Smart Contracts for Smart Cities

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Mattereum - Humanizing the Singularity

23 min readJul 16, 2018

London Futures by Eisabeth Skene via Flickr

“A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”

— Rebecca Solnit

“By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.”

— Socrates

The city has often been the site of technological progress within our histories and our stories. Some bleak, some utopic. Science fiction skylines with automated, aerial transport (“Where we’re going we don’t need roads”) and other imagery have shaped our expectations of the city of the future. Yet there are many futures that have yet come to pass. When we talk about smart cities we are talking about a grouping of concepts, a confluence of technologies and models of society. Are these more than shiny distractions from the real problems of the world, or are they essential to a prosperous urban future?

In this article, we’ll unpack the notion of the smart city, the technologies which are making it a reality, the resulting property rights and economic models that will proliferate, and the considerable challenges that arise. We’ll then see how blockchains and smart contracts can become building blocks of this new architecture, and finally look at some potential contributions from Mattereum, seeing how a well-crafted legal–technical infrastructure can streamline these complex processes whilst maintaining certainty, accountability, and above all — human agency.

What is a Smart City?

According to the United Nations World Urbanization Prospects 2018 report, 55% of the world’s population currently resides in urban areas, projected to rise to 68% by 2050. The world’s urban population is projected to increase by 2.5 billion by that same year. How we design our cities is imperative in maintaining a desirable and sustainable quality of life for ourselves in the future. Overcrowding. Pollution. Waste disposal. Resource allocation. A city of poor construction is a system design problem at a massive scale.

Around the world, governments and corporations are enamored of the idea of “smart” cities. The United Arab Emirates is actively positioning Dubai as the quintessential city of the future with its numerous smart city endeavors. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has a smart city initiative called Sidewalk Labs with plans to reinvent the Quayside neighborhood by the Eastern Waterfront of Toronto. What really fuels the hype of smart cities is the allure of absolute efficiency across various sectors of urban life, and while politicians and the technocracy espouse lowering costs through efficiency gains, critics such as Bruce Sterling believe that there is a great divide between the rhetoric and reality of smart cities, that there will be less innovation and prosperity and merely a new veneer of software overlaid atop the existing urban practices and social structures, or as he describes it, “A land grab for the command and control systems that were mostly already there.”

What is a smart city really? The concept has been around for quite some time under various monikers: “digital city”, “knowledge city”, “intelligent city”, “ubiquitous city”. What all these conceptual models agree on is this notion of a city with autonomous operations handling numerous facets of urban existence by the widespread use of information and communication technologies. At its heart is the Internet of Things, where we break up the components of a smartphone and embed them into our homes, our streets, our vehicles — essentially anything that could have economic value with network access. These ubiquitous sensors on our person and within our infrastructure are key components of this city of the future.

So how does this change things?

Economies of Omniscience

The discourse around smart cities tends to leap from the technology that can actualize this vision to the utopic result. These include visions of an automated transport system banishing traffic congestion, and solar panels installed on every roof giving neighborhoods unlimited clean energy. Yet the truly “disruptive” possibilities of this new urban operating system is based on something else: the rise of networked property rights.

The business models that arise from the deployment of smart technologies such as autonomous vehicles, smart power grids, and drone delivery services are key. The ways in which we realize “economies of omniscience” are at the heart of the pathways and conflicts which will appear as we build and participate in the smart city. The possibility of a networked urban commons which gives citizens a more active role in the development and operation of their neighborhoods is a radical shift from the current models dominated by state and corporate entities. Like kids playing in the sandbox, many are not too fond of sharing their toys, and the city has its incumbents.

Uber and AirBnB are both examples of how longstanding markets such as transportation and housing can be shaken by the advent of networked alternatives built from the Internet up. The ubiquitous internet access and location services accessible through mobile devices allows digital networks to more effectively handle the supply and demand of existing markets, yet these tech companies face significant regulatory pushback from jurisdictions all over the world, namely by their refusal to acknowledge service providers (drivers, renters) as employees (which consequently allows them to maintain lower prices.) In a relatively short amount of time, two products which facilitate the allocation of limited resources (space, time, vehicles) through connected mobile devices have generated a fundamental shift in commerce: giving people the means to provide and access on-demand resources with each other. If the goal of the smart city is to make as many facets of it as frictionless as possible for the people within it, then they may be more accepting of similar models moving forward.

