Robert M. Pirsig said that if a revolution destroys a government, but not the patterns of thought that produced it, then those patterns will repeat themselves. This is happening over and over again. I feel surrounded by a dominant system that captures and commodifies dissent, that kills divergence, that blames me for his problems and sells me solutions. I know I’m repeating myself.
When this dominant system captures Ethereum, it becomes an encrypted hierarchical pyramid of power, useless to repair all the things that are broken, all the beings that are hurting. We are in a loop in which we try to decentralize, fail, make a patch, and try again. This is an interesting experiment, of course, I am learning so much. And it is a loop. From here I don’t know how to escape capture.
I propose experiments that run next to the loop, financed by it, and that serve to inform us. From them we will look into our damaging patterns and, maybe, with these other eyes it will be obvious that we just have to not repeat them.
Here I am guided by 3 ontological shifts, to see differently:
- capital accumulation → capital liberation
- untrusted rational agents → trusted relations of care
- prescriptive → emergent
1. Sensuous nature 
This is a different way to fund biodiversity. The decision of the place to fund comes through the direct relation with the caretakers of that land. It focuses on degrowth, so we leave space for the more-than-human to grow. It explores a big question: can we do NFTs without speculation?
This proposal is detailed in: [draft] Sensuous nature 🌱⚡
2. What is an economy without MEV? 
Let’s push speculation to the edges, where it serves a useful economic exploration.
At the core of our economy I want something other. Nobody extracts MEV because it would break relations of trust, or because it is just redistributed into the group as it flows.
There are small circles of trust,that weave trust with other circles. The circles are local to a geography, guilds, or remote friends with common ways.
One question is: Where is the edge? Where are the limits of trust and where do we put MEV and speculation to play?
We need a philosopher, an anthropologist, maybe computer simulations, we need a speculative fiction writer to weave this narrative.
This happens now. We just don’t see it because it has been branded as primitive or poor, underdeveloped. The colonization and capitalist extraction narrative makes invisible any economic relations that have nothing to do with salaries or accumulation.
This proposal will document these relations from the ground, and imagine an other economy built on top of that.
3. Crypto-colonization of Central America 
I want us to pay a latinamerican feminist sociologist to do three case studies:
- surf city in El Salvador
- prospera in Honduras
- bitcoin jungle in Costa Rica
How the money abundance coming from crypto currencies is relating with the local abundance of nature and culture?
4. Economies of care in the rural town of Tinamaste, Costa Rica 
During an initial exploration funded by Flashbots we found the town of Tinamaste, which is a weird mix of abundant beautiful nature, rural locals, locals from the capital, and foreigners.
Recently the foreigners received donations from giveth, which makes this little town a very interesting place to inform our actions.
What we found that I wasn’t expecting was the idea of economies of care. The most clear example was local elders taking care of foreign elders, showing the culture of care they learned from their mothers, a very ancestral way of living that is a reflection of the giving nature of this land.
I want us to fund the sociologist to return to this land and organize a series of sessions, some for the locals to learn about crypto from the foreigners, some for the community to talk and share their ways of care for the land and for each other.
The town is very small. If we teach the owners of the mini-mart and the restaurant to receive payments in cryptocurrencies we will see this money flow. we can observe what emerges, how crypto changes when it’s appropriated in this context, and what do these economies of care have to teach us when designing economic protocols.
Here are the preliminary results of the study: FRP-32: Socioeconomic effects of cryptocurrency redistribution in the Costa Rican rural town of Tinamastes
5. Trace the supply chain of Ethereum to see the real cost of operation 
The MEV we are currently accumulating and distributing is a direct result of a model of extraction, slavery and colonialism.
This proposal is about accountability, response-ability and reparation.
What is the cost of an ethereum validator? From the mine to extract the materials, the factory that adds the plastics, the dam that generates the electricity, and the cloud that runs it.
We can pay an exploratory grant to a researcher recommended by Fairphone to know where to start.
Long term this will be very useful to design a grounded issuance and burning policy.
Bonus: rematriation before decentralization
This one is currently stuck in a loop internal to Flashbots. I will publish about it later.
I proposed these experiments to the plural researchers and got no funding. If you want to work with me on one of them, or to fund them, let’s talk.