<MoneyLab> The twelve magic gifts of the Economic Space Protocol

[Geert Lovink]

Via Akseli Virtanen <akseli.virtanen at gmail.com>
https://economicspace.agency

The Economic Space Protocol (ESP) is an economic networking protocol and economic protocol development platform. It enables a network of participants that can design their economic organization through programmable performances and that exchange stakes for gaining access to each other's economic outputs via reciprocal credit lines.

Here are its twelve significant features:

A new organization type: The Economic Space

An economic space is a programmable network where participants define, share, and execute each other's economic performances. Participants coordinate and communicate economically via offers without central decision-making bodies (like voting).

A new value primitive: the Economic Space Performance

An economic space frames its production as a stream of performances that participants may publish, validate, and value. These may include the production of commodities, but in addition, the protocol frames any activity as an economic performance making more abstract forms of value economically expressible. 

A new economic relationship: Mutual Stakeholding

The economic space protocol creates a network where each economic space may peer with each other by exchanging stakes. In this way, they gain access to each other's output and reciprocal credit lines, simultaneously creating a new networked monetary, production, investment, and risk-taking system. Moreover, through stake tokens, participants share not only the incentive but the information required to organize how the well-being of one may not decrease, but increase, that of the other.

A new transaction type: A non-zero-sum economic transaction. 

Offering to stake on an economic space performance is a non-zero-sum economic transaction involving the exchange of stake, issuance, clearing of reciprocal credit, and compensation of performances, which, when matched by the network, results in a net gain for all parties. Furthermore, the protocol gives participants visibility on a potential transaction's economic side effects before executing it.

A new surplus definition:  Multi-denominational dividends

An economic space accounts for its surplus as stake appreciation, not money accumulation. The ESP does not define surplus as a positive balance of credits as with "profit" but as a positive change in stake price. The stake valuation includes the balance of other tokens, including other participants' stake tokens, commodities, and credit. An economic space can hold a surplus in its “treasury” or distribute it as dividends that do not need to be transformed into credits but can remain in the same underlying tokens. An economic space's stake tokens represent access to its underlying performance, resulting outputs, and network assets. 

A new financial definition of wealth: Network Stake

The protocol incentivizes participants to hold on to stake tokens as a store of value. The network protocol financially recognizes stake as the preferred store of value in defining it as collateral for credit. In the process, credit takes a secondary monetary role; clearing it as soon as possible supersedes the agenda of storing it. Participant's not only collaboratively build wealth through mutually staking and validating their performances but also get to define what counts as wealth. 

New economic gameplay: Cooperative finance. 

The protocol incentivizes network participants to align their performances with each other and assemble them to increase their value. They financially recognize that they are part of the same network by facilitating their transaction through mutual credit, as they are invested in each other to gain access to the network's surplus. Participants simultaneously seek their benefit and that of those they transact with, and therefore the network as a whole. The economic space protocol is essentially an economic network financial collaboration protocol.

A new governance type: Distributed Leadership

Each act of valuation from a participant is a new form of decision-making. Unlike voting, which seeks to define a collective making a decision on what to perform, an economic space is itself a decision seeking a collective to support it. Moreover, valuing performances follows market dynamics. It does not require creating a higher-powered agent like a board that coalesces preferences into discrete events and chooses a majority over a minority. Instead, it accounts for and integrates all opinions, preferences, and agendas by empowering participants as much as they empower others.

A new economic medium: Symmetric Economic Medium

In the ESP, all agents have the same economic capacities, like issuing stake, clearing credit, making offers, or creating new economic spaces. The protocol creates structural equality that enables a more even economic playing field. At the same time, this symmetry elevates the communication dimension of the economic network, enabling information to flow equally and bidirectionally among its participants without being mediated by privileged parties. In this way, the network effectively engages in a many-to-many dialogue and negotiation about what is valuable.

A new economic innovation platform: The Economic Space Protocol 

The protocol is a platform for economic innovation that enables participants to create economic networks. It allows them to shape the network's financial architecture to create and distribute value. For example, determining credit clearance methods, stake token issuance or redemption processes, performance valuations, offer types (e.g., network derivatives), and risk levels when staking, performing, or engaging in other speculative activities. This open framework creates new markets, organizations, and business models impossible within traditional financial systems. Participants are empowered by the same programmable assets and economic communication protocols while remaining compatible with our current economic system.

A new economic interoperability layer: A layer one economic protocol

Like money and markets, the ESP is a Layer One economic protocol that allows agents and their performances to coordinate and organize into higher-order networks. Interoperability makes possible the collaboration required to create collective performances and outputs. In this way, participants may unlock additional returns by articulating the collective surplus values that arise from Economic Spaces (ESs) interconnectedness. Furthermore, through this protocol, users may design economic relationships that create and capture the latent wealth that otherwise would be inaccessible -- participants can unlock new network outputs by operating within a unified economic system where multiple economic spaces interoperate collaboratively. 

A new economic language: The economic space grammar

The ESP represents a shared language to understand and articulate networked economic values and relationships. It enables its members to negotiate new economic relationships that describe how they may create, measure, and distribute the value generated from their interactions. Furthermore, this language allows users to articulate new network value forms (i.e., network derivatives) predicated on mutually beneficial economic relationship parameters in a unified economic network.


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