Metabase: A Blockchain Platform to Build Next Generation Businesses

Blockchain technology and decentralized systems have promised to unlock new sources of value and create a near frictionless global economy. We are creating a new blockchain technology, called Metabase, for entrepreneurs and innovative companies to build next generation businesses–to deliver on this promise.

For the first time in history, peer-to-peer transactions and collaboration between members of complex, geographically dispersed networks are coming of age.

Although in its infancy, a new world without economic gatekeepers, central authorities, and costly middlemen is emerging and bubbling under the surface.

Rising out of the ashes of the 2008 global financial crisis, pioneers of decentralized systems have begun building global collaborative networks where value is transacted and automated. These pioneers have helped legitimize decentralized systems and the collaborative community model by showcasing their potential to add dramatic value to self-organizing systems as well as potentially, the global economy.

Along with this, they have also highlighted the inefficiencies and inequity inherent in the centralized economic architectures of today.  

We require a new paradigm in thinking that castes out the old command and control systems of industry and innovation that rose from the modern industrial age, to reform into a way forward with decentralized systems that can power our systems more equitably.

Since emerging in 2009, Bitcoin and its core operating technology, a blockchain, has laid the foundation for a new era of digital peer-to-peer transactions.

Bitcoin has gained legitimacy among millions of people around the world, and even some governments. Bitcoin is now accepted, managed, and sustained by a vast international community as a platform to exchange value.

While Bitcoin offered one specific application of blockchain technology, a peer to peer electronic cash system that enables online payments (transfers of value), the advent of the Ethereum open software platform served to realize the broader potential of blockchain technology beyond bitcoin– the first generation of autonomous decentralized applications.

Ethereum offered a platform for developers to build any decentralized application by moving past basic “contracts of difference” toward autonomous agent contracts. In doing so, it opened up a world of unimagined decentralized possibilities, where more complex constructs of value can be built, transferred, and managed with greater ease and transparency.  

We have seen developments beyond these two central archetypes, but the innovations have been piece-meal and singular in their approach, highlighting features that are appealing to blockchain insiders, but providing little as a comprehensive solution to the prevailing problems that blockchains face, especially relating to usability, applicability, and adoption.

Despite cultural and institutional resistance, and setbacks in the form of accessibility, hacks, and scalability having a significant impact on the wider adoption of these and other decentralized applications, a clear and often overlooked success story is unfolding.

Collaborative communities of unprecedented scale are developing game-changing applications through the Ethereum platform. Startups, industry, and governments are investing in and using the Ethereum platform, to build and deploy decentralized blockchain applications across diverse use cases.

A thriving global ecosystem of permissionless innovation and grassroots collaboration is emerging where individuals can create and fund decentralized applications without relying on traditional sources of investment.

Together, Bitcoin and Ethereum have proven that decentralized systems and global collaborative communities can work.

Both these seminal platforms stand as representations of a decentralized future filled with endless possibilities only held back by our imaginations, fears, and our ability to access resources of innovation that have never been utilized before.

Vast improvements and innovations are needed to meet the true promise of blockchain technology, which is fundamentally impacted by accessibility.

To fully utilize the power of blockchain technology and decentralized applications, we require comprehensive bottom up solutions that match complicated societal and cultural systems. The enablement of collaborative technology driven communities at different scales interacting with modern forms of decentralized governance and other organizations in a nested system that accelerates personal sovereignty, financial inclusion, sustainable development, and a movement toward a more circular system of collaboration and consumption.

Much like the early days of the Internet, decentralized systems today remain inaccessible to a broad and diverse group of users. While emerging blockchain technologies have revolutionized usability among an elite developer community, it has fallen short in making the development of decentralized applications easy and accessible to entrepreneurs and innovators, regardless of their technical acumen or literacy.

The time has arrived to take decentralized applications, which have shown so much promise in Bitcoin and Ethereum, to the next level.  

We’re building Metabase from the ground up to empower the world’s most underused resource – entrepreneurs.

A platform that enables a broad and diverse group of entrepreneurs and innovators to build blockchain powered decentralized applications and scale next-generation businesses that can impact global society.

Building the Future on Blockchains

We’re developing Metabase to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges by accessing the untapped ingenuity of innovators around the world. We’re making it much easier for the average technologist to leverage the power of blockchain technologies.

