by Jango and Filip

Dominant organizational and financial models have always suited the technologies of their respective eras. In this era of internet-native businesses and AI, corporate-stock models of organization have become anachronistic.

We want to double down on a vision of how wealth will be most productively created and distributed in our future characterised by digital networks, artificial intelligence, and cryptographic identities.

Context

Smart contracts allow us to program financial relationships. They make it possible to articulate exchanges between the producer and consumer, investor and entrepreneur, artist and fan, and participants in a system more generally. They are a recent feature of our world, and they can be leveraged in arbitrarily colorful ways.

Jango has spent the past 3 years helping sculp smart contracts to progress a specialized language for articulating these financial relationship experiments, and the past 2 years refining that language in production as Juicebox¹, which has facilitated $177,115,741 in ETH payments to 1,182 projects as it has tended towards increased reliability for public use. He's done so alongside a group of internet anons, itself organized via this Juicebox language. At its core, the experiment has been to create business models of the future.

The Problem

Over this time, we've seen compelling consumer crypto offerings emerge, but few have struck onchain sustainability. Many organizations ironically continue with a dependence on traditional cap tables, term sheets, payrolls, and rent-seeking fee structures because productive and safe onchain forms haven't been well demonstrated. Others stick to a public goods narrative that sidesteps conversations about risks and incentives altogether.

Solutions

The next step is to take the now fully-featured Juicebox language and shape it for intentional competitive use. Specifically, we believe organizations oriented around Retailist and other Post-Corporate capital structures will prove to be highly productive, and we believe organizations that encourage a broader ecosystem of networked treasuries are also likely to bear fruit.

Retailism is a business framework where wealth is exchanged programmatically over time from newer participants to elder ones, and where investors and customers are treated as alike participants. Funds move according to pre-programmed rules.²

Networked treasuries are organizations architected with horizontally interconnected treasuries instead of increasingly-bloated hierarchical ones.³

We will continue to leverage the internet to make experimental progress, but we'd also like to begin nurturing a dedicated physical place to gather from where we can cultivate these ideas in a focused fashion. We want to create a studio production environment to bring bands of devs together for weeks at a time, providing the ideal setting, ingredients, and meditations for creating bold projects. Truth is, a handful of the most recognized JuiceboxDAO contributors have either lived in Carrboro, North Carolina or have passed through for weeks at a time as the Juicebox language has come together. We understand the productive influence that sharing inspiring spaces can have, and we sense value in doubling down.⁴

Powerplant

Powerplant is a production studio for open source devs experimenting with post-corporate financial models for our networked world.

This 11-acre property is situated 5 minutes from downtown Carrboro and Chapel Hill, 30 minutes from Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and 30 minutes from Research Triangle Park, and it is currently on the market. This region has a tight concentration of technology corporations and universities, and is home to Jango and other Juicebox contributors.

We want to turn this house into a production sanctuary for devs, inviting small groups and helping them bring scoped concepts to life in 3-12 week sprints.

The first year will see experiments borne from the cast of Juicebox developers. In time, we aim to support the production of other mission-aligned projects from people we're excited to get to know and build alongside, and clients who wish to propel their mission-aligned concepts forward.

Jango intends to spend 1/3 of the first year at the property and will lead the production scheduling.
Mieos, who runs a property management firm in town, will make sure the property is well cared for throughout the year.

The characteristics of the space will make or break this project. We believe we've got a stellar candidate at hand here, but we'll keep an eye on the market if this one slips.

Why It Works

Pockets of intellectual and technological dynamism tend to have several traits in common:

• Open and collaborative environments. Easy propagation of ideas.
• Small groups of people. As groups grow too large, the burden of coordination begins to replace meaningful work.
• Cross-disciplinary teams. A diversity in perspectives helps break out of intellectual and inspirational local maxima.
• Motivation coming from ideology, idealism, or even a strong deadline.
• More than stability – not having to be overly preoccupied with daily life. This can happen in times of great prosperity, or with the help of patrons or institutions.

Combinations of these ingredients frequently succeed:

1. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works division was established in 1943 to meet an impossible deadline: 180 days to design a jet which could compete with advanced German aircraft. With a tiny division of 23 engineers and slightly over 100 people in total, Kelly Johnson led the delivery of the XP-80 Shooting Star in just 143 days. The Skunk Works division went on to design the U-2 spy plane, the F-117 Nighthawk, and the F-22 Raptor with continued adherence to the principles laid out by Johnson. Of note: The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).
2. The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist group based in Menlo Park. Its first meeting, held in Gordon French's garage, attracted around 32 programmers, engineers, students, and interested laypeople – they built and modified machines, shared software and hardware designs, and discussed programming and technology. Its members went on to define the personal computing industry: members Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein went on to create the first mass-produced portable computer under the Osborne Computer Corporation in 1981, Steve Wozniak (who attended with Steve Jobs) credits the meetings for inspiring him to design the Apple I, and many other influential programmers and founders participated alongside them (see Wikipedia). The group was ideologically motivated, driven by a belief in the potential of personal computing.
3. The Xerox corporation established the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to explore the architecture of information and to future-proof the Xerox corporation. PARC was given freedom to pursue exploratory research, operating like a startup within Xerox. Its researchers were encouraged to follow their interests and to collaborate across disciplines, and went on to invent and incubate Ethernet, graphical user interfaces, laser printers, significant parts of object-oriented programming, and the model–view–controller paradigm (among many other inventions).

The Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, the early Ford Motor Company, and the early history of most tech giants also speak to this idea – that bringing together and funding focused, cross-disciplinary groups to work towards ambitious technological goals leads to fast progress.

Also see Patrick Collison's Fast.

Operations

1. We will deploy a Powerplant Juicebox project with an allowlist delegate for the funding and operation of this project. Only investors we've agreed to work with and who agree to the legal bindings we'll draft together will have access, though the data will be public.
2. We plan on putting together a technology budget that we'll all agree to. We plan on proposing up-front spending on workstations, servers, and networking hardware, and plan to utilize remaining funds for high-performance computing hardware, media equipment, or other items as needed by projects and approved by token holders.
3. The property's asking price is $1,975,000. We believe we can negotiate this down as we intend to pay cash. Investors will own the house, have access to liquidate it within certain bounds, and be subject to a buyout clause.
4. A portion of funds and reserved token issuance will be routed from projects made from the house to the Powerplant project. This will determined on a project-by-project basis.

Many specifics remain undecided. We're open to your suggestions.

Retailism

Intro to Retailism: https://jango.eth.limo/9E01E72C-6028-48B7-AD04-F25393307132

A Retailistic View on CAC and LTV: https://jango.eth.limo/572BD957-0331-4977-8B2D-35F84D693276

Modeling Retailism: https://jango.eth.limo/B762F3CC-AEFE-4DE0-B08C-7C16400AF718/

Retailism for Devs, Investors, and Customers: https://jango.eth.limo/3EB05292-0376-4B7D-AFCF-042B70673C3D/

Observations: Network dynamics similar between atoms, cells, organisms, groups, dance parties: https://jango.eth.limo/CF40F5D2-7BFE-43A3-9C15-1C6547FBD15C/

Addendum: Programmatic Sales

On July 13th 2023, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that Ripple Labs' "programmatic sales" of XRP did not violate federal securities laws. From the ruling:

Ripple's Programmatic Sales were blind bid/ask transactions, and Programmatic Buyers could not have known if their payments of money went to Ripple, or any other seller of XRP ... Ripple did not make any promises or offers because Ripple did not know who was buying the XRP, and the purchasers did not know who was selling it.

Juicebox is

by Filip

Juicebox is an Ethereum protocol for funding, operating, and scaling projects. Its first version was deployed on July 15th, 2021. In the ~721 days since then, the protocol has facilitated $177,115,741 in payments to 1,182 projects.

This is in spite of the fact that:

• The protocol has only supported Ether payments so far. This means that projects must opt to use Juicebox in spite of the price volatility, gas fees, and onboarding friction that come with using ETH.
• Juicebox is built and maintained by a DAO – there are no executives; JuiceboxDAO does not have marketing or hiring departments. Instead, it is self-governed by its community.
• Unlike many other crypto protocols, Juicebox did not launch with venture backing.

Juicebox has succeeded in spite of these obstacles because Juicebox aligns communities more effectively than traditional financial models can. JuiceboxDAO itself is a testament to this – it is the first project on the protocol, and its treasury and community have been managed using it.

Juicebox is the product of both mechanical and cultural innovation:

Mechanically

• Anyone can deploy a Juicebox project, which takes about 10 minutes.
• Project creators dictate the project's behavior in advance – what happens when the project is paid, how funds can leave its treasury, and the conditions under which redemptions can take place.
• A project's creator dictates the time-locked conditions under which a project's rules can change. This allows projects to find a suitable balance between flexibility and trust, evolving their project's behavior to scale with their communities.
• Juicebox does payroll – projects can pre-define payouts to Ethereum wallets or other projects, and those payouts can be defined ETH amounts or USD values.
• When people pay a project, they receive that project's tokens (which can be fungible or non-fungible).
  • These tokens can be used as a primitive for governance, community access, or gated content.
  • Tokens can be redeemed to reclaim a portion of a project's overflow (funds in excess of what's needed for payouts).
• All of this takes place on the Ethereum blockchain. Juicebox is transparent, verifiable, and uncensorable.
• Juicebox is extensible, allowing for rapid iteration on treasury mechanics and extensions.

Culturally

• For people to trust Juicebox projects, they must first understand them. Honesty, openness, and transparency are baked into the protocol's incentives.
• Everything is open source and permissionless.
• Juicebox projects are easier to "fork" (i.e. duplicate). This keeps creators and operators accountable to their communities.
• Leverage lies with devs and builders.

