Emergence of the Crypto Commons
* Felix Fritsch. Emergence of the Crypto Commons: Navigating Socio-Technical Affordances and Ideological Tensions on the Blockchain.
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"a detailed ethnographic and institutional analysis of communities actively engaged in this project"
Description
"The dissertation explores the emergence of crypto commons as a novel approach to collective resource stewardship enabled by Blockchain technology. Three research questions are discussed: What are Blockchain’s affordances for crypto commons governance? How do crypto commoners navigate ideological tensions between Blockchain’s libertarian principles and the communal values of the commons? And, what is the political economy of crypto commons and how does it affect their shared governance? As part of the dissertation, two case studies are examined; the Token Engineering Commons (TEC), and Regenerative Finance (ReFi).
This research establishes the crypto commons as a distinct object of inquiry, offering practical insights to crypto commoners seeking to bridge the gap between ambitious visions and limited empirical examples. It supports the recognition of Blockchain’s emerging role in sociopolitical struggles and promotes a shift toward a regenerative political economy centered on the commons."
Discussion
Author N.A. ?
"Fritsch's entire project is animated by a sense of profound urgency, situating his research as a direct response to the escalating socio-ecological crises of the "Capitalocene".1 He argues that the capitalist mode of production, predicated on the endless appropriation of "cheap nature"—unpaid ecological work and resources—is reaching its terminal limits.1 The looming "end of cheap nature" signals not just an environmental crisis but a fundamental crisis for a system of accumulation that has historically relied on the free appropriation of ecological surplus.1 In this context, the development of scalable, resilient commons-based infrastructures is not a utopian ideal but a critical survival strategy.
His call for a "regenerative political economy centered on the commons" is therefore a proposal for a new societal metabolism, one capable of providing ecological and social regeneration in the face of systemic degradation.1 He identifies the burgeoning field of Regenerative Finance (ReFi) as a key battleground where these ideas are being tested. ReFi, a sphere of projects using blockchain for the "socially equitable regeneration of natural ecosystems through financial innovation," becomes a rich empirical case for Fritsch, revealing a complex ecosystem of corporate, libertarian, and commonist actors all vying to shape the future of nature's relationship to finance.
The Architecture of Crypto Commons
At the heart of Fritsch's analysis is a precise definition and a novel theoretical framework for understanding crypto commons. He defines them as "decentralized socio-technical systems that leverage blockchain technology to facilitate the collective stewardship of shared resources, while incentivizing third-party actors to contribute to the objectives of the communities governing the commons".1 This definition is crucial as it immediately highlights the hybrid nature of these entities: they are simultaneously inward-looking (collective stewardship) and outward-facing (incentivizing external actors). To understand how this hybridity is managed, Fritsch identifies three high-level "institutional affordances" that blockchain provides, moving beyond a simple list of technical features to explain how the technology enables new forms of social and economic organization.
Trustless Accountability: This affordance emerges from blockchain's nature as a public, immutable ledger, often described as a system of triple-entry bookkeeping. It allows for the creation of systems like Open Value Accounting (OVA), where contributions to a commons—whether in the form of labor, capital, or other inputs—can be transparently recorded and rewarded without relying on a central authority for validation. This is essential for scaling coordination beyond high-trust, small-group settings and for creating verifiable records of ecological states, as seen in ReFi projects that track carbon sequestration or biodiversity.
Contractual Organizability: This affordance is unlocked by smart contracts, which enable the creation of novel organizational forms like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). By automating the execution of rules and agreements, smart contracts drastically reduce the transaction costs associated with forming and managing complex organizations. This allows communities to experiment with new governance models, from simple multi-signature treasury management to elaborate systems of proposal-making and voting, replacing traditional hierarchical structures with programmable, contractual relationships.
Permissionless Mechanizability: This affordance refers to the capacity of blockchain to serve as a substrate for prototyping and deploying new institutional patterns and economic mechanisms without needing permission from any central gatekeeper. It creates what Fritsch, drawing on institutional economics, calls a "free market for institutions," where novel designs like Augmented Bonding Curves (ABCs) or Conviction Voting (CV) can be launched and tested in live environments. This accelerates the pace of institutional innovation, allowing communities to design bespoke economic engines to fund their specific commons.
The Central Contradiction: The Libertarian-Communal Tension
While these affordances open up new possibilities, Fritsch's core contribution is his identification of a deep-seated ideological tension at the heart of the crypto commons project. He argues that blockchain technology is not neutral; its architecture is imbued with a set of right-libertarian principles inherited from its cypherpunk origins. These principles include the primacy of the sovereign individual, a preference for voluntary market exchange as the ideal mode of coordination, and a deep skepticism of politics, which is often viewed as a form of coercion.
