HOW WE’RE REINVENTING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM WITH ETHEREUM — PROJECT ARMSTRONG MISSION BREAKDOWN (Summary)

“What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.” — Louise Erdrich

Hello, I’m Jesse Morningstar and it’s a pleasure and a privilege to introduce you to Project Armstrong: a fresh project with the mission to create a brand-new and full-fledged financial system that will enable everyone everywhere on the face of the planet to live with dignity and in luxury.

I often get strong reactions to that last part: words like “impossible” and “unrealistic” tend to be thrown around in the conversation that ensues, but when you actually put things in perspective you’ll see that in light of a whole universe chock-full of untapped possibilities, it absolutely doesn’t make sense that we’re still unable to procure the resources necessary to enable every single human being on the planet to live with dignity and in luxury.

You see, at some decisive point in time the members of a generation must muster the courage to seize the rare opportunity to venture far beyond the narrow confines of the tried and true so they can really challenge their concept of what’s possible and work in concert to significantly expand it, lest they perish as prisoners of flawed and archaic constructs that mercilessly limit their potential and leave them condemned to endure lives of needless suffering.

Our time as a generation is definitely now.

Here’s the game-changing proposition: we now have the technology to completely rebuild our financial system and create a completely new one that is far more effective, more egalitarian, and more elegant. All we’ve got to do is go for it! It’s time to create a financial system for the space age. We have the knowledge and technical capabilities to do it, and the upgrade is much overdue!

Delivering this upgrade is exactly what Project Armstrong aims to achieve as fast as humanly possible. Project Armstrong endeavors to architect a financial system based on the understanding that humankind now has a much larger pool of resources to draw from, a tremendous pool of resources provided first by digital space and now increasingly by cosmic space. The work at hand and indeed our high calling is to build an economic infrastructure that will enable humankind to intelligently tap into this larger pool of resources so we can give every single member of our race the capacity to thrive.

This is a huge mission, and it’s huge on purpose: Project Armstrong was launched in recognition of the simple truth that sometimes you’ve just gotta go big or go home, and nobody gets to produce breakthrough outcomes unless they’re wholeheartedly willing to go big to an audacious extent that even scares and shocks them.

Project Armstrong is all about going gloriously big: our mission really comes down to making the big and intimidating changes that must be made to completely re-architect the global financial system from scratch so that humankind can finally have the clean slate, the tools, the opportunities, and the infrastructure necessary to access the resources it needs to truly thrive. We believe and know that we can achieve this by leveraging all the capabilities that Ethereum provides as a platform for economic innovation and by engaging the prodigious creativity and unsurpassed generosity of its community which has been and still is so devoted to contributing massively to the advancement of our civilization.

So in a nutshell I’m contending that as a community it’s time for us to truly push the envelope like never before and make Ethereum do what the traditional financial system has found impossible to do so far: that is to enable the human race to thrive economically with no man, woman, or child left behind. And we’ll do this by:

1. Building better tools that enable easier, faster, and cheaper access to capital and credit so that people at all levels of the socio-economic ladder can have the resources they need to skyrocket their productivity and maximize their value creation potential,

2. Providing a new context for value creation along with a new asset management infrastructure and paradigm that make the process of wealth creation a lot friendlier and more intuitive for people of diverse backgrounds.

3. Building tight-knit communities with shared aspirations focused on solving those very complex problems that must be solved to significantly and simultaneously raise the quality of life of large groups of people; communities that will joyfully take on the task of conceiving, funding, and successfully deploying protocols and moonshot projects that endeavor to create unprecedented socio-economic progress.

PROJECT ARMSTRONG IS MULTIDIMENSIONAL

Now, let’s go a little deeper and explore the main moving parts that make up the strategic core of Project Armstrong. We have 3 dimensions or main strategic fronts:

1. The mass adoption endeavor:

Our first priority is to help accelerate the pace at which mass adoption happens for cryptocurrencies, and we’re doing this with completely different objectives in mind: we don’t strive for mass adoption so the price of crypto can go higher because that’s tragically shortsighted, but instead we’re striving for mass adoption because it’s the best way to dispatch the tools and deploy the infrastructure that will form the foundation of a brand-new and better global financial system. We refuse to put the cart before the horse: we refuse to focus on economic outcomes without first making sure that we have established the right infrastructure for making those outcomes happen methodically and beautifully.

