The network coordinates who does what so that people get what they want at a lower cost or higher quality.

It has the goals of:

• Reducing wealth inequality to a humane level
• Serving as a global social security network so people can at least survive
• Removing inefficiencies induced by monetary economies
• Providing a digital-native foundation for a fair, efficient, and effective legal system
• Providing the accounting infrastructure to tackle global problems like climate change
• Providing process management and operations solutions to existing businesses and institutions
• Serving as an algorithmic venture capital firm that allocates resources to valuable activities
• Giving people more head space to think about their situation
• Serving as a global economic health dashboard
• Coordinating towards a more desirable time for all of us

At the heart of the protocol is an abstraction over social coordination that can represent every possible organization. The abstraction is chosen so that computers can reason about action and effect throughout possibly quite complex organizations, and recommend what to do differently to better fulfill peoples wants.

In the network you negotiate social coordination directly, in terms of what you do and don’t do. From that, a new paradigm of coordination markets emerges.

It’s based on the idea of a match, essentially complementary statements of “I do this if you do that” with all participants accepting the plan.

The network provides an auction mechanism to negotiate matches, accounting of open interest from accepted matches, verification of physical delivery, and according settlement in the virtual.

Matching through wants and commitments

On a high level, users get matched through their declared wants with commitments.

Users express their want as constraints on reality, explicitly specifying how their representation of reality relates to measurements of the actual world.

Further, users declare their commitments, expressed as conditional actions. It is an official statement to do a certain action in all situations that matches the condition.

The aggregate of all users wants makes the economies demand side, with the aggregate of all commitments making up the supply side of the economy.

This can be seen as a generalization of the order book. But really it’s a new paradigm of coordination markets as automatic multi-phase negotiations about who does what become feasable. We think this will be more efficient and effective than existing coordination mechanisms like companies, money, laws, political institutions, and text messages.

Principles

Ask Protocol is designed to introduce as little complexity as possible. It achieves this by defining a very simple representation of the sensory-motor cycle which abstracts out how you see the world and what you value in that world. The simplicity in the accounting system then gives rise to great organizational complexity in practice. Because the chosen representation of social coordination is computable, the viability of a given organization can be reasoned about automatically.

Especially the real-time declaration of wants brings efficiency. It enables a proactive economy through collaborative and computer-assisted planning. Instead of relying on price discovery which operates retroactively. Proactive planning essentially adds an information channel to the markets through which one can more precisely negotiate who does what through simple message types want, commit, propose-accept-reject and primitives of situational condition, causal action, transferable reasoning about effects, and expression of value through wants.

What we do right now

In that order:

1. Implementing the third major version of the trading system. It consists of the AskFi SDK and AskFi Runtime. Strategies and domain models are defined in terms of the SDK. The Runtime uses those models and strategies to actually observe, interpret, decide, and do something, whereby it produces a data trail.
2. Mapping out a strategic plan on Omnistrat
3. Implementing a generalized +EV crawler as a parameterized strategy, with validation via different use cases:
   1. crypto market making
   2. power grid asset optimization
   3. social network to optimize spare time
4. Derive tokenomics from that algorithm, decentralizing the +EV crawler

Read more

If this got you curious, here’s some more reading for you:

• An overall introduction going over the problem and frames the solution.
• The Lightpaper that explains the solution from zero to one, as concise as possible.
• A new approach to algorithmic trading, outlining how the ideas proposed here relate to financial markets and shows how a new approach to algorithmic trading emerges from it.
• Positioning, showing how Ask Network is the next evolution of the global financial system.
• Something about me, outlining my past projects and how they influenced me to build this.