Our Strategy
There are three parts to what we are doing. We are building a new type of post-blockchain technology, a platform through which that technology becomes accessible, and the first use cases on the platform.
The glue holding it all together is the ECSA platform: an open, collaborative platform that will open source finance and terraform new economic spaces. The platform enables communities and individuals to make their own offers, issue their own programmable tokens and set their own value systems: to create economic spaces that look and feel and function like they do themselves. To do this, we need software technology that does what blockchains can do, but in a more modular and scalable manner. So these are the three parts: Agoric as software architecture, the ECSA platform itself, and the new economic spaces on the platform.
If you are familiar with Ethereum and Consensys, there is a rough parallel. Agoric is our “Ethereum”, the protocol tech that we need. ECSA itself is like Consensys, a hub (including a company) for developing the application space for the underlying software. And the economic spaces are the individual use cases (like Ujomusic, Boardroom and so on) that live on and benefit from the ECSA platform.
Agoric
First, we are helping to launch an Open Source project for the development of Agoric software. Agoric is a distributed smart contracts platform, based on the object capabilities framework developed by Mark S. Miller, among others. Agoric lead developer and ECSA CTO Jorge Lopez has architected Agoric into a fully fledged protocol creation tool, with a wide array of possible uses, but also with financial and economic applications as a focus area.
ECSA is invested in Agoric, because we see that its modularity, interoperability and scalability are exactly what is needed for building the platform and economic spaces that we want to see in the world.
Agoric will have its own native token, which functions in part similar to Ether: it is used (like gas) to pay for the hosting and running of services on the Agoric network. However, unlike Ether, the only way to get Agoric tokens is to contribute to Agoric development.
ECSA Platform
Second, we are building the ECSA platform, the portal to use Agoric and the place where economic spaces are designed and operated.
The platform is used for the creation and operation of an ecosystem of economic spaces, activating and intensifying a complex field of new social, financial and political relations. It provides a distributed smart contracts platform with a set of ready-made organizational-financial templates to start launching economic spaces. The ready-made templates come with different tools and expanding educational and organizational resources. The goal is to make the use of the platform and the navigation in the economic space ecosystem as intuitive, playful and open to invention as possible.
The platform has its own token, the ECSA token, whose value is backed by the success of the launched economic spaces, and only by this. Its value (i.e., the value of the networked ecosystem) appreciates as new economic relations flourish. In a sense, one can see the ECSA token as a derivative (or a metacurrency) of the tokens of the economic spaces themselves. The ECSA token is tradable, and can be used to pay for the services on the platform.
Economic Spaces
Third, we have launched the Economic Space Program for the development of economic spaces. At the moment, more than 20 different cases of economic spaces are under development, with inspiration from everything from Platform Cooperativism through Open Source Development to Local Currencies in play.
We want to launch Agoric and the ECSA platform with first use cases already in place, not only to show their potential and possibilities but also because early adopters matter. They will play a profound role in shaping the sense and direction of the novel, nascent economic and organizational forms that will emerge. The plasticity and generative potential of financial technologies and the new degree of disintermediation provided by distributed technologies is everything with (and would be nothing without) the people using these tools and orienting their development with their ethos.
Each economic space will also have its own token. We see these tokens not so much as simple currency or even equity, but as “programmable money”: something that as smart contracts defines the nature and governance of the economic space, in addition to defining stakeholdership. The tokens of the economic spaces will have different issuance and backing: allowing for different models and kinds of value is a key goal. As a consequence, the liquidity and tradeability (for instance, exchange between the tokens of two different economic spaces or between an economic space token and the ECSA token) is determined case by case.
The vision: programmable economy with open source economic spaces
Together these three things coalesce into our vision: the technologies of post-blockchain distributed ledgers open the possibility of a programmable economy, which allows the design of new systems of value creation and distribution, enabling the users to set the rules for their own economic spaces. These economic spaces are created in an open source manner: copying, remixing and modifying existing models and templates. The overall value creation is based on sharing risks and rewards: the tokens appreciate when the whole ecosystem grows and becomes more vibrant.
If you’re interested in joining the growing ECSA community, contact us!.