This is why mass adoption for us is not a dream that we hope will be realized someday, no for us it’s an existential imperative and a vital operational requirement that we’re very determined to realize as soon as possible come hell or high water.

You can go deeper and discover our very unusual take on mass adoption in this keynote article.

2. The financial innovation laboratory:

Project Armstrong’s second strategic front concentrates on crafting, through bold research and development efforts, powerful solutions to very complex economic problems that our civilization has failed to solve so far. We’ve been investing massive amounts of time, resources, and effort in pioneering new frontiers of financial engineering so that we can design and deploy highly effective financial solutions that will:

• Lower the requirements for gaining access to capital, credit, and world-class financial tools,
• dramatically optimize how we create, store, and exchange value, especially in digital space,
• boost the purchasing power of individuals, with special focus on emerging economies,
• provide new systems of incentives that will create a positive-sum economic paradigm by fostering new value-adding behaviors and new relationships between the various economic agents and market participants that make up the financial system,
• introduce and disseminate new financial instruments that will help solve very complex economic problems more efficiently and with extraordinarily lower costs.

3. The community foundry:

The last and most crucial dimension of Project Armstrong aims to grow a grassroots network of enthusiastic problem-solvers who are eager to collaborate fanatically to achieve quantum leaps in social progress for their communities. We’re building a platform that will enable people with shared values, struggles, and aspirations to link up, forge powerful bonds through engaging brainstorming processes, and create brilliant breakthroughs thanks to the magic of laser-focused and highly concerted action.

You see, the largest majority of problems we face as a civilization are in fact coordination problems, and we’re struggling — and miserably failing — to solve these coordination problems because we have deeply dysfunctional communities, and we have dysfunctional communities because we’ve never really had tools that could enable us to coordinate with each other in real-time so we could evolve and live together as intimate collaborators. And it certainly didn’t help that governments messed us up real good by establishing competitive paradigms that incentivize adversarial relationships between people who are supposed to problem-solve together.

That’s exactly why Project Armstrong’s third strategic endeavor, the community foundry, strives to be an engine of significant social progress by coalescing dynamic circles of joyous collaboration and rigorous problem-solving that will provide very empowering and uplifting platforms on which purpose-driven communities can organically crystallize to deal constructively with their issues while spearheading moonshot projects that will rapidly elevate their standards of living in a major way so they don’t have to rely on the false promises, the toxic gamesmanship, and the suicidal senselessness of politicians to better their lives. This is a crucial piece — if not the most crucial piece — needed to create the superb level of decentralization and self-reliance that achieves a clean and complete separation of money and state.

Here’s the key takeaway: the community foundry will establish a vibrant and highly collaborative intellectual ecosystem that will allow people to meet like-minded individuals and forge strong and stable partnerships that can be leveraged to pool resources, develop very valuable assets, and achieve the exquisitely high levels of coordination necessary to completely reclaim as a community their power and right to create prosperity on their own exciting terms.

ONWARD AND UPWARD

This is pretty exciting stuff and we’re absolutely thrilled that you get to be a part of this adventure from the very start. As the founder of Project Armstrong I’d like you to know that this project was born from a wholehearted yearning to deliver an unprecedented amount of value to the world through the Ethereum community, a community to which I owe so much: a community that inspires me daily with its ingenuity and exceptional responsiveness. That’s precisely why me and my team are showing up with our finest work to push this ecosystem to a whole new level of awesomeness and hopefully much closer to the its highest peak of usefulness.

Thank you so much for making it this far. The good news is that things really do get so much sweeter from here on out: over the next 30 days we’ll embark on a one-of-a-kind intellectual expedition and walk you through the delightful details of all our research and development efforts so you can get familiar with the cool stuff we’ve been building and thinking about really hard. So link up with us on social so we can make this moonshot happen and make it happen gloriously!

=> Get real time updates on all the cool stuff we’re up to by following our twitter handle @MoonshotETH. We just launched it to make it easier for you to follow our progress closely, so get in there and give that handle some love.

Let’s make history together.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T. S. Elliot