This podcast episode is based on the recent publication "Decentralized Society" by Glen, Puja, and Vitalik, exploring how blockchain can address trust challenges through mechanism design to achieve pluralism. Gitcoin Grant, as the largest web3 experimental field for "Radical Markets," provides practical experience for ideas related to decentralized society and maintains close ties with pioneers in this theoretical field.
Class Representative ｜ Kayyu.eth
Review ｜ flytoufu
Typesetting ｜ BigSong.eth
Introduction#
💡 This podcast episode is based on the recent publication "Decentralized Society" by Glen, Puja, and Vitalik, exploring how blockchain can address trust challenges through mechanism design to achieve pluralism. Gitcoin Grant, as the largest web3 experimental field for "Radical Markets," provides practical experience for ideas related to decentralized society and maintains close ties with pioneers in this theoretical field.
The release of the DeSoc paper is like a tropical monsoon. The ideology it spreads stirs this nascent world, with its underlying technology SBT giving rise to numerous projects: Metamask, Cobo, and Gnosis DAO jointly developed Evolution, Binance launched the Binance Account Bound (BAB) token, Project Galaxy, RabbitHole, and Noox minted soul-bound qualification certificates, and so on. However, the market for DeSoc-SBT is still in its early stages. Amidst the false prosperity that springs up like mushrooms after rain, we still lack real scenarios that address users' pain points and have not seen widespread and strong market demand. DeSoc will be a brand new society, one that people look forward to, but the road to building it is fraught with challenges.
👤 Host: Kevin Owocki | Founder of Gitcoin, host of the Greenpill podcast.
👤 Co-host: Leon Erichsen | Researcher in society x technology, currently working at Gitcoin. Previously studied philosophy and economics at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and served as an entrepreneur and tech communicator at the RadicalxChange Foundation.
👤 Guest: Eric Glen Weyl | Economist, researcher at Microsoft Research. Co-author of "Radical Markets" and proposer of quadratic voting/funding. Co-author of the "Decentralized Society" paper.
👤 Guest: Puja Ohlhaver | Tech researcher, lawyer, strategic advisor at the MEV research organization FlashBots. PhD from Stanford Law School, formerly an investment management lawyer. Co-author of the "Decentralized Society" paper.
Background Overview and Guest Introduction#
Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Leon Erichsen have joined the podcast! This episode revolves around a highly anticipated paper from 2022—"Decentralized Society" (DeSoc). This article, authored by Glen, Puja, and Vitalik, discusses how blockchain serves as a foundation for global coordination to solve trust issues. They envision a network composed of user accounts, using non-transferable soul-bound tokens (SBT) as cryptographic labels to facilitate decentralized identity (DID) and verifiable credentials (VC). For example, how cool would it be if Gitcoin could issue on-chain certifications for everyone who has contributed to Gitcoin Grants! When there are many users, it forms a trust graph for scenarios like voting proof, skill proof, employment proof, etc. Only by allowing trust to flow into web3 can we build a richer and more diverse ecosystem on the foundation of DeSoc. At that point, we can address issues like under-collateralized loans and civil resistance movements. Pluralism, in this context, refers to diversity in mechanisms and users. "Local control mechanisms" enable user communities to co-create their world. In recent weeks, the idea of DeSoc has sparked heated discussions on Twitter, with people actively debating its potential implications: How to maintain privacy? How to ensure that certifications are voluntary and bottom-up? In this episode, we will delve into these topics: exploring the possible forms of DeSoc and how to make blockchain the foundation for global coordination by enhancing trust and creating user relationship networks.
Guest: Glen Weyl published a popular book in the crypto space, "Radical Markets," in 2018 and founded the RadicalxChange (RxC) Foundation, dedicated to exploring future political and economic paradigms. Glen's primary job is at Microsoft, where he conducts research on politics, economics, and social technology. He invented quadratic voting, a method of matching funds. Puja is a lawyer and strategist at Flashbots. They met at the Radical Exchange gathering in Berlin in 2019 and helped organize the RxC Berlin Summit, which featured Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang and other RxC community members. At the summit, Glen introduced RxC 2.0, which is about understanding complex social ecosystems and incorporating sociality into existing mechanisms. The paper on decentralized society represents another storm sweeping through the web3 movement.
