic and participatory, with the currency of decisions represented by tokens.
My Eureka moment came when I discovered Bitcoin in 2013. This would enable exchanges of value and information through decentralised networks in ways that could make the collaborative aid marketplace possible. The IXO cryptocurrency token will finally be generated and distributed to participants in the ixo Network, during 2018!
An important feature of this marketplace is that it would enable anyone to invest either directly or via new vehicles (sic), to have projects implemented that they believe in. This would provide opportunities for much-needed experimentation and speculation on new types of projects and interventions that were not being funded by traditional aid funders. It would also transfer decision power to the marketplace participants.
My ideological motivations for advocating this power shift were based on years of professional experience as an international development practitioner, knowing how the international development (aid) marketplace operates. At the time of giving my presentation, I was working as a policy advisor to the UK Department for International Development (DfID)and starting to get involved in a data-driven global aid transparency and accountability initiative for the International Health Partnership (IHP+Results), which I went on to lead for a number of years, up to 2013. From this perspective, I was frustrated by how decisions about aid prioritisation get made — including about what to fund and who to fund.
Although I got distracted from concurrently completing my PhD dissertation at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, my preliminary research into stigmergic collaboration, which was the basis for my PhD proposal, got me thinking about how to implement systems that harness more effective coordinated decision-making, with economic incentives and information feedback loops to calibrate the performance of these systems. Which led me to propose that a collaborative aid marketplace could augment decision-making with a virtuous share/prediction market.
This is now possible using curation markets and token-curated registries — an important set of ideas originated by Simon de la Rouviere. Anyone should be able to stake IXO tokens to promote the delivery of specific sustainable development impacts they see as important.
The stakeholders in this marketplace would have vested interest to perform well, as they would be economically incentivised by having a share-stakeholding. With ixo we have Proof of Stake mechanisms that require tokens to be deposited into smart contracts, to participate as a network host, or to perform key functions in decentralised impact exchanges.
The marketplace would fundamentally be driven by data providing evidence for results, as the basis for claiming impact investment yields. The ixo Protocol provides a Proof of Impact mechanism, using cryptographically verifiable impact claims that are validated by consensus and verified through evaluation processes augmented by software oracles, to produce Impact Tokens and verified impact data.
Reputation is a critical enabler within a decentralised, collaborative marketplace. The ixo Protocol embeds decentralised identifiers into impact claims, for direct accountability and attribution. These identifiers can be authenticated through digital signatures and by using more specific object capabilities, including cryptographically verifiable credentials, such as qualification or reputation claims. The blockchain record adds provenance to these credentials.
I believed that the collaborative aid marketplace could create a platform for innovation. Today we see how blockchain technologies are enabling disruptive open-source innovations — most remarkably within the vibrant developer community that has grown around the Ethereum network. Decentralised applications can interoperate in creative, recombinant ways that could make innovation flourish. We have designed the ixo Protocol to plug and play with all types of other applications for fundraising, governance, data-sharing, identity management, dispute resolution, investment derivatives, curation markets, and so on.
A developer community is starting to grow around the core ixo Protocol and I am excited to see what new types of applications for sustainability and related use-cases will emerge for the Impact Economy. We invite developers to join our Github.
Making ideas happen
It has taken far longer than I ever anticipated, but I had never imagined how broad the scope and big the potential scale of the concept might become.
Over the past decade, a lot has changed in the world that makes the notion of an aid-focused marketplace less relevant. The sustainability threats we face — including climate change, have become more evident and urgent. But we see a vast impact economy growing by turning these threats into opportunities.
We have responded by expanding the concept of the collaborative aid marketplace idea, to include all sources and types of investments into achieving sustainability impacts. We define Impact as the measurable change that we want to see in society, for the environment and within the economy. The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals provide a guiding framework for the types of impacts that will create the future we want. This incorporates the 2015 Paris Agreement for responding to climate change. The Global Goals are about ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all, by the year 2030. These goals are relevant at all levels of society, in all countries.
Over the past 3–4 years, we have succeeded in turning many of these original ideas into practical action, by prototyping and field-testing the protocol for Early Childhood Development applications, in South Africa. This work has been supported by The Innovation Edge and through an investment from the UNICEF Innovation Fund. We recently launched the ixo Foundation, together with highly-regarded global institutions as founding partners. The non-profit foundation serves as custodian and promotor of the ixo Protocol open-source code base, open standards and ixo Network.
We have taken a pragmatic approach to building applications of the protocol, using a combination of Web 2.0 technologies and iteratively building in new web standards and blockchain capabilities, with a roadmap towards full decentralisation. For instance, in early 2015, we pioneered a blockchain-based decentralised identifier registry (ID-IO), using the Ripple ledger, which we presciently felt would be more affordable than Bitcoin for scaling up transactions in the social development context. Ripple pivoted (and more recently flipped!). Ethereum and other exciting technologies have emerged. Now we are working on a hybrid of Ethereum smart contracts linked to a consortium blockchain database mechanism. We welcome developers to get involved in helping to build out the core protocol and to develop your own use-case applications of the protocol, as this matures.
The next year and decade ahead
We are (finally) launching ixo to the world in 2018.
It will be exciting to see how these ideas are taken up by the community over the next year and into the future. I am convinced that we now have the technological capabilities and economic mechanisms to grow a truly collaborative decentralised marketplace for impact that can bring about the urgent transitions that we need to see over the next 10 years.