Mapping the Smart City

Before we delve further it will help to have a conceptual framework. In their paper “Blockchain-based sharing services: What blockchain technology can contribute to smart cities,” Sun et al propose a three-part model: people, technology, and organization. The various services and functions that lie at the vertices of this triangle can help identify the pressures and frictions within the system.

The human facet involves the user experience of these autonomous systems, trust in the availability and integrity of the system, security and privacy of personal data, and access/ownership of property. It also involves knowledge sharing to reduce information asymmetry which puts the users in a designed disadvantage. As more complexity is layered onto the city, it is important for people to have some clarity on where they are positioned within these new autonomous systems and value networks so that they are not taken advantage of by the powers-that-be, or at least be aware of it when it happens. Education is paramount so that people are not overwhelmed as the city transforms around them.

The organizational dimension deals with the governance and policies that coordinate relationships between the different actors within a smart city initiative. This also involves the corpus of law which enforces property rights. This organization provides the common ground for the various social structures within the smart city, the initiatives therein, and the citizenry. This element is important as it provides the necessary consensus and accountability frameworks for the whole project to work as well as the means of handling the inevitable exceptions and edge cases that will follow.

Technology comprises the numerous interoperating systems that allow smart cities to function. As mentioned earlier, one of the key hardware components of the smart city is the ubiquity of sensors. Along with these sensors are various means for the devices to communicate to a network. There are also the databases maintained largely by trusted third parties which house user data to monitor the “health” of the network and process the data to various ends. Applications provide the user interface to the system and likely connect to the database or network via an API. And let’s not forget the host of protocols that will tie everything together. This part of the triangle often gets the most attention because it is the more tangible and defined of the three and easier to research and develop within laboratories and pilot programs. The other two extensively involve people and well…people are difficult.

The goal for any system of networked property rights is to establish an equilibrium between these three areas. Isolate a single point or vertex of this framework and a host of challenges arise. The smart city project is a legal–technical–social undertaking that will test everything which constitutes it. In an age of networked matter, how do we ensure that people are not vulnerable to the faults of the machinery? Or at least minimize the damage? We can start by rethinking the infrastructure from first principles and determining the best tools and methods from there. This is where blockchains and smart contracts enter the picture.

The Ledger and The Executable

A blockchain is a decentralized immutable ledger, fault-tolerant, publicly auditable, and attack-resistant. The goal in developing blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies is to create databases that can persist into the next century while placing minimal trust in third parties. For thousands of years, credit systems have been facilitated by a variety of models. Some of the earliest accounting systems were single-entry: one entity would maintain lists with entries describing various assets; this created a trust silo subject to fraud or incompetence, and severely limited commerce. Double-entry bookkeeping, which came to prominence with the Medici bank in 14th century Florence, has been the backbone of commerce for hundreds of years because it has allowed commercial entities to effectively audit each other’s ledgers for error or fraud. Blockchain, however, implements Ian Grigg’s triple-entry accounting model, wherein two or more transacting parties can refer to an accumulated chain of digital signatures (of transactions, events, messages), a neutral source of truth, as it were. The use cases for cryptographically secure and verifiable “evidence chains” in commerce are vast, especially when we add programmability.

Smart contracts were first envisioned by Nick Szabo in 1996 as a potential method of formalizing business relationships and commercial agreements in an online context more efficiently than existing methods involving paper contracts which require human interaction at every step. A smart contract is essentially the operational element of a contract rendered as executable code. Szabo’s thesis was that it could be possible to embed all manner of contracts, both familiar and novel, into the hardware and software of our world, augmenting existing property rights and realizing new ones. Early smart contract systems include Point of Sale (POS), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and AMIX (American Information Exchange). These systems were limited in that the contractual parties were quite passive and unaware of the finer processes taking place. Their design lacked the dynamics and granularity needed to truly bring the “meeting of the minds” into a digital context. In contract law, there is the notion that parties to a contract have a shared understanding of the intentions of the contract as bound by “the four corners of the page.” In practice, this is not always the case. Contracts of adhesion, for example, are where a single party of the contract holds majority power within the deal and can even take advantage of another party’s naivety. Where these progenitor smart contract systems fell short was their inflexibility in the negotiation and drafting of contracts for different deals. Of course this was not the intent or concern of these systems. They simply sought a way to automate a particular process. The idea of smart contracts has informed pioneering work in the conceptualization and formation of digital markets and has become a critical element in the advent of blockchains and a myriad of use cases.