These embedded values are in direct conflict with the foundational principles of the commons. Commoning is an inherently collective practice centered on stewardship, mutual trust, and social accountability. It prioritizes the production of use-value for a defined community over the accumulation of abstract exchange-value. Its governance relies on political processes of deliberation, negotiation, and compromise to maintain social cohesion and manage shared resources equitably.1 This creates a fundamental contradiction: crypto commoners are attempting to build communal, politically-negotiated institutions on a technological substrate that is designed to facilitate atomized, apolitical, market-based interactions. This tension is not a philosophical curiosity; it is encoded into the very mechanisms that crypto commons use, creating persistent challenges and trade-offs that communities must actively navigate.
Fritsch's dissertation moves from this theoretical contradiction to a rich empirical analysis of how communities on the ground attempt to manage it. Through his case studies of the Token Engineering Commons (TEC) and various projects within the ReFi ecosystem, he identifies three key strategies of navigation.
Ideological Compromise: This involves the conscious adoption of market-based or libertarian mechanisms to solve specific problems that have traditionally plagued the commons, such as funding and scalability. The TEC's use of the Augmented Bonding Curve (ABC) is a paradigmatic example. The community made a deliberate compromise to assetize membership and introduce speculative market dynamics as a means to generate a continuous stream of tax revenue for funding public goods in the token engineering space. This was a trade-off: sacrificing the traditional non-transferability of membership in exchange for a novel funding engine.
Technical Adaptation: This strategy involves modifying the default libertarian settings of blockchain technology to better align with communal values. Fritsch's analysis of the Traditional Dream Factory (TDF), a regenerative land project in Portugal, provides a clear illustration. To counteract the plutocratic tendency of token-based voting (where more investment equals more power), the TDF introduced non-transferable "Proof of Presence" and "Proof of Sweat" tokens. These tokens, earned through physical presence and labor contributions, amplify the voting power of active community members, thus technically re-embedding governance in embodied participation rather than abstract capital investment.
Social Scaffolding: This is perhaps the most critical strategy Fritsch identifies. It refers to the creation of dense informal social norms, cultural practices, and shared narratives that complement and often counteract the formal logic of the encoded mechanisms. The TEC's "Cultural Build" is the primary example. The community invested enormous effort into developing a shared culture based on Elinor Ostrom's eight design principles for commons governance. This social layer acted as a crucial buffer, encouraging benevolent, pro-social behavior and tempering the purely self-interested, extractive logic that the ABC mechanism could otherwise invite.
The interplay of these strategies reveals that a successful crypto commons cannot rely on mechanism design alone. The failure of the TEC's Conviction Voting (CV) mechanism serves as a powerful cautionary tale that forms a cornerstone of Fritsch's critique. CV was designed to be a highly efficient, decentralized decision-making tool, replacing cumbersome voting with continuous preference signaling. However, its design was rooted in a libertarian individualism that atomized decision-making, allowing subgroups to fund proposals without needing to build broader consensus. The empirical result, as Fritsch documents, was a "tragedy of the commons" in budgeting: a lack of strategic coherence, general over-expenditure, and the erosion of the community's ability to form a collective will. The community's response was not to tweak the parameters but to abandon the mechanism altogether in favor of more centralized, steward-led budgeting.
This outcome demonstrates with empirical force that the success or failure of these systems is not primarily a technical question, but a political one. The CV protocol worked perfectly as coded; its failure was a failure of political design. It attempted to "code away" the necessary, albeit messy, political work of deliberation, negotiation, and compromise that is essential for sustaining a commons. This leads to a crucial conclusion: any post-capitalist vision that relies on purely mechanistic or automated governance is likely to fail, as it misunderstands the fundamentally social and political nature of collective action.
Furthermore, Fritsch's analysis of how crypto commons interface with external markets highlights another critical design challenge. The core task for these communities is to construct what can be termed an "osmotic boundary"—a semi-permeable membrane that allows for the inflow of necessary resources like capital and new members, while filtering out the corrosive, exchange-value-driven logic of the broader capitalist market. The TEC's "Cultural Build" was an attempt to create this boundary through social norms. In ReFi, projects like Kolektivo are attempting to build it technically through "transvestment derivatives"—financial instruments that allow external investors to speculate on aspects of a natural asset commons without granting them ownership or control over the underlying resource.1 This recurring theme demonstrates that a viable post-capitalist model cannot be a fully autonomous or isolated sphere. It must be a resilient system capable of strategic engagement with the dominant economy, and the design of this interface is perhaps the most critical challenge it faces."
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More information
Bio
" Felix has been at the forefront of this transformative space, contributing not only as a scholar but also as a builder. He founded and led the Crypto Commons Association and commons hub, which have been instrumental in fostering collaboration and innovation within the movement, and organized numerous events such as the Crypto Commons Gatherings 2021 – 2024. Over time, his engagement has brought together numerous visionaries, activists, and technologists to co-create and expand the crypto commons."
(https://www.commons-hub.at/post/emergence-of-the-crypto-commons)