Powerful technological, social, and economic shifts are impacting individuals, industry, nations and the global economy. Legacy financial institutions, governments, and other power centers which play a ‘gatekeeper’ role in the economy are exacerbating social challenges and innovation shortages, as their inherent makeup impedes entrepreneurship and innovation at scale. As a result, world changing ideas are being left unrealized at a time when they are needed most.

We believe that blockchain technology can be a foundation for innovation that if constructed to empower individuals from wide global diasporas, and at varying levels of capabilities, will be able to inspire invention and the courage necessary to address some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Demographic shifts

The world is getting older, especially in developed countries. The world’s ageing population is placing strain on government’s ability to provide basic services, especially in Healthcare. In the developing world, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, future demographic challenges center around high population growth coupled with a trickle down of innovations that are driving a rapidly growing middle-class.  More resource efficient services and new infrastructures that can provide high quality services at a low cost are needed.

Financial inequality and access

Without access to formal financial services, approximately 2/3 of the world’s population will remain excluded from advancements that bring much needed social and economic stability.

For hundreds of millions of low-income people, access to formal financial services will mean the continuation of real economic growth and formal inclusion into the global economy. A move toward a new era of openness, decentralization and global inclusion where the elimination of intermediaries and significant inefficiencies lead to ready availability of financial products for individuals with varying needs is a necessity.

The inability of governments to administer and keep official records of identity and property has continued the cycle of illegitimacy and poverty. It has also lead to stagnant wealth creation, and large unregulated informal economies.

Fragmented and siloed government record keeping systems that lack interoperability need to be replaced by a decentralized, transparent and incorruptible digital infrastructure that empowers financial inclusion and solidifies property rights to end wide scale informal economies and poverty.

If accessible and comprehensively implemented, blockchain technology can be the enabler to reverse the cycle of stagnation that continues to exclude people from the benefits of global economic growth, making too many vulnerable to social upheaval and disaster.

Resource allocation and environmental ecosystems

The dominant linear model of consumption which relies on large quantities of exhaustible resources has become unfit for the global realities we face.

Consumption patterns are coming up against resource constraints. These challenges are compounded by rising demand by the world’s growing, increasingly affluent population, and the imbalance of distribution. The unsustainable overuse of resources, and the ensuing destruction of the environment, is leading to insecurity and leaving many parts of the world uninhabitable. It is also causing economic volatility in global markets.

Powering long-term economic value creation requires the ability to harness under-utilized human capital and technology to create sustainability for our existing resources, while creating new opportunities for our future.

Globalization and trade

We have arrived in a more interconnected, global, and complex world. Global trade flows have increased dramatically leaving governments and their citizens to tackle increasingly complex, multi-jurisdictional issues arising from a lack of transparency and interoperability.

We need to move from linear to circular economies through secure and sovereign P2P transactions of value, transparency and immutability that enable individuals and organizations to circulate and recapture value from their underused assets and facilitate the transition from finite resource usage to the sustainable.

Corporate consolidation

Today most industries are oligopolistic in nature. Corporate consolidation is having a negative impact on global innovation. Recent years have seen records set for corporate mergers and acquisitions. The trend toward heavily consolidated industries is resulting in less incentive to innovate as competition is on the decline.

Increasing competition by enabling innovation from smaller challengers will not only create more consumer choice but will also reallocate wealth to those who can harness technology and human ingenuity. It is imperative that the tools for innovation are evenly distributed and accessible if we are to make progress on our greatest challenges.

Digital security, sovereignty and privacy

For individuals, industry, and government, the world has entered a time of unprecedented risk and complexity. Data breaches have impacted companies and government agencies around the world. From Yahoo, Sony and Target, to the NSA and US Department of Defense, sophisticated hackers are stealing highly sensitive data on an unprecedented scale.

These breaches have caused significant losses in productivity, decreased consumer trust and immeasurable financial and political costs. There is a need for an advanced approach that provides a new level of data security and sovereignty.

Mission

To truly democratize global entrepreneurship and drive innovation we must provide founders and small business owners access to tools which make the creation, development, and scaling of next generation businesses feasible and impactful.

At its core, Metabase is the blockchain ideal for today’s entrepreneurs to create tomorrow’s businesses. Metabase empowers innovators around the world to advance positive change through technological means, by offering a platform for frictionless innovation, that makes the development of new businesses easy and accessible regardless of technical ability or prerequisite knowledge.

Metabase is our aspiration to help entrepreneurs, small business, and enterprise build their business to be future-proof and sustainable using blockchain technology to make a positive impact and provide the requisite tools to power prosperity.