If we have a distributed, fault-tolerant accounting system and a means to move value around in the form of executable code, it would seem that we have key pieces of the puzzle, yet how has this not become the de facto standard of smart city initiatives? The truth is that although blockchains and smart contracts show great promise in resource allocation and handling networked property rights, they have not effectively interfaced with the real world outside of a few pilot programs. Referring to the smart city framework mentioned above, it is not enough to build out a single point of the triangle. Technology alone will not suffice. People must be able to interact with these systems safely and intuitively, and the user experience of blockchains and/or cryptocurrencies are notably lacking in fundamental features necessary for adoption (like asset recovery). When there is a bug in a smart contract, or if a counterparty does not fulfill their end of the deal, then there needs to be a mechanism for dispute resolution within the system as well as a means to fix the software and recover any assets if necessary. In order for these technologies to become fixtures within our urban futures, we must not become too enamored of the grand utopian potential, and think of what must be done now in the present for these systems to develop in our best interest.

Enter Mattereum

Mattereum’s multidisciplinary team aims to build the legal–technical interface connecting the abstract software world of blockchains and smart contracts with goods and services in the material world. While there have been many conceptualizations of the Internet as a separate jurisdiction from the geopolitical borders we impose upon the world, the truth is that property rights — from land to copyright — are enforced by nation-states (fiat property). Every constituent project of the smart city will have to fit into an existing body of law.

The only practical way a smart contract can be legible to a court of law (and to the parties of the contract for that matter) is if there is some way to clarify the intent and function of the software in prose. Mattereum’s approach draws upon the idea of a Ricardian contract developed by Ian Grigg in the mid-1990s: software facilitating the issuance and transfer of a digital asset is paired with a human-readable prose document. The flows and events of the prose contract can be rendered into executable code with shared parameters between the two (who, what, when, where, how much, etc.), thus making it readable by both people and machines. All of the subsequent events conducted by the software references a unique cryptographic hash identifying the prose document, resulting in an accumulating chain of transaction records for all participants. As a result, every user participating in this system is assumed to be doing so under the terms of the contract.

To cope with inevitable errors in code and prose, not to mention often desirable ambiguities, there needs to be a means of repair. One method is to include an arbitration clause in the prose contract detailing the forum and process of dispute resolution. Legally-binding arbitration, considered a valid form of alternative dispute resolution for commercial endeavors within the more than 150 countries that have ratified the New York Arbitration Convention, is often the best option. Since disputes arising from blockchain ecosystems will require the interpretation of technical evidence, Mattereum will provide and train a panel of technically-competent arbitrators who are versed in smart contracts and distributed ledger technology.

Ultimately, what Mattereum seeks to accomplish with these hybrid contracts is to minimize the risk of delamination, in which the technical and legal aspects of the contract become incompatible even if each component is valid in its own domain. To embed a smart contract within a city, it must be engineered with respect to the legal and technical reality of whatever context it is built into, and be adaptable and reparable over time.

Now let’s see how Mattereum could apply its expertise to various smart city initiatives.

Autonomous vehicle fleet

Self-driving vehicles are coming. While current systems are semi-autonomous, as they still require hands on the steering wheel, it is only a matter of time until the technology and regulation reach a point where manual steering becomes a matter of last resort or even a liability. Autonomous vehicles are a unique development in the auto industry in that they are as much a feat of software design as of mechanical engineering. One could even say that the electric, self-driving car is a computer with locomotive capabilities. What role would Mattereum have in developing an autonomous vehicle platform?

Let’s say a smart car manufacturer such as Tesla partners with Mattereum to explore a new monetization model. The goal of this pilot is to test whether or not an autonomous vehicle fleet could be economically viable: rather than selling the cars, they are deployed directly from the factory with an application installed which handles the necessary payments and record keeping via a Ricardian smart contract held on the blockchain. Participants in the pilot would use a mobile app similar to existing ride-hailing apps. The smart contracts would all stem from the same template, drafted/engineered by the Mattereum team. There could be a dynamic pricing model similar to ride-sharing platforms like Uber or Lyft. Upon payment, the smart contract would distribute the value according to the conditions of the contract: the revenue streams could be allocated to risk pools to cover insurance costs in the event of accidents or malfunctions.