RadicalxChange (RxC)[1] was founded by economist Glen Weyl in 2018 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. RxC connects people from various fields—including social scientists, technologists, artists, and activists. It is a forward-looking political and economic movement aimed at advancing diversity, equity, community, and decentralization by upgrading democratic institutions, capital markets, data economies, public domains, and identity systems.
Host: Kevin Owocki turned RxC research into reality in 2019. As the founder of Gitcoin, he created a unique web3 product and quadratic funding community. To date, Gitcoin Grants is recognized as one of the largest practical fields in the RxC movement. As RxC ideas undergo revolutionary iterations, it is fitting for Kevin to engage in dialogue with RxC thought leaders to explore the blueprint and practice of cutting-edge methodologies. In this episode, Greenpill has also made an unprecedented invitation to co-host Leon to take on the main hosting duties. In 2018, Leon, then a student, was inspired by Glen and adopted his ideas as guiding principles for his life. After graduating, he worked for the RxC Foundation for two years before joining Gitcoin, focusing on exploring the future of funding protocols. Leon contributed significant ideas to DeSoc during early discussions, making him a bridge. As a Gitcoin member deeply engaged with this line of thought, Leon also posed impressive questions to spark intense discussions.
Pluralism as a Philosophical Foundation#
Leon begins by pointing out that pluralism is the social philosophy that inspires this decentralized society paper, and the authors attempt to spread this value into web3 to stimulate social experiments. So his first question is—what does it mean to be a pluralist?
Glen approaches this with a dual reasoning of essentialism and instrumentalism: first, on a philosophical level, some people are hedonists, while others are utilitarians. For him, the underlying philosophy that resonates most deeply is one of richness, complexity, and diversity, with a novel structure. It permeates Glen's cognition, allowing him to understand human thought, what constitutes goodness, and the nature of reality. At the same time, it is a practical philosophy: people recognize the eternal differences between individuals and must find a non-violent way to arrive at a collectively optimal balance. This is his most fundamental belief in moral and cognitive terms.
In contrast to Glen's almost emotional definition, Puja's response is more analytical. She defines DeSoc as a form of co-determined sociality. To better understand this, Puja deconstructs it: first, DeSoc is a recognition that individuals are defined by the communities they participate in. It does not study a specific person or community/network but rather the relationships between them. This includes trust, knowledge, shared resources, and data. Additionally, it focuses on how these communities form large coordination systems like nations and networks, thereby producing broader public goods. She believes that DeSoc is built on one of its core principles: "local knowledge," meaning that those closest to the problem possess the most specialized knowledge and have the most at stake. The ultimate principle for cooperation among highly differentiated communities is consensus among diverse stakeholders, which is key to forming local units and broader cooperative networks. In summary, this is her view of DeSoc: local knowledge, local control, and cooperation across differences.
The paper is built on the foundation just mentioned, discussing the ideas of democratizing communities and decentralizing power to community members—what the authors call "community restoration." The ownership of tokens should ultimately belong to the social networks individuals are part of, not just to individuals themselves. When these two elements come together, the power of networked society becomes apparent. We need to decentralize both individuals and communities to make their interconnections more resilient and concentrated. This interconnectedness is key to determining the strength of a society.
Structuring a Decentralized Tech Stack#
Is there a specific entry point within the existing tech stack to realize the DeSoc vision? Puja believes that in a decentralized society, two keywords are "decentralization" and "architectural decentralization." Decentralization is not just about a specific tech stack but also about decentralizing across technologies and different architectures. Glen also discusses the issue of architectural decentralization in a paper co-authored with Divya Siddarth and Danielle Allen. Therefore, Puja does not think it requires a specific technological foundation but rather looks at this technological foundation in different ways and allows for multiple technological foundations to coexist.
"How AI Fails Us"[2] is a policy paper published by Glen Weyl, Divya Siddarth, and Danielle Allen in 2022 at Harvard Kennedy School. It reflects on the dangers of AI as centralized intelligence and cites examples like Taiwan's digital democracy movement and Wikipedia, proposing a spontaneously emerging pluralism as an alternative.
