August 26, 2023
Collaborating through finance. Financial networks as a collaborative medium
Finance is about the trust, information and risk that shapes our relationship with an unpredictable future. It is a technique to bridge the future to the present. Finance is fundamentally relational. Agents collaborate to manage their risk exposures to a shared future. But our empowerment through it is asymmetric: Asymmetric access to information, financial instruments and transaction types, leads to shifting risks asymmetrically. Empowering certain financial actors and disempowering others.
The key question is: Can we access finance differently? Opening the financial protocols so everyone can collaborate in the same way.
Our perspective: Finance is a network protocol. A communication system: information flow and network structure change follows specific protocols
1. The structural view: the liability graph. Detecting cyclical liability relationships, enables transactions like distributed credit clearing. But much more is possible!
2. The dynamic view: transactional state changes. Recognizing the full array of “collaborative” transactions empowers us to organize our future in new ways. MTCS or Distributed credit clearing is just a starting point. Changing the future means generating risk.
Finance enables us not only to share, but to decrease the downside and increase the upside. To leverage collaboration and collectively enjoy its upside. CoFi is about financially collaborating, but are we? We would benefit from forming one network and building interoperable protocols. But what should our “collaborative business model” be? Attempting to generate and capture a liquidity premium spread creates an incentive to compete, when we need to collaborate. Luckily, there are other spreads in town.
We need a spread that grows the more the cost of liquidity decreases. Like the spread on real value creation… Where the realization of a future is the underlying for equity, and through equity, the collateral for credit.…Which is real future creation. The risk on the spread of turning inputs into outputs… together. Reciprocal staking is to investment, what MTCS is to credit. Reciprocal staking is also a “collaborative” transaction type to risk-author our future. So we can expand from clearing together to… Risking together