SLA — Software is a Liquid Asset
Decentralized technologies represent a new paradigm for coordination technology and unlock new models for positive sum economies and pro-social innovation.
The legacy models of our digital economies are broken. They’re unavoidably shaped by perverse incentives that produce value-maligned outcomes. They depend on exploitative and ‘proprietary’ data models which, importantly, are wholly incapable of accounting for and thus advancing intrinsically valuable artifacts; ones that aren’t tainted by the advertising dollars which today unfortunately come to appraise them.
Our web is capable of much more, of advancing open and sustainable systems that create long-term value for our societies and that are owned and operated by the people who build and maintain them.
Web3 technology enables these positive-sum economies to thrive, eliminates coordination costs and scales ownership and governance in web-native ways. It creates a necessary shift in the economic models underpinning our digital lives while faithfully advancing the internet’s founding values of abundance, privacy, and sovereignty.
In Web3, Software is a Liquid Asset.
Web3 software is both more flexible and fluid than ever before, and to develop decentralized software, to distribute it, use it, invest in it and create with it is all to manage this liquid asset.
A token example is the token itself. Tokens are flexible: We have tokens as community currencies, tokens as fractional ownership, tokens as novel debt instruments, tokens representing authority in new governance models, game tokens, loyalty tokens, collectible tokens, tokens of tokenized physical assets, tokens in synthetic assets, tokens representing new structures and ideas. Any single token can embody any number of these characteristics, and more.
Tokens are fluid: Their functional characteristics can evolve in time and context, flowing seamlessly amidst a vast ecosystem of composable software. We can buy tokens with tokens, borrow them, pledge them, swap them, mint dollars against them (you read that correctly), auction them or donate them.
So whether the token itself is the very point of the product or merely a behind-the-scenes implementation detail, at the heart of most every decentralized technology lay a token — the token of token economics. To engineer decentralized software is to engineer economics; innovation’s meter is fed with tokens.
But tokens don’t just feed innovation, they breed it too.
Today, well-engineered token systems are aligning vales and incentives without centralized control at de-minimis risk and cost and with seemingly limitless scale. Projects form freely and define value in the ways they’d like, engineering their incentives and economics accordingly. Rigid categories like owner, developer, customer, and user blend together. Concepts like sales, product, marketing, distribution, partnerships, and investor become hazy and remote.
This new class of highly composable and superfluid digital asset grows exponentially every day, and with each development, we’re challenged again-and-again to reimagine the who, when, how and why of software development.
Commonwealth is a tokenized innovation community leading the global development of Web3.
Dedicated to the advancement of decentralized technologies and the positive-sum economies they enable, we formed Commonwealth to aggressively invest in these new systems, in their new economics and in their uncompromising growth.
Join us in building a better way.
