Today’s piece was cowritten with David Phelps. Two months in the works, it is about collectivizing finance, but it is also an experiment in collectivizing finance:
Want to play along? Contribute to the PartyBid here.
It’s worth noting that none of the tech that made this possible—Ghost Knowledge’s collective commissions, Party DAO’s collective purchases, or Mirror’s collective splits—existed a few months ago. That’s as good place as any, in fact, to start.
Indulge us, if you will, by stepping back in time to a different era, two weeks ago. In that far-gone epoch, before PartyDAO had enabled anyone with a crypto wallet to join in crowd-purchasing NFTs as part of makeshift collectives, multiplayer finance was already starting to signal its nascent power against incumbent investors.
What happened? In practical terms, the token-holders of the decentralized finance platform Sushiswap banded together to reject a deal that would have given the powerful Venture Capital firm Lightspeed a discounted token price. But what does that story mean? You might imagine the story as one of how crypto-native everymen collectivized to insist that they receive the same terms as the richest investors: It’s a Wonderful Life as performed on Reddit, or if you prefer, the Wallstreetbets-Gamestop-Saga played out in a way that didn’t just benefit the big financiers who were handling the deal.
Or, alternatively, you might imagine it as a story of how, in our overly-capitalized and increasingly democratized markets, the investors who matter most to protocols are those in the community who invest their time and work, rather than their money.
You might imagine it, then, as a story of how Venture Capital will soon be under siege by collective finance.
In contrast to the democratization of finance, which leaves retail investors to their own devices, the collectivization of finance brings investors together to support each other and a project, and in so doing, to increase the probability of success. Collectivization is about the group working together towards a shared objective by giving each other opportunity, leverage, and education, rather than individuals going it alone.
How did we get here? And where are we going? To understand our story here—the story of how we’ve arrived at an inflection point in collectivizing finance—we need to go back to the beginning. That beginning lies long before the development of technologies and trends that have enabled collective finance. It lies in the ways that venture capital created the perfect opportunity for its own disruption.
Below, we’d like you to join us on our own multiplayer journey into a speculation on the history and future of collective finance. We’ll cover four pieces:
This piece itself emerged from the collective crowd-commission of Ghost Knowledge, with all commissioning proceeds going to Blck VC and All Raise.