Commons as a Service: Programmable Funding for Shared Digital Infrastructure

Transcript

[music] >> Hey everyone. So, my name is Dipanshu Singh and over the summers I got to work on this really interesting project with the folks at the funding coordination team at EF. And what what I'm going to start with, right, is just like this question which ideally as I go down the slides, we should have now an interesting perspective to answer this question. So, the question is basically, you know, what if the free rider problem was institution design and not human nature?

So, I present to you Commons as a service also known as Circuits and this is the presentation. Now, like every good presentation, what we usually start with is a SKCD meme right? And this essentially are just various ecosystem and as you can see what you have is a project in Nebraska that has been tanglessly maintaining since 2003. Funny enough, this is how actually OpenAI was recently hacked. There was some unmaintained project that was, you know, had a backdoor or you could have like the microscope or micro microbes in the ocean that are not getting credit

but whales get all the documentaries. So, what you notice here is essentially, you know, the prioritize the underfunding or under prioritizing of dependencies that these ecosystems are dependent on, right? And the thing is Ethereum is also not an exception to this. I mean, what you have are essential infrastructure project that has no tokens to sell and also maybe they just got their grant declined. And this is especially needed in this, you know, everyday is a zero-day world.

So, now what I now proposing? What am I really proposing here? If you look at why this problem is and what is the current solution to it, you are going to have this gap essentially. You know, you have a certain KOL of the industries that are actually, you know, putting in the funds. Uh the users and the fundings are not correlated. I don't you don't really see DeFi users caring about the security of wallets.

Uh and then just the grants and the human in the loop decision that needed for grant making is so tiresome that it's like why should I even continue? So now what I am basically proposing then is kind of this, which is like with Ethereum, with programmable money in a sense, we can directly put in the comments, whatever that could be for an ecosystem, in the value flow.

So you could imagine like a Uniswap uh taking optional fee from the users if they want to support DeFi security, or you could also imagine the float that is in a smart contract with some funds being used to fund other dependencies. And essentially all these would be real-time and programmable. And at the end, these are all opt-in circuits. Now, once I look at this, what you now have is not an entire solution, but at least some reinforcement to that guy there, you know. There's some extra bandages to

make sure things don't fall apart and we can at least stand on giants on the shoulders of giants. But yeah. Now uh I'm not really talking in theory, but we have examples. Uh one of the examples is this keyring initiative that was done whereby the Tornado Cash developers were given funds for their legal defense all through this sort of protocol in the loop funding, which I like to call commons as a service. And the thing is it can live anywhere in the whole Ethereum ecosystem. It could be in your DEXs, it could be in the lending protocol, it could be in the restaking

protocol and what you could essentially now have is a free rider problem that essentially asks this question of you can see folks rowing the boat and if one defaults, the other folks say, you know what, why should I continue? But but the thing is, you know, to some extent we have 21st century technology, but we are still working in institutions that are were designed in the 16th century.

Now with this closer loop of, you know, autonomous organizations and whatnot, we can just simply ask why isn't there a propeller in the boat? Why is everyone rowing manually? And that that's just the perspective I want to give here. With programmable money, with Ethereum, with AI, we can actually address the institutional designs that could help us address the free rider problem. Now this is isn't this isn't a silver bullet but it it is actually changing the problem into some sort of engineering problem rather than a oh, it can't happen un unorthodox problem.

And yeah, and the reason why it matters is because if Ethereum can show a way to actually solve this in this manner, then we can show everyone else that this free rider problem is not actually a paradox, but actually something that we can solve institutionally. Yeah, that was my Thank you for listening. >> [applause] >> Okay.

So yeah, um, you you have room for one question I believe, or maybe two. Um, a question would be I agree that some form of taxation or from incentive might be required to maintain and continue the development. Um, there's been efforts by Protocol Guild and to to provide that. What is do you see as the main obstruction of getting this implemented? What do you see as the the barrier? Why is it not a thing yet? Why L2s, protocols, stable coin providers, etc. are donating this way? >> A lot of it is also um this uh form of legitimacy that needs to be established. You know, what is funding Ethereum? What is use of Ethereum fees to make sure

Ethereum sustainable? So once all these discussions are legitimized through just interactions with the community, it become it just clicks. So the same way how right now funding the commons in the real world is legitimized through some form of democracy, some form of debates, that's the same case that we need to follow here. But with programmable money, at least we'll have this layer of um transparency that's default and also this layer of, you know, real-time value flows.

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