The interesting possibility of this monetization model for car manufacturers is that a single car wouldn’t have to sell for a single amount but continue generating value over time, which could net a far greater profit. Manufacturers could also implement a hybrid approach in the rollout of a new fleet, deploying a certain percentage of cars to certain cities and selling the rest directly to buyers. To resolve disputes, the arbitration clause within the contract is invoked at which point arbitrators versed in the legals of autonomous agents can make a binding decision. In regards to the contract engineering, the challenge here would be how to address the ownership of the vehicle. The contract could be modeled on a lien (under common law) which facilitates the sharing of property between an owner on record (the manufacturer or their subsidiary) and the lienholder (rider/renter) with the terms of repossession written and programmed into the contract. The contract could also be an altogether different design to meet the particulars of the deal.

This example is only one possible path towards a fleet of autonomous vehicles, and it may even be one of the least radical options. One alternative: all of the existing owners of an autonomous car could opt in to this feature via a software update instead of the manufacturer deploying the cars to the public. Even more radical, the car could own itself, perhaps operating in a legal sense as a special purpose vehicle (pun intended). Any change in ownership fundamentally changes the dynamics of the system. With ubiquitous sensor and effector technologies like the autonomous vehicle, many different forms of property rights are possible, with different models of contractual relationships between the manufacturers, owners, and riders.

Agoric City

The growth of Amazon’s global distribution network has given people quick access to goods from all over the world. In some of the metropolitan areas with Amazon warehouses, a package can arrive within a couple hours of placing the order. But that immediacy is only possible if a local Amazon warehouse happens to hold the good. What if the smart city could be more self-sufficient and locally-sourced to satisfy the needs of its citizens without relying on a single company’s resources? A localized, automated logistics network could bridge the resources held by local businesses and individuals with consumers to meet their immediate needs, turning the city itself into an efficient agoric system.

One of the benefits of such a system is the immediacy of knowledge. A system which can cut through the information delay in commerce is immensely valuable. Where Mattereum could play a role is in the transactional framework that presents itself if the system is more than just a search engine for local goods but rather a way to directly link buyers and sellers, B2B and B2C. Sure, the customer could simply visit a store, but things get much more complicated if the purchase is done before the good is in hand or if the transaction is purely peer-to-peer and not via a brick-and-mortar storefront. Ricardian contracts are already operating in the peer-to-peer online marketplace setting of OpenBazaar as a means to clearly track the liabilities of the parties, so bringing this model into a locally-sourced market paired with automated logistics to speed things along would yield many possibilities in a high-density urban environment. For added efficiency, alternative modes of delivery such as drones and quadcopters could be an ancillary service which eliminates the need for ground transportation of goods. These would also require a great deal of legal forethought as drone regulation is a hotly contested topic and may not be allowed in some jurisdictions.

How would the participants of this system settle disputes with one another? Online marketplaces like Ebay have their own method of online dispute resolution via third-party mediation services. In Ebay, the results vary with the sheer volume of transactions (90% success rate). ODR services that use mediation can settle the majority of disputes with little trouble. However, if a transaction invokes a variety of systems with different actors, such as automated delivery services, there may be more complexity to tease out before the dispute can be resolved with appropriate consideration of the facts. This is where Mattereum’s panel of technically-competent arbitrators could play a key role. As emerging technologies create more complex business arrangements, ODR services will have to either adapt to the increasing complexity or rethink their design from the ground up.

Energy and the urban commons

One of the radical changes in moving into the new operating systems of the future city is the possibility of an urban commons, in which citizens can have a more inclusive role in the funding, operation, and management of public utilities thus far centrally controlled by companies. One facet of this urban commons is the energy grid, which has been vertically integrated and monopolized by power companies resulting in an inefficient system. The decentralization of renewable energy solutions is critical so that energy access is not hindered by a central point of failure or misaligned incentives between users and providers. This is perhaps a natural progression given the diffuse nature of these energy sources, whether it be wind, water, or solar. Microgrids allow certain geographical enclaves of the city to be self-sufficient in their energy usage and allocation while still having the capability to connect to the larger citywide grid. Smart meters act as the hardware interface with the grid and can be modified at a distance to adapt to peak activity (load handling), allowing more allocative efficiency in energy consumption when demand spikes. The users would likely interface with the smart meter using an application on their mobile device. While the technology is already working in the field, the challenge lies in deftly bringing together the technology, the legals, and the people into a holistic system without risking the delamination problem mentioned earlier.