Glen confidently states that no existing technology is sufficient to fully achieve the goals we aim to reach. However, it is exciting that web3 may, to some extent, achieve this goal, with verifiable credentials (VC) and decentralized identities (DID) being a potential area. However, the data structures they discuss are not about optimizing existing technologies but about establishing more suitable architectures, even though new things may also have their own flaws. This point is mentioned in the conclusion of the paper: The goal of this paper is pragmatic, built on things that already have momentum and people involved. Moreover, their goal is to principled understanding of the limitations of these things and to combine various existing technologies to build more suitable new technologies.
Application Scenarios: Decentralized Research, Open Source Software#
What applications of this paradigm do the authors hope to see in web3? Puja finds the track of scientific research and knowledge production (DeSci) very interesting. She recently gave a related talk at a conference, sharing insights on the relationship between markets and science and how it can help or hinder research. For instance, journals, which charge exorbitant fees, contribute nothing to the knowledge supply chain and hinder open access to information. DeSoc offers a third way to break some bottlenecks in today's science: researchers can publicly display their qualifications and achievements through SBT credentials and associations, which will help shift the rent extraction of journals back to scientists. Those research DAOs are exciting for funding research, rewarding peer review, incorporating peer replication results into reviews, providing traceability, sourcing labs, and conducting experiments, etc.
Decentralized Science (DeSci)[3] is a movement for decentralized scientific research and knowledge production, aiming to leverage Web3 technology to build public infrastructure to support the financing, initiation, review, certification, and storage of scientific research and knowledge production.
Glen adds that open-source software has a similar structure to what Puja describes. It is a radical transparency! One can even envision combining open-source software and science. Currently, open-source software contributors receive very little academic prestige, and academics do not produce enough usable software. If there were a smoother publishing process integrated with the software stack, perhaps these two worlds could benefit each other.
Diversity in Funding Communities#
Following the topic of open-source software, Leon then asks how to design funding mechanisms for these projects to achieve participant diversity? They previously discussed looking at contributors' credentials to obtain the number of shared certifications from their communities or the software projects they use. How should the parameter settings be improved?
Glen states they are trying to figure all this out. This summer, he worked with an intern at Microsoft on this content, exploring revolutionary research questions: AI and prediction markets, funding and voting, asset control and ownership, social media operations, and how to bring people into clubs or networks. These important research questions are well expressed mathematically but remain unsolved. He hopes to see this field thrive, find solutions, and experiment with organizations like Gitcoin. This will lead to a flywheel effect, similar to past technological tool innovations, intertwining research and social innovation. This is his greatest hope.
Kevin, from Gitcoin's perspective, hopes to guide a virtuous cycle. This flywheel effect will generate more DIDs and VCs, more use cases, leading to even more DIDs and VCs. Thanks to the paper Glen wrote earlier, quadratic funding has been put into practice at Gitcoin. Gitcoin is eager to guide this line of thought with everyone in the future. The Gitcoin community is more familiar with RxC ideas, researching quadratic funding in a diverse ecosystem and the possibilities of a decentralized society. He is pleased to see this pluralism thrive.
Low-Hanging Fruits#
As for the low-hanging fruits that are easily achievable at this stage, Puja mentions the part of the paper that measures decentralization. The measurement criteria are based on the relationship between weak affiliation and strong solidarity, then weighted accordingly. They refer to this as "accidental over-coordination" or "intentional collusion," but currently, there is no standard terminology to label it. On one hand, the dimensions of measurement are diverse rather than singular; on the other hand, control over computational resources needs to be considered. Therefore, measuring the degree of decentralization across different technologies remains a challenging topic, but anchoring these terminologies would be a good start.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning that the MEV that Puja primarily studies is a special form of data cooperatives. People generate many transaction records, and this data itself has informational value. The data has interconnections, forming a dynamic response system. If a transaction is revoked, the informational value changes. In its rapidly changing state, creating data cooperatives to negotiate transaction value is a challenge. So this is the most difficult scenario to solve in the case of data cooperatives. If MEV can be resolved, many privacy and security issues discussed in this paper can also be easily addressed.
