What Is Hyperstructures?

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Master Trader
Apr 17, 2013
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Horne is a co-founder of crypto startup Zora. He was one of the core developers of the popular stablecoin USDC at Coinbase.



His blog is excellent and worthy of a follow.



So, what is a hyperstructure?



According to Horne, it’s a crypto protocol that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries.



And, says Horne, it has these specific characteristics:



Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.



(Uniswap, one of the most popular Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) in crypto, is a good example. The Uniswap team and website could disappear today, but the protocol will run in perpetuity. )



Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at network/transaction fee cost.



Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and “exitable” by the owners.



Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol. They incent value creation and make value extraction cost-prohibitive.



(Uniswap’s Liquidity Provider (LP) fee is a good example. LP fees incentivize participants to provide the key resource to the protocol — liquidity. This fee is paid to anyone providing liquidity, not to Uniswap.)



Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.



Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for competitors who use the same infrastructure.



Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.

“Hyperstructures,” Horne writes, “treat every participant fairly, to the extent that it’s possible to treat people fairly in a world where everyone’s capabilities and needs are so different.”



As a result of being free, expansive, unstoppable, permissionless and credibly neutral—Hyperstructures create a positive sum environment.



This means you can have an ecosystem of potentially competitive participants using the same piece of infrastructure to the net benefit of everyone.



Consider, if just a small percentage of our key institutions were to adopt such an infrastructure, it would be a paradigm shift so large it would eclipse all technological revolutions before it.



We would go from institutions based on:



→ Permissions



→ Mutability/Censorship



→ Gated Access/Walled Gardens



→ Extractive



To:



→ Permissionless



→ Unstoppable



→ Public



→ Free



Hyperstructures are built for the Space Age. Some semblance of this embedded in our dominant institutions would be a best-case scenario.



And perhaps it’s not as “pie-in-the-sky” as people think.



[Ed. note: Opportunities abound in Web3. But only a few game-changing protocols will gain mass adoption. One of the best ways to play is infrastructure — the protocols necessary for Web3’s growth. – Chris C.


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