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.