Maximum Extractable Value (MEV)[4] refers to the maximum value extracted from block production beyond standard block rewards and gas fees by including, excluding, and changing the order of transactions in a block. This concept was initially applied in the context of PoW, referred to as "miner extractable value." This is because, in PoW, miners control the inclusion, exclusion, and ordering of transactions. However, since the transition to PoS through the Merge, validators have taken on these roles, and mining is no longer part of the Ethereum protocol. Value extraction methods still exist, hence the term "maximum extractable value" is now used.
Future Twitter, New Tribalism, and Algorithmic Territories#
After the paper sparked heated discussions on Twitter, polarized ideological camps are forming: one side believes credentials must reside on-chain and be sold to Ethereum accounts; the other side opposes pure on-chainism. This seems to be the norm in social sciences, where people remain entrenched in their echo chambers. Leon asks whether the authors have thought about how pluralism can unite everyone.
Glen cites an article by Jaron Lanier in The Atlantic about the future of Twitter. Lanier proposes that people form and join multiple Twitter groups. These groups should be small enough to implement an internal reputation system. Glen agrees with the trend pointed out in the article and believes DeSoc will lay the technical foundation for this. If the group sizes envisioned by Lanier expand, using SBT credentials and quadratic voting as mentioned in the DeSoc paper would be a better governance choice. The current CEO of Twitter—Elon Musk—is also an advocate of web3. The Twitter Blue Sky project aims to explore these possibilities. Therefore, the future of Twitter is promising.
Jaron Lanier published "How to Fix Twitter—And All of Social Media"[5] in The Atlantic on May 26, 2022. In the article, Lanier proposes a third option for social media beyond "absolute freedom" and "centralized control"—"tribalism," where netizens spontaneously form groups and speak freely only within those groups.
Puja emphasizes the importance of "technology as a communication channel." The goal of DeSoc is to ensure these channels are locally controlled, rather than monopolized and centralized. For example, on Twitter, SBT can display membership and identify the social context of tweets. At the same time, to ensure that communication channels are truly owned and decentralized from the ground up, they should not become puppets of bots and capital. Ultimately, users should retain bottom-up control, and decisions should be based on the broadest range of diverse participants, which will prevent channels from becoming capital monsters fed by narrow interests through rent-seeking.
Glen adds that Puja's discussion reflects a crucial and inseparable dual issue: 1) cooperation across individuals 2) achieving local control. If people express a viewpoint on a certain issue, they must be genuine insiders to have the qualification to express it. At the same time, we must avoid people ultimately falling into echo chambers. Finding the right balance between the two is key to making the system operate and ensuring incentive compatibility. Therefore, the best approach is to use algorithms to delineate local boundaries of communities.
Pluralism in Interdisciplinary Initiatives#
Should DeSoc theory be integrated into existing disciplines like economics or sociology, or should new disciplines be created? Glen believes DeSoc theory does not fit into any existing community. Nevertheless, these communities cannot be overlooked, as they provide necessary elements. Similarly, DeSoc theory needs to embrace pluralism as it develops into a field: it should connect different intellectual communities, and this intersection will generate a new field. For example, economics brings mathematical rigor and a design mindset, sociology emphasizes social structures rather than individual motivations, and computer science focuses on building things that can be used and deployed at scale. Each field has too many problems that cannot be digested internally, so interdisciplinary intersections are a necessary condition for project success.
Puja's Flashbots project is an interdisciplinary initiative that organically combines social science, computer science, and cryptography. The data generated by transactions has immense value, requiring various experts—auction experts, mechanism design thinkers, computer scientists—each of whom is also a philosopher in their respective fields. As technological platforms evolve, successful teams and companies must draw the best outcomes from each discipline to survive and thrive in diversity.
Flashbots[6] is a research and development organization that originated from Ethereum, aiming to establish a permissionless, transparent, and sustainable MEV system to mitigate the negative impacts of maximum extractable value (MEV) on blockchain. Puja is currently a strategic advisor at Flashbots.
