The internet has changed.

At its dawn, many had hoped that unparalleled access to information and communication would unify humanity towards a paradigm shift for global liberation: collective betterment seemed to be on the rise.

Instead, the digital frontier has been colonized by large corporations, governments, and commercial ventures, exploited for its key resources at unimaginable scale and depth. Centralized platforms have gentrified social and information networks, harvesting data en masse to catalog and commodify human activity. Our attention is under surveillance, confined to narrow echