Adoption Focused
ProgrammableCapital.com is a blog and github repo exploring modern forms of capital enhanced by automation. Blockchain technology is the major catalyst enabling the enhancements. The focus is on the evolution of market micro-structure, plus any academic or business impact. The intended audience includes executives, thought leaders and policy makers seeking to understand new approaches to finance which are actually seeing market adoption.
Basically, Crypto
The majority of programmable capital consists of open and decentralized protocol input/outputs, tokens, digital assets, or other crypto assets/agreements/contracts. However, if a sufficiently large enough private network formed from a consortium, it could still qualify per our working definition.
Working Definition
Our working definition of programmable capital is:
Any resource or agreement which is registered and controlled in a fashion which enables consensus and structural interoperability of one or more facet through it’s life-cycle by an explicit owner.
Resource or agreement refers to concepts including but not limited to assets, loans, property, rights, money, claims, licenses, securities, annuities, etc. The word asset is avoided in the definition intentionally. We favour instead resource which includes say, ether or debt. Ether has no corresponding liability on another firm’s balance sheet. Debt, is always somebody else’s asset.
Registration and control systems typically resemble architectures leveraging blockchains, distributed acyclic graphs or block lattices combined with cryptography solutions to maintain security in an immutable way.
Consensus refers to either the latest snapshot or cumulative history for anything registered and controlled (balances, code, execution results, etc.).
Structural interoperability refers the combination of ledger data and a programming language supported by a protocol, such as Solidity, or APIs such as the methods of a smart contract, associated with the capital’s current state and form.
The facets can span topics such as governance, incentives, utility, exchange and compliance.
The life-cycle spans transitions and states, such as definition, instantiation, modification, transfer, forking or burning.
Explicit ownership refers to changes of ownership being atomic. Atomic changes make ownership disputes impossible, within the definition of any codified governance. Implicit latent claims of liability cannot persist between ownership changes.