Mechanisms for coordination must reflect the real relations of mutual interdependence amongst their participants, and the form of the coordination mechanism must mirror the content of coordination which is desired, or they will diverge and fail to function.
– Anoma vision paper
Motivation
Communities are dynamically changing over time. one reason for this is that the composition of members changes due to natural churn or internal/external events which trigger defection. In general, one thing the crypto ecosystem is good at is building tools for self-sovereign individuals defined as one person and for groups of individuals defined as many - often with the name blockchain, rollup, community computer, multi-sig or DAO.
Our coordination tools are not as good, at least currently, in dealing with the ephemeral or temporary communities. They also create a lot of overhead for the community organizers, like time-consuming DevOps or bureaucratic compliance (filling out paper work with the local authorities, state, and federal governments, etc.).
The reason the bureaucratic compliance is important is sometimes communities want legal protections in the physical world where they live and coordinate and the affordances of digital signatures and unstoppable code is not enough to enforce various human rights or legal protections (civil and criminal). Ideally, coordination tools can facilitate the prerequisite bureaucratic compliance by abstracting the complexity away and making interoperability between both the security guarantees provided by digital signatures and the legal guarantees provided by local, state and federal governments trivial.
Perhaps this is a bit abstract so let’s get concrete. Imagine that I want to start a digital first organization that manages its accounting with a distributed systems based protocol but also has legal protections of the jurisdictions that my community members live in. Depending on where you live in the world this is not so straightforward. For simplicity, let’s assume your community is based in the USA and you want to form a DAO (which can be registered in the state of Wyoming).
In parallel you would need to
- set up a multi-signature account or blockchain/rollup which can send and receive digital assets your community desires to use.
- file the appropriate paperwork to incorporate as a DAO
- seek out the necessary technical (audits/code review/UX design) and legal advice required. (you could skimp on this but let’s assume your community is serious).
Once these tasks are complete (hand-waving over many details) your community is ready to go and begin operating. To set something like this up you’re looking at a minimum a few weeks of planning, communication, and execution. If we assume you are a highly savvy super coder and legal eagle, then maybe you can do all this in 1–2 days. Most people who want to run communities in the physical world are not super coders, many not even computer-literate. How do we serve the communities who want the benefit of autonomous/self-sovereign/interoperable technology blended with local legal protections?
One other problem here arises which is that if the community members change dynamically then individuals may have different preferences for how to be legally compliant and/or the optimal techonolgical solutions which facilitate coordination.
- Ideally, we would like to make it 5 minutes or less to set up your own “autonomous community”. How?
Application Sketch
Front end interface, an LLM that you can talk to. The LLM specializes in crafting intents related to deploying both legal entities and digital entities. The LLM asks you a series of questions about your community and needs. After the interaction, the LLM presents you a number of different options to choose from.
| Intent | Digital entity | Legal Entity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Multi-sig on Ethereum | LLC |
| 2 | Anoma instance | DAO |
| 3 | Celestia Sovereign Rollup | DO |
** Note this list is just illustrative, the terminology and the options are just hypothetical
After you select the intent you want, the LLM asks you to sign to make sure this is what you want and then goes and sends your intents to the network for solving, ordering and execution (where appropriate). The LLM also has you answer questions to fill out the required paperwork for the Legal entity. Once complete, you’ll receive a message that the digital entity is set up and perhaps an e-mail that the legal entity paperwork has been submitted. The LLM could also offer to send your documentation to a legal expert first prior to submission, for example.
Benefits
- Allows communities to organize quickly with low overhead and receive both digital and legal protections
- Anoma is the perfect substrate for this, with intents users will be able to specify exactly what services they want from whom. Also scale-free money as a “native” application is a powerful tool for community sustainability and longevity.
- Makes ephemeral communities with digital and legal protections easier to form on demand. When the community disbands or changes a new deployment is not high overhead