The Crypto Commons Association CCA was originally founded in April 2021 by Felix Fritsch and Giulio Quarta as a legal entity aiming “to actively promote the development of digital common goods and infrastructure in the field of distributed ledger technology (blockchain and the like, referred to as 'Crypto Commons' in the context of the association), their academic reception and analysis, their public accessibility as well as their broad social application and appropriation.”

The digital common goods and infrastructure to be promoted include, in particular, freely accessible protocols that are beneficial to the common good by making planetary resource limits visible; coordination mechanisms for decision-making of horizontally organized groups; as well as market mechanisms which, in addition to internalizing external costs, generate funds for the regeneration of natural commons.

The academic reception and analysis of “Crypto Commons” to be promoted includes, in addition to scientific work, also and above all the design and accelerated development of the emerging interdisciplinary scientific field itself. The promotion of its public accessibility regards not only low-threshold, popular-descriptive access to secure technical and factual knowledge but also socio-political and socio-economic possibilities of interpretation, which allow a public to position itself in relation to these technologies.

What are the Crypto Commons? Crypto commons are a subset of digital commons emerging in the context of Distributed Ledger Technology. They comprise base layer protocols, applications built on top of them as well as tools and mechanisms used in their design and calibration. In contrast to pre-DLT commons they usually make active use of market mechanisms and economic incentives in order to reward contributions to the common Good.

Their solid grounding in market mechanism design as well as their distributed and permissionless operation by loose networks of incentivized supporters opens up the possibility of scaling Commons frameworks beyond the local and immediate. As a computational and organizational substrate for decentralized economies, they reinvigorate post-capitalist visions of commoning as a mode of production formulated in the wake of the internet.