Mattereum is already working in this area with ImpactPPA, a platform that gives communities and municipalities the means to finance renewable energy initiatives themselves without relying solely on central government or big energy providers. While ImpactPPA will provide the necessary hardware such as solar panels and smart meters, one of the crucial components is the SmartPPA (smart power purchase agreement) which will allow anyone from a member of the community to a head of state to propose energy initiatives and fund them through the platform with tokens. Power purchase agreements are the core contractual framework between energy providers and consumers, from financing projects to facilitating a sale. Mattereum will help design the SmartPPA which, as the name suggests, is an integration of smart contracts with a human-readable PPA. Since these utilities will operate in many different jurisdictions, each SmartPPA will be drafted and engineered with respect to the legal and regulatory context.

Many of the smart energy systems being proposed and/or built using distributed ledger technology have the capability for users to buy and sell energy in a peer-to-peer fashion. The energy in these transactions are represented and denominated in tokens. The transactional framework of the buying and selling of these energy currencies run into significant possibility of dispute. If a natural disaster damages the hardware after a transaction has been made, interrupting energy generation, then the terms of the SmartPPA (or some such thing) would not be met. Building dispute resolution into these transactional frameworks can allow these business processes to have efficacy in the real world with the benefit of clear intent clauses and access to technically-competent arbitration to handle the “unhappy” path.

Digital consumers union and data marketplaces

The automated systems that comprise a smart city require an immense amount of accurate, up-to-date data in order to optimize their operations and deliver their promised efficiency gains. This creates a very valuable feedback loop between the citizenry and the smart city itself. While a Google City would have its tendrils in all aspects of the smart city and be the sole beneficiary of the data, this presents a very undesirable scenario in which the citizens are unable to benefit directly from their contributions to the ongoing project of the city. With people more and more aware of how their data is being manipulated and monetized by corporate and political entities, creating more equitable business and governance models around data is a paramount concern.

One project that is developing a protocol to curtail the centralization of data mining for AIs is Ocean Protocol. Their protocol involves a sophisticated set of operations including Proofed Curation Markets and specialized data marketplaces to create more connected data supply chains. “Data is the new oil,” as they say. Like oil, the resource must go through many steps of mining, refinement, and allocation to be of any use to data consumers, namely algorithms run by companies. Ocean is built on a tokenized ecosystem that incentivizes the inclusion of good actors and generation of quality data. Rather than have a monolithic data marketplace, the protocol will facilitate the creation of many data marketplaces for specific areas. These could be more localized data sets for automated transport, energy usage, etc. Ocean is currently looking to Mattereum as an opt-in arbitration service which these marketplaces can plug into in the case of a dispute, such as a user contesting a claim on IP, among other situations.

There is also the possibility of establishing covenants for all of these data marketplaces so that data providers can hold consumers accountable for the use of their data — a data consumers union in a sense. This could take the form of a Ricardian constitution, which expands upon the Ricardian contract system by having a document which details the general rules and values of the community which is then signed by members, allowing the system to track the liability of the parties like a traditional Ricardian contract. This governance mechanism will be used for entire blockchain ecosystems, such as EOS, but it can be applied to virtually any online enclave in which members interact and transact with one another. The core of Ocean’s governance design is the token-curated registry (TCR), in which users are incentivized to let in reputable actors and exclude bad ones. While Ocean is focusing on crypto-economic frameworks such as TCRs for its governance design, one could imagine a need to accommodate certain wildcard disputes and other exceptions with an internationally-viable dispute resolution platform with highly competent arbitrators. Ideally, the community could have its own governance system capable of nullifying or resolving disputes between members before going the more antagonistic and costly route of traditional courts. Conversely, in areas where rule of law is weak or corruptible, alternative ODR systems could provide the means for community members to seek recourse when things go wrong.

Samaritan DAO

So far, we have emphasized the efficient allocation of resources including transportation, energy, and data as being characteristics of the smart city, but another resource that can be better managed is the citizenry itself. The city can be smart in the coordination of its people, not only capital assets. Emergency and volunteer services could benefit immensely through a platform which is able to coordinate people around events in physical space. While some may not like the combination of incentives and altruism, or even see that as an oxymoron, rewarding people for being active, positive participants in the community ought to be possible. The difficulty with decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) is their lack of governance. The Ethereum DAO hack that resulted in the loss of what is now valued at hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Ether and a fork in the network was due to a lack of governance mechanisms that could handle disputes or asset recovery. A localized DAO run by a Ricardian smart constitution is a viable solution as it removes the presence of anonymous ghosts on the internet and fosters a true community within a certain area. One framework which this system could be based on is ChamaPesa, an application for informal savings groups secured by a cryptographic transaction suite designed by Ian Grigg and built with communities in mind. Local institutions and citizens could self-fund the Samaritan DAO with all manner of currencies, which are then immediately converted to the Samaritan token. This token is then awarded to users when they make assurances to facts of users, especially regarding certain skill sets, when they onboard new members, or upon the accomplishment of volunteer services. The token could be designed along the lines of ChamePesa’s Chamacoin, with built-in incentives to maintain community cohesion as well as open up the possibility of decentralized fiat currency issuance.

Here’s an illustration: a trained doctor is shopping next door to a restaurant. She is part of the Samaritan network. Suddenly, a guest at the restaurant shows signs of a severe allergic reaction. Rather than wait for medical services to arrive, the doctor receives a notification on her phone about the incident happening just yards away from her. She helps stabilize the patient until emergency services arrive to take him to the hospital. After the incident, she is awarded an amount of Samaritan tokens which could be locally redeemable for cash or other goods and services in town. The user experience would be designed in such a way that the community acts as the oracle to the system, relaying information in the real world to the platform.

Mattereum could help engineer the legal–technical entity of the Samaritan DAO with its Ricardian Constitution so that it does not run into legal or regulatory friction within its jurisdiction. The arbitration system could be invoked as a final check against any actors attempting to fabricate events for a free payout, or any other dispute. While this particular problem would be unlikely with a reliable oracle system, having a dispute resolution platform for the DAO and any internal or external entities could help provide certainty and security in its operations.

For this system to be at all feasible, it would need an insurance framework to cover liabilities of its community members, especially in an emergency like the example above. While the legal entity of the DAO could simply opt for a plan with a third-party insurer, there is the possibility of leveraging the community structure in order to improve risk assessment and offer lower premiums. This notion of distributing risk assessment in the insurance process is championed by InsurePal, whom Mattereum has partnered with to provide dispute resolution services as well as its expertise in crafting legally-enforceable smart contracts. The core of InsurePal’s design is the social proof, essentially a form of positive peer pressure in which friends and family members can vouch for each other to reduce uncertainty in the insurer’s risk analysis. Since this Samaritan DAO consists of community members who can make assurances about one another, this provides a trust framework which can help smooth out much of the risk throughout the organization. This tight-knit trust structure is reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s concept of tensegrity, applied to the formation and operation of a community rather than physical architecture. While many look at the concept of the DAO as something that lives entirely on the Internet with participants all over the globe, a more localized approach could provide many benefits to the community.

Conclusion

The pairing of smart contracts (and in turn blockchain) with the vision of the smart city presents much promise. While it is impossible to predict the exact trajectory of our techno-social progress, we can approximate what is plausible and test what is possible. There are many considerations to the overall project of the smart city as a whole such as the risk of balkanization as companies try to manifest their vision of the city with embedded interests and jurisdictions allow or forbid certain initiatives. Will the smart city be a unilateral effort or a multilateral effort? If we build this bridge from both ends without certain standards or protocols, then we may later discover that the two halves do not connect at the middle. There are also the possibilities of deepening existing monopolies and repeating the same patterns (mistakes) like trinkets which we hold dear out of familiarity. Blockchains and smart contracts are potential building blocks for new urban infrastructures and new ways of interfacing with the city itself. Whether it starts within a neighborhood in America or a community in Africa, we can start designing, testing, and building the machinery of the city to have a positive social impact and avoid ant farms made of concrete and silicon. The goal of Mattereum is to effectively integrate technology with the real world in such a way that human agency is cherished rather than a hindrance, and the buildout of smart cities will provide all manner of intersectional projects which could benefit from a thorough understanding of how to make these emerging technologies work in the real world.