Government Participation, Effective Regulation, and Decentralization Prerequisites#
In RxC thought, an indispensable contributor is Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang. Leon asks what political leaders can learn from Tang's pluralistic ideas and her work in Taiwan.
Audrey Tang[7] is a free software programmer and politician from Taiwan. She is currently the Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan and previously served as a member of the Executive Yuan. She is the world's first openly transgender cabinet-level politician. As a child, she could not adapt to the educational environment within the school system and began homeschooling at the age of 14. Later, she served as a consultant for companies such as BenQ and Apple, and has long been involved in open-source community collaboration.
Glen expresses optimism about government involvement in web3 construction, which can mobilize larger-scale resources. In Colorado, where Kevin is, they are actively negotiating with local governments. Ethical considerations from the government can be transformed into regulatory forms that help shape a more democratic ecosystem for web3: regulation can curb the highly financialized aspects, indirectly encouraging people to invest more tools into democratic participation.
Puja points out that it is the prerequisite of decentralization that allows web3 to be free from regulation by capital or political giants. Many entrepreneurs forget the original intention of decentralization in web3 and rebuild TradFi in DeFi. In the case of social media, rebuilding monopolistic giants that control personal data may not only return things to square one but could also worsen the situation. If this situation is not controlled, the line between heaven and hell is thin. She emphasizes that we should always remember this is a decentralized experiment. If there is not enough innovation in decentralization, it leads to a loss of goodwill and legitimacy.
Confidence in Web3, Future Prospects, and Public Advocacy#
Leon turns to ask the authors about their confidence in web3. Although web3 has existed for over a decade with decentralization as a premise, it seems to have had little impact on society as claimed, instead concentrating different powers. When it comes to decentralizing power, large public chains are not the most decentralized places. There are also different ideological camps in the space, or internal epistemological conflicts between different philosophies, such as the hyper-individualists seen in Gitcoin. He asks whether we should abandon web3 out of disappointment and start a new technological paradigm.
Puja believes it may be wiser to maintain an optimistic and pluralistic attitude. The paradigm proposed for measuring decentralization is to understand the collusion phenomenon in networks by observing the degree of individuals' connections. This analysis can be conducted in traditional finance and should also be done. Glen mentions a collusion scenario in Chapter 4 of his book "Radical Markets": for example, Fidelity and BlackRock both own shares in the same major airlines, which undermines anti-competitive policies, leads to price increases, and wage decreases, forming a tragic capital chaos. Web3 can lead traditional finance here. Decentralization is the right path, and such dialogues can promote its progress, allowing us to see how it performs. Therefore, it should not be discarded.
Glen believes that the reason pluralistic thinking is a minority view in web3 is that it is a minority view in mainstream society. While it is good that people are trying new things, experiments should be guided by values. If mainstream values are projected into the web3 space, more people will think in pluralistic ways, and hyper-capitalistic approaches will diminish. This can only be achieved when more people recognize this space and its potential. Therefore, one of their goals should be to bridge the gap between these dialogues about the future and mainstream values. Glen believes his task is to draw mainstream attention to the future and help people in the web3 world understand the values held by mainstream groups. This is often a chaotic and conflict-ridden path, easily angering both sides. However, he believes that to implement the DeSoc values of cooperation between different groups, understanding the intersections of different communities and finding consensus to make things work is crucial.
Leon concludes that they can end this meeting with a more hopeful and optimistic attitude, assuming that capitalists and pluralists can merge and cooperate to establish more diverse institutions. Quadratic funding and voting may take years to truly enter the mainstream and make people outside the realm of social technology experiments aware of them, thus achieving a fully decentralized society. He then shares that he has been collecting non-transferable proofs since he was young, gradually accumulating his virtual soul as he grew older. In this field, the algorithms of social graphs may also take decades. He asks, what will 2030 look like?
