an autonomous ecologist's guide to namada & anoma

_{^{Christopher Goes
Autonomous Ecologies 2}}

Alternative titles

wtf are these crazy people doing?
why are there so many names?
will they ever ship?

&

(are)

protocols for autonomous ecologies

but what are autonomous ecologies?

our understanding:

–

groups (organisms) that want to:

• define their own boundaries
• self-govern their internal operations
• interoperate with others

so, what's new?

we live in the world of westphalian ecologies

westphalian ecologies

are characterized by

a rigid, standardised set of articulable and enforceable relationship types

some examples:

• employer / employee
• employed / unemployed
• for-profit / non-profit

this standardisation is not the result of evil

it is the result of optimisation for state legibility

the state guarantees enforcement of the commitments involved in these relationships

fair enforcement requires legibility and standardisation

in a sense, we ask too much of the state

sustainable self-governance requires internal commitment accounting and enforcement

autonomous ecologies will rely on protocols to enforce their commitments themselves

"the other sort of state"

this frees them from state legibility

the cambrian explosion of relational ontology

• many tokens
• many metrics
• many types of relationships
• subtlety, nuance, and context-specificity

early cambrian period examples

• post-web society
• coordination collective
• vibecare collective
• public goods laboratory

where do autonomous ecologies live?

the now: surveillance state of Ethereum

and a patchwork quilt of protocols

the hope: arboreal Taiga

and a unified protocol substrate

what is required of the protocols?

• value-neutral, but value-explicit
• distributed accounting
• programmable commitments
• programmable information flow control

takes a long time

^ live shot of heliax engineers

the soon: twilight zone

privacy where it counts most

meet people where they're at

aims to help bridge these worlds

–

protocol-wise

&

community-wise

&

philosophy-wise

what can namada provide for your AE?

• private payments for previously public assets
• shielded actions for public app interop
• public goods funding for the private stack

private payments

• one-hop from Cosmos
• one-hop from Ethereum
• shielded rewards for sitting tight
• sharing is caring, privacy-wise

shielded actions

• keep your assets shielded at rest
• initiate an action on namada
  • unshield just what you need
  • send it elsewhere to use the public app
  • results routed back and shielded again
• add FROST and you've got a DAO

public goods funding for the private stack

• PGF is as important as PoS
• Stewards nominate (optimised fast-path)
• PGF is not altruism
  • autonomous ecologies need collective funding for collective goods
  • namada offers a schelling point

we can't do it alone!

safety in the twilight zone

still requires some patchwork protocol quilting

twilight zone privacy pack for your AE

• signal for comms
• namada for assets-at-rest
• penumbra for swaps
• nym for the network layer
• skiff/cryptpad for the docs
• (etc.)

it's hacky, but workable

approaching the taiga: sneak peek

what can anoma provide for your AE?

• unified base operating system
  • the same P2P layer for chat and consensus
  • the same identity system for payments and poker tournaments
• programmable information flow control
  • private consensus
  • private IBC
• explicit commitments and assumptions
• automated accounting
• fractal instances

our endgame (or really, the beginning of a new)

–

fractal instances

for

autonomous ecologies

how to think about fractal instances?

• consensi created on demand
• application data & logic move freely across trust boundaries
  • e.g. fork a discord chat
• Anoma wallet = Anoma node
  • roles, but dynamic

fractal instance analogies

• less blockchain, more (fancy) spreadsheet
• built into the relational structure of usage
  • e.g. layered permissioning in chat
• also a rollup (what isn't these days)

upcoming events

Namada key collection [next several weeks]

???

catch Adrian's talk at EthCC on Thursday

remember: we work for you

come tell us what you want

thanks!