For Entrepreneurs

Metabase will provide innovative toolsets to build, collaborate, grow and monetize new businesses. From concept to development and monetization at rapid speed, founders can drive their creations forward and deliver new products and services quicker than ever before.

For Small Business

Metabase delivers enterprise grade solutions that enable scalability and robustness. The platform seeks to eliminate technological hurdles that impede transformation when responding to change and trying to maintain sustainability.

For Enterprise

We are witnessing the beginning of a global ecosystem of innovation and industrial collaboration. Collaborative industry consortiums are remodeling the competitive arena, developing game-changing applications. Enterprises that are progressive, and that can embrace change, will also be able to utilize Metabase to reinvent themselves and create sustainable futures.

For Government

A smart nation will be equipped with an anti-fragile digital infrastructure that facilitates innovation and powers the evolving services and outcomes their citizens demand. Metabase will be a comprehensive blockchain infrastructure that enables industrial, private/public collaboration, ensuring an economy works to the benefit of all stakeholders in a society.

First Principles

As a company of people from diverse backgrounds, geographies and cultures our perspective on what a comprehensive blockchain solution should be is shaped by our unique experiences, and perspectives on what a good solution is– applied to a specific problem. Within this framework we propose that metabase should be a solution that makes it easier for entrepreneurs and innovators, regardless of their background, to be able to build next-generation blockchain powered businesses.

The Metabase Blockchain Protocol Design Scope

We started with the System Dynamics of what we think would be a suitable tool for blockchain innovation, taking a 3-D approach to designing a system that, within a framework, serves the needs of entrepreneurs challenging some of the world’s toughest problems using the ideals and promise of blockchain and decentralized technologies.

We began to imagine a blockchain that was able to manage the best aspects of value storage, velocity, and a medium of exchange when designing the framework for its Economic Policy. We decided early on that our offer to the blockchain ecosystem would be based on advanced thinking in  Human Systems as opposed to rigid technocracy when designing a protocol that would facilitate better industrial and social constructs, all while maintaining that collaborative communities that make up circular economies will require cryptographic mechanisms that maintain Security and Sovereignty in ways reinvent our current systems and accentuate the benefits of utilizing blockchain technology to advance change and innovation.

The Metabase Blockchain Protocol Design Principles

There have been some excellent contributions to blockchain innovation in the last few years. We seek to follow in the tradition with our own contribution, from our own perspective, that will provide an alternative to innovators in our growing space.

We continued our design scope to encompass values in building our system that put Broad Accessibility and Usability at the forefront to make blockchain technology more widely pervasive. We also believe that the protocol and underlying technology should be Easy to Understand. Too many people after years of reading, conferences, and courses still have misconstrued notions of what a blockchain is and what it is not. Most times the industry moves so fast that many fundamental areas of understanding are skipped for the novelty of what the industry seems to promise. The notion that a blockchain is a panacea for industries ad infinitum is a mythology, and we believe that like all other industries, design decisions and differentiation, will add to the diversity of the industry and help it grow.

Holding the first two principles as axiomatic, we also believe that in order to achieve this the Metabase platform must be Secure by Design. This assurance must be built into the system so that it is innocuous without infringing on the first two principles.

The current dominant design in the blockchain pantheon is still based on “Proof of Work” consensus. Although effective, it is not Sustainable and Inexpensive, which is a principle we believe must be embedded in our protocol design to reach the broadest adoption from a variety of different perspectives and blockchain innovators.

It has also become apparent that one of the major areas overlooked in decentralized systems are new forms of Transparent Governance. We believe that this is an area that demands greater innovation and we have made this fundamental to our ambitions and within the traditions of innovation of the blockchain community.

Blockchain protocols and decentralized applications are transforming industry and our notions of governance. However, within this transition, we still need to adhere to rules and norms through Real-world legal integration with the ambition that proper implementation and adoption will create accepted practices when interacting with decentralized and autonomous applications.

We’re building our protocol to last and create value for years to come. Given the rapid advancements in blockchain technology, we foresee that platforms that are Agnostic and Interoperable will have the best chance of enduring and creating the most value for entrepreneurs, industry, and governments.

Lastly, and aligned with our mission and community, we believe that a blockchain protocol should be Modular and Configurable providing flexibility for a variety of different micro services that can offer a range of benefits for use cases that we have not imagined yet.