When Glen spoke in Berlin three years ago on the topic of "RxC 2.0," he thought it would take at least three or four years to have a concept to realize it. Three years later, he believes we are beginning to understand that we can achieve this. Now does not mean it has been completed or is operational as a tool. But from a vague sketch to a concrete framework, he believes progress is encouraging. Quadratic funding still needs some time, but it has entered the realm of government experimentation and the discourse of mainstream intellectual elites. People like Audrey Tang will become more common. He is confident that the goals can be achieved, perhaps even faster than imagined. In this capital-driven, highly centralized dystopian society, we have a real opportunity.
Puja hopes to see people focus less on their phones and more on interactions with each other. Less focus on their financial portfolios and trades, and more on collaboratively building community resources and assets. She believes that MEV, in a sense, is a symptom of hyper-financialization rather than embracing networks of individual participation. She hopes to see more local governance and experiments conducted on populations to think about incentive mechanisms. Experiments should be conducted in scientific communities inclined toward high exposure and be part of their work. Ordinary people who are unaware of the situation and passively enter should not be the focus of experiments. Infrastructure should be built consciously and carefully to minimize risks and maximize cooperation and consensus.
Leon suggests that art and culture can help more mainstream audiences recognize DeSoc values. Glen states that they have been making some radical changes, such as filming a documentary about Audrey Tang and creating interesting SBT artworks. There are various exciting possibilities.
Conclusion#
If someone is attracted to the vision of pluralism, how should they start? Puja believes that web3 is essentially about community and how to empower localities and achieve decentralization. Therefore, she suggests that people start from where they are and see how they can help their local communities. Glen emphasizes that it ultimately depends on the skills and identities of the individuals involved. For researchers, they can tackle many issues, such as incentive structures, funding based on multi-level communities, community restoration, and how to go beyond prediction markets and AI; for entrepreneurs, they should focus on building. For example, trying to find better collaborative software that incorporates SBT into governance in platforms like Discord. Every page of the DeSoc paper contains ideas for researchers and entrepreneurs to extend on their own.
At the end, Kevin thanks everyone for their participation, stating that the DeSoc movement feels like the beginning of something new rather than the end of something old. Leon, as a young social activist, expresses his commitment to fighting for this cause for life and calls on everyone to join their ranks. Puja and Glen announce that they are establishing an academic research network on the topic of DeSoc and will release a research agenda in the coming weeks, including some open questions. Researchers interested can feel free to contact them.
[1] https://www.radicalxchange.org/
[2] https://carrcenter.hks.harvard.edu/publications/how-ai-fails-us
[3] https://ethereum.org/en/desci/
[4] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/mev/
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/05/how-to-fix-twitter-social-media/629951/
[6] https://www.flashbots.net/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
✨ Subscribe to the "GreenPill" podcast ✨
https://availableon.com/greenpill
🟢 This episode's YouTube link 🟢
As a workstream initiated in the GreenPill Chinese community, "GreenPill Podcast Co-learning" adopts a co-creation format, encouraging more people to get involved. Specifically, we are recruiting the following roles:
Class Representative
Listen to the podcast, produce notes, and publish them on the GreenPill Chinese community media account.
What we want is not translation! But expansion and summarization based on content understanding.
Share your notes and understanding at co-learning meetings.
Bounty will be awarded based on podcast duration, at 3 USDT per minute.
Typesetter
Typeset based on the content produced by the class representative and column information.
15 USDT per article.
If you are interested in the above roles, please sign up on our Dework page:
https://app.dework.xyz/greenpill
If you are interested in our workstream, please copy and open our Notion page:
https://greenpillcn.notion.site/GreenPill-62cbfc461cb44fd0a55f62a8104928bc
Our related output content will continue to be published on the GreenPill Chinese community's relevant media platforms, please stay tuned.
Uncommons is a public sphere where a collective of Commons Builders explores Crypto Thoughts together.
Uncommons is a public welfare community spontaneously organized by web3 enthusiasts, social builders, and internet citizens dedicated to building public goods, formerly known as the GreenPill Chinese community.
Uncommons is a crypto humanities brand incubated by Planck.
Notion community collaboration document: https://uncommons.notion.site/
Telegram face-to-face digital garden: http://t.me/theuncommons
Twitter Global Publicity: https://twitter.com/Un__commons