Year of the Dev

Posted new years 2021/2022 for the JuiceboxDAO community

Devs aren't just coders. Anyone who recognizes genuine inefficiencies and makes themself useful toward delivering great solutions is a dev.

filipv, STVG, twodam, zeugh, phytann, sage, mieos, nicholas, zom-bae, mrgoldstein, zhape, westlife29, linywan, peacenode, germs, gulan, and a few other JB friends don't contribute code to the core contracts or site, but they show up to dev everything else they recognize can add value: governance, tools, dev ops, analytics, Banny, cryptovoxels empire, Discord bots, podcasts, translations, education, bookkeeping, support, strategy etc.

• Devs are individuals, not entities. DAOs, VCs, corporations, campaigns, and projects may have great devs within them, but aren't devs themselves.
• Devs like to dev with other devs.
• Devs are often artful.
• Devs are never zero-sum thinkers.
• Devs should continue to improve how we build alongside each other at scale and audit each other's work along the way. More agency, less management.
• Leaders are devs who also delegate effectively between other devs. Any dev can be a leader, the more the merrier.
• Devs should continue to work towards improving the experience of other devs.
• Devs who build in the open have leverage.
• Resources follow devs.
• Power decentralizes as more people become devs.

The Juicebox Model

by Filip

The ways in which businesses elect to organize themselves, as well as their resulting corporate cultures, play a major role in technical innovation. It is no coincidence that corporate innovations have historically emerged alongside technical ones: joint-stock companies in the mercantile era, limited liability corporations during the Industrial Revolution, and employee-equity-driven startups in Silicon Valley.

In Planning of invention part 1: Burton Klein and Dynamic Economics, Scott Locklin cites the work of Burton Klein, an economist who was particularly interested in what drove companies to dynamism and innovation. Klein classifies firms as follows:

Type 1: “Happy warrior rationality” is associated with ideological outbreeding and is commonly employed in making fast history.

Type 2: “Middle-class rationality” is associated with ideological inbreeding and is commonly employed in making slow history.

Type 3: “Accounting rationality” is associated with a zero rate of ideological change and is commonly employed by profit maximizing firms in a temporary equilibrium with an unchanging outside environment.

Type 4: “Conservation-of-power rationality” is associated with organizations which have such a lot ability to deal with unpredictability that they must manipulate the rules of the game if they are to survive.

Locklin summarizes this as:

Type 1 companies have new ideas: early radio, jet aircraft, semiconductor and internet companies were type 1. Type 2 companies steal ideas; early Facebook or Ali Baba are classic type 2 companies. Type 3 companies are Walmart, and Type 4 are modern day tech monopolies, insurance companies, Boeing and most American banks.

and goes on to list several characteristics common to type 1 firms:

• Within Dunbar's number (i.e. 150 or fewer people).
• Diversity in skill, perspectives, and background: "Engineers, product developers, executives, laborers and machinists all working on the manufacturing floor."
• A lack of strict hierarchy. Although top-level leadership is important for driving decisions, breakthrough ideas and insights can come from anyone.
• A tendency to bring in external contractors, tech experts, and academics, who can also bring new ideas and perspectives.
• Organizational simplicity and independence.

In Practice

JuiceboxDAO, Peel, and some other DAOs demonstrate this principle — smaller groups of talented people can consistently deliver innovative crypto products in ways that Meta, Twitter, Google, and eBay cannot, despite their massive budgets and deep talent pools.

Networked Treasuries

Centralized hierarchical corporate models are not suited towards Type 1 innovations because:

• Rejection can kill ideas at any level of the corporate hierarchy, meaning breakthrough ideas and insights are often shot down before they can materialize.
• As teams become departments, they become homogeneous. Accountants only talk with other accountants in the "accounting department", and any unique insights are lost.
• As departments are separated from each other, they also lose the ability to independently launch experiments. A group of 30 accountants cannot do much on their own, and most ideas are abandoned: logistical burden makes it difficult to justify experimentation within large organizations. As an organization grows, the payoff of experimentation generally remains the same, but the up-front effort required to launch an experiment increases exponentially.

In computing, frequent distinction is made between "vertical" and "horizontal" scaling. Put simply: vertical scaling is making an existing server bigger, and horizontal scaling is getting more servers, coordinating information between them.

Juicebox allows communities to apply a similar principle to their organizational structure. Instead of scaling through increasingly bloated hierarchies, Juicebox projects can scale horizontally by deploying new projects with independent rules and mechanics. This works because:

• Deploying a project is easy: it takes ~10 minutes and a gas fee.
• Payments between projects are easy to manage and don't incur fees. Complexity can be reduced from many individuals payouts to general budgets for a group.
• A Juicebox project's rules are easily accessible onchain, meaning informed teams can understand a project's behavior in minutes. The cost of diligence tends towards zero when operating under a well-understood set of parameters.