Welcome Seasteading community! Seasteading isn’t just about floating homes, these floating communities are about evolving our relationship with each other and with the earth. It’s also about creating a more abundant and efficient world. To help bring Arktide’s vision to fruition, it is necessary to explore and integrate new and emerging technologies. One of those is blockchain technology, which will serve as a foundation for a whole new wave of technological advances. In this blog, we will discuss the ways in which we can incorporate blockchain to help create efficient and secure communities in the ocean.
If you are new to blockchain, it is best defined as a shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a network. An asset can be physical (a house, car, cash, land) or non-physical (intellectual property, branding). Virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a blockchain network, reducing risk and cutting costs for all involved. These assets can be turned into fungible or non-fungible tokens (NFTs); fungible meaning they are all equal and can be traded for the same value, and non-fungible meaning they are not of equal value as they each have different characteristics or one-of-a-kind.
Blockchain helps to facilitate the transfer of information, whether that is transactions, ownership, rules, or even access to certain events or places. In a floating community, things like seastead ownership, community rules, and community members can all be stored on a public blockchain network which only people from that community have permission to access. There could also be smaller private blockchain networks for organizations like businesses, schools, or hospitals. All network participants have access to the distributed ledger and its immutable record of transactions. With this shared ledger, transactions are recorded only once, eliminating the duplication of effort that’s typical of traditional business networks.
To speed transactions, a set of rules called a smart contract, is stored on the blockchain and executed automatically. A smart contract can define conditions for community access, community rules, and business activity. They can execute clauses automatically if the required criteria are met. Therefore, these smart contracts can be used to manage communities based on the agreed rules. These contracts are like normal contracts, with the benefit of automatically executing clauses, rather than having to hire a legal team to review the contract and begin the process.
These blockchains and smart contracts can further be expanded by developing community tokens. These tokens could serve as proof of residence in a particular community. Tokens can be used as a form of governance, allowing residents in a community to vote on changes they would like to see in their community and its rules. Tokens could also provide a means of access to resources provided to community residents.
Assets, products, and services could also be tokenized in a seasteading community, allowing for easier proof of ownership and a more efficient way of transferring and transacting them. The real power of Non-Fungible tokens is that anything that has a title can rest in an NFT which is a one-of-a-kind serialized token. The benefit of having tokenized titles is that it cuts out a lot of middlemen when it comes to the transfer or transaction of an asset. With a tokenized title, anyone who is interested in purchasing can easily look at the history of that token/title and obtain the information necessary.
These tokens could further be subdivided and sold, granting token holders temporary or conditional access to certain assets, products, or services. When it comes to managing your seastead, these subdivided tokens could serve as access. For example, you can subdivide into 365 tokens for each day of the year, and by buying those tokens, people can get access to your seastead for the specific night/nights that the token represents. Rather than having to list your property through a third party, you can sell the tokens directly to the customer and avoid having to pay fees for that service.
For hotels, it’s great because a lot of times they have different classes/types of rooms, and by having them tokenized these rooms could be sold in an open market where the prices can fluctuate based on supply and demand for that specific room/hotel. Smart contracts can also be set up so that the whole process of reserving a room is automated, reducing the amount of time and people involved.
As we can see, the implementation of blockchain technology in seasteading communities would increase the efficiency of their economies. Blockchain will not only change the way people interact and exchange, but it will also alter the technology which we use to do so.
Sources:
https://www.ibm.com/topics/what-is-blockchain
