Why 0xPARC?
October 26, 2021
Why 0xPARC?
Structurally, 0xPARC is a somewhat unconventional organization. In this post, we'll explain some of the motivation for starting 0xPARC, and outline the place that we hope 0xPARC will occupy in the broader decentralized technology ecosystem.
Encouraging Application-Level Innovation
We're interested in enabling decentralized application "moonshots." Almost by definition, moonshot ideas are ideas that aren't necessarily productionalizable today—they are projects that may uncover further research directions, or which may set the stage for future products as underlying technology matures. As a result, not all of these projects fit within the traditional support or funding frameworks that exist today for crypto technology.
Part of 0xPARC's mission is to create space for these kinds of experiments:
- Some application ideas are waiting on core protocol and infrastructure development that will take several years. One example of this might be a fully decentralized social app or MMO game that aims to serve mainstream consumer audiences in the future.
- Other projects do not fit into a risk profile, time horizon, or value-capture framework that is acceptable for traditional investment models. This could include open-source work, open educational resources, or basic research for which a compelling business application is not yet clear.
- Still others may wish to experiment with novel ownership, organization, or business models, and may benefit from no-strings-attached funding so that they don't have to silo themselves into existing organizational paradigms in order to get off the ground. This could include organizations that wish to evolve into fully decentralized, on-chain-governed communities.
In all of these cases, grant funding and other forms of ecosystem support enables experiments that would not otherwise be able to find resources or which may be prematurely shoehorned by traditional funding models.
Bringing Existing Teams Together
0xPARC wasn't created in a vacuum. In many ways, 0xPARC is simply a natural evolution of several projects that already work together informally: Dark Forest, ETHUniversity, Project Sophon, Reboot, new unnamed ZK games, and more.
These projects complement each other via symbiotic relationships and feedback loops: ETH educational programs incubated the founding team of Dark Forest, which attracted third-party collaborators, who in turn started additional educational/R&D projects, which in turn are activating and educating more contributors. 0xPARC is a vehicle to bring these communities together, to cultivate relationships between them, and to put them in touch with the wider decentralized technology ecosystems.
Within this network, 0xPARC is intended to play a support role. 0xPARC aims to empower innovators and community leaders to do their best work, rather than to top-down direct these projects itself. In a healthy ecosystem, ownership is distributed among multiple independent voices. Our role is to bootstrap such an ecosystem, and to act as the scaffolding or "glue" that brings projects together and helps them find the resources that they need.
Propagating the Web3 Ethos
Applied crypto technology will have a huge impact on the future, which means that crypto technologists have a tremendous amount of power. 0xPARC encourages projects we support to be deliberate about both what we build, as well as how we build it.
Firstly, the most important parts of the crypto ecosystem today are built on a core set of principles and values that deserve to be preserved and passed on. Blockchains are built around the free sharing of knowledge and information—at the cultural level via open-source norms, at the social level via vibrant and non-hierarchical public discourse, and even at the technical level via a foundation of peer-to-peer networking protocols. Decentralized systems present an opportunity to bake important ideals into the next generation of digital applications: these systems are democratic, in that permissionless platforms give a voice to any participant (or smart contract) who desires to participate; they are individualistic, in that they protect the individual's rights to privacy, freedom, and self-determination; and yet they are also paradoxically collectivist, in that so much of the ecosystem today is built on public goods that have been freely gifted by researchers, developers, thinkers, writers, and philanthropists for the benefit of a broader community.
0xPARC hopes to play a role in propagating these values. Grant-giving, community-building, educational initiatives, and open-source work are important beyond just the direct impacts of any specific project or program—these actions contribute to the broader cultural fabric of Web3.
Secondly, there is still a lot of work to do to bridge the gap between the current state of crypto, and the idealistic ethos and values of Web3. Crypto today is highly financialized, with (arguably) most activity still being driven by speculation. Also, there's a big difference between programmable blockchains being theoretically permissionless versus being actually accessible to the average person, and building for the latter is not always immediately profitable. For example, in a decentralized network where transactions-per-second throughput is low, the natural business incentive for a crypto gaming company is to push up the value carried by each transaction, and to target crypto "whales" instead of building for the masses. However, experiments into decentralized games that will be accessible to mainstream consumers are clearly important and worth supporting, especially as underlying scalability improves.
Financial incentives are important for maintaining a self-sustaining ecosystem, and we may eventually see products, companies, and DAOs emerge from this network. But bootstrapping this ecosystem in a way that is mission-aligned may require a neutral origin point where builders can take risks and prioritize value creation over value capture at the outset.