Broken transaction infrastructure breaks society.
Billions in the developing world suffer from legal, banking, and governmental insecurity. Unenforceable contracts. Runaway inflation. Bribed judges. Online scams. Natural resource theft. Banks refusing withdrawals. Institutional grift. Flimsy constitutions. Untrusted elections.
Billions more in the “developed world” suffer from contracts designed to extract, rather than secure value. Fine print banking surcharges. Exorbitant legal fees to navigate red tape. Apps cleaving 30% off of user-generated profits into their pockets. Centralized app stores vacuuming up 30% of their spoils. Centralized banks debasing family generational savings.
As a general rule, every modern economic agent has been subjected to onerous outlays of capital and effort to navigate a brutal reality:
We are forced to pay protection fees to transaction infrastructures we distrust to minimize the odds of catastrophic loss at the hands of counterparties we trust even less, due to contracting through mediums built and controlled by mercenary capital.
Regrettably, this plague contaminates beyond the realm of money. Due to the extremely online nature of modern life — where personal data is sneakthieved and sold with every click, keystroke, and geotag — extractive transaction infrastructures degrade the very fabric of our humanity: interpersonal relationships and cultural creativity.
Online discourse devolves into hacking social media feedback loops with incendiary misinformation. Dating devolves into hacking appified digital meat markets with reductive misrepresentation. Artistic success devolves into hacking streamers’ algorithms with lowest common denominator pandering. Humans devolve into serving invisible profit motives, not each other.
In short, warped incentives → warped results. And with each transaction, this societal warp metastasizes, accelerating a viciously net negative downward spiral:
- Genuine value builders receive reduced rewards for their builds
- Reduced rewards lead to reduced growth and sustainability of value builders’ continued enterprise
- Reduced enterprise by value builders leads to reduced value creation
- Reduced value creation leads to societal, economic, and environmental decay
To reassert, the health of our transaction infrastructure is the health of our society. When it is broken, we suffer grievously. But when we improve it, we improve the world. If there is any solution approaching a panacea for the ills assailing society, it is to improve the fidelity of our connections.
In fact, one could convincingly argue the history of human progress is the history of improved connections improving information organization.
Symbols, language, writing, maps, math, religions, astronomy, ships, printing press, the scientific method, trains, electricity, the telegraph, telephony, radio, television, satellites, computing, the Internet.
Optimistically, this frames the ultimate promise of a blockchain-powered future: to heal our broken transaction infrastructure with the next epochal shift in human connectivity — improved information organization resulting from transparently accounted, immutably smart contracted, distributed ledger technology.
This polaris of hope first appeared in Satoshi’s introduction of 2009’s Bitcoin whitepaper. However, it was not until 2013 when Vitalik Buterin illuminated the concept of “smart contracts” in his Ethereum whitepaper that blockchain’s full potential began to crystalize: a “World Computer” could be built, aligning the needs of individuals and markets alike by replacing rent-seeking middlemen with cryptographic trust.
Regrettably, a panoply of practical limitations remained before Ethereum’s vision could practically materialize. As Ethereum’s development progressed in fits and spurts, alternative Layer 1s arose, seeking to travel blockchain’s final mile to mainstream usage. A handful of projects pushed breakthrough innovations but ultimately failed to coalesce advancements in the space into a platform layer capable of surpassing the functionality of legacy transaction infrastructures.
It was not until Proof of Stake rose to prominence as a consensus mechanism, in tandem with the exploration of new data structuring architectures such as sharding, L2s, and sidechains, that dApps began making inroads beyond the innovator class to the promised land of early adopters.
Yet even then, with transactions executing at accelerating speed and decreasing cost, crypto failed to achieve the escape velocity sufficient to emerge from the troposphere of technological development to moon land on tech revolution. Unfortunately, what it did achieve was runaway valuations spurred forth by frothy VC market conditions.
Any student of innovation cycles could predict what transpired next. A swarm of bad actors and dilettante entrepreneurs sniffed out easy profits and infiltrated the cryptosphere, seeking to either:
- Capitalize on a generational economic bubble with half-baked builds
or
- “cryptofy” traditional exploitative centralized economic models rather than fully embrace blockchain’s disruptive potential (and jeopardize existing profit centers).
Unsurprisingly, these newcomers proved incapable of building the “killer mainstream blockchain app”, let alone a functional World Computer. After multiple speculative market cycles, Web3 became a maglev ghost train destined to never arrive at station…
Until finally, in June 2019, Team Rocket arrived on the scene to release the Avalanche whitepaper, detailing their intention to build an “open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, new financial primitives, and new interoperable blockchains.” Shortly thereafter, the Cornell-based team launched Ava Labs, a science-driven blockchain company. Now, Ava Labs’ engineers have advanced blockchain technology to its watershed moment —
By wedding their Snowman consensus with “Subnets” — sovereign blockchain networks that define their own rules, running on dynamic subsets of Avalanche validators, to achieve value-transacting consensus independently of other subnets — Ava Labs has built a fully-integrated mainframe for a World Computer that can actually work for the whole world.
As such, crypto’s “hardware” can now support the software necessary to heal our transaction infrastructure, serving as the base layer for an intuitive platform that:
- Bakes multiple layers of cryptographic trust into each value exchange
- Modularly scales to meet growing market demands
- Equitably allocates evolving collective ownership amongst contributors
Pakt is a global mission to build that platform, one that serves as the intuitive Operating System for the dawning age of the World Computer.
