Essay 1: Higher is Not a Headless Brand
Essay 2: The Token is The Problem and The Opportunity
In theory, a sufficiently deep practice can be continuously refined and is continuously relevant.
In theory, a sufficiently deep practice can be continuously refined and is continuously relevant.
If a practice is of true value to the world, even if it is not of obvious financial value, it will likely persist not only because it is durable, but also as people attempt to preserve it for future generations.
In essence, the practice becomes trustworthy, as a result of the value it is able to generate for it's practitioners and the world, and scene participants act to protect it from fading into irrelevance.
As a reminder, higher's cultural practice is to explore new ways of seeing and feeling higher irrespective of market action.
Essentially, decoupling perception from reality and therefore enabling more agentic behaviour.
Wisdom traditions, art, and neuroscience have all pointed to the idea that perception is not reality, with their most dedicated practitioners benefiting from the integration of this insight into their daily lives.
What is novel about higher is the location at which this insight has emerged.
Technology, Money, and Mind all intersect at the site of the higher scene as it is today. There are perhaps no more pervasive and influential forces shaping human destiny at this time.
The uniqueness of higher's location amidst these forces influences the possible innovations that could arise out of the scene. And hence so may be their value - unique.
If we want to continue to explore higher, together and preserve the uniqueness of this scene, the scene will need to continue to collaborate with one another and finding ways of ensuring that activity continues.
One effective approach to achieving this, whilst aligning all participants, is to establish a sustainable funding model where speculative market activity on HIGHER remains viable while simultaneously generating resources to support collaboration and cultural initiatives.
If people are going to speculate on the scene and gain financially, it makes sense that the scene should try and partake in some of those gains.
The possibility of liquidity being removed, in which case the token would no longer tradable, would be a return to how things were before the token.
If we don't want to go back, if you believe that there is value in what could emerge from the scene as it is today, we might wish to move forward in a way that protects the possibility of trading the token and provides funding to sustain cultural practices.
In other words, if we think the higher scene is valuable, we might do what we can to preserve it, so that we can go higher forever.
Introducing: Permapools
A Permapool is a 50/50 liquidity pool where pooled funds are permanently locked and cannot be withdrawn, however, additional funds can be added, and distribution of the fees generated from the pool can be configured in multiple ways.
In practice, the appeal of a Permapool is that it incorporates a form of neutral territory for a scene as the funds inside the LP continually service speculation on the value of the scene's culture whilst also generating fees that can be utilised to fund cultural activity within the scene.
Permapools not only provide a shared source of value but they also generate revenue in the process.
This is good for every kind of scene participant.
Pure Contributors solely engaging the scene's cultural practice, benefit either through direct funding or through the effects of increased scene activity and exploration, dependent on how the LP generated funds are deployed.
Pure Speculators solely speculating on the scene through token holdings, benefit from increased LP to trade into, and can also speculate on the potential for deployed LP generated funds to increase or decrease demand for token holdings without fear of not being able to trade the token if LP is pulled.
and
Hybrid Speculator-Contributors, engaging both the scene's cultural practice and allocating funds to speculation, benefit from the impact of deployed scene activity funding, can bet on their own work, and also do not have to fear the possibility of being unable to trade the token in future.
In summary, through Permapools, speculative market action creates a source of sustainable funding for collaboration on scene activity which aligns all forms of participant.
How to use the generated fees
Distribution of the fees is an important piece of the puzzle around Permapools and is only limited by the necessity for generated fees to be used in ways that also align all participants.
We can examine what kinds of considerations we need to make by considering each kind of scene participant:
Pure Contributors want fees to be used for funding cultural activity.
Pure Speculators want fees to be used to drive changes to token price.
Hybrid Speculator-Contributors want both.
This limits fee spending to activities that drive token price action and advance scene activity.
How this might unfold for higher
Currently, there exist pools of funds that are centralised in the wallets of the Higher Party and Aethernet that could be used in ways that align all participants.
However, as it stands there is no clear public process or guidelines for how these funds should be distributed or requested. Both of these pooled funds were also left unmentioned in the latest (awesome) update to aimhigher.net.
However, seeing higher as a scene as opposed to a Headless Brand, I see no fatal problem with this, and simply see that these funds exist in the control of two different types of genius within a multi-genius scene.
The pooled funds in those wallets are not locked, which allows for more freedom in where they can move and how they can be used, but also means that they require protection from adversarial parties.
And these forms of genius do distribute funds, the reality is simply that there is a high friction to getting your hands on them which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Far from suggesting that these two parties operate any differently, I believe that their forms of genius may be ultimately healthy for the ecosystem.
Permapools simply offer the possibility at alternative forms of genius, which these parties could choose to support, or not.
If the scene wants to continue to evolve durably, and birth genius, this diversity is a good thing.
Diversity allows for conflict and conflict can help to refine processes. It also provides resilience, stability, and adaptability for the ecosystem as a whole.
As long as engagement in conversation, collaborations, and exploration continues, the scene can continue to distribute genius even if parties aren't always aligned.
Everything is always changing. We are in a good spot.
Perma-Higher
To examine how Permapools might be of maximal benefit, we need to take a look at:
How Permapools are different from current scene infrastructure
Why trade volume increases
How to support the widest range of scene participants
The Power of Permapools
The two major differences between what Permapools can do for higher versus what Aethernet or The Higher Party have already done is in the permanent locking of LP funds and the possibility for alternate forms of governance over funds.
Valuably, both Aethernet and the Higher Party are currently providing LP to the market, and generating fees, but there is no guarantee that they won't pull liquidity, and their governance structures trade-off either security for speed or speed for security.
In both cases, huge enthusiasm from earnest members of the scene led to large donations to wallets that are now mostly inactive. In both cases, huge trust was required of the governance structure, and the responsibility of utilising those funds was also equally high with the potential for huge losses - a probable cause of their inactivity.
Permapools represent the opportunity for lower-risk donations from those who want to support the scene as well as more efficient ways of coordinating. As long as a Permapool is set up to automatically take donations and place all or some of them into the LP permanently, donators can be sure that they are supporting the token's stability and longevity. This creates the space for more risky forms of governance over the generated fees, as most of the donated funds are protected.
Governance is limited to what % of donations are added to the LP and how fees are distributed and used.
The opportunity is then for multiple kinds of iteration of the Permapool concept to arise, with different forms of governance that can take more risk and move quicker, with different forms of fee utilisation.
In every case, there is also the opportunity to use donations to the permapool in exchange for long-term alignment from the governing entity.
In summary, Permapools enable a new kind of participant (or form of genius) within the scene that can support the the scene both financially and culturally in ways that existing pooled funding entities cannot.
Increasing Trade Volume
Trade volume is a measure of the total value traded. As trade volume increases, the amount of fees captured by a Permapool increases. Trade volume can be thought of as a function of demand for the token over time.
This means that, in theory, one can increase the volume traded by either increasing or decreasing demand for either of the tokens in the token pair.
This provides incredible durability for Permapools, in that almost any scenario of change that effects the tokens in the liquidity pool can generate more funds for cultural activities.
Supporting the widest range of scene participants
Ultimately, every kind of participant can benefit from more market activity and more cultural activity, both of which are downstream of more participants. Speculators benefit from more participants like themselves to trade against and more activity to speculate on the outcome of. Contributors of all kinds benefit from a greater total amount of participant attention, exchange, and collaboration within the scene. In aggregate, more participants supports all participants.
In summary:
The higher scene has the potential to provide unique value to the world.
Permapools are a low-trust way for pooled funds to generate more funds.
Funds are best spent in ways that increase the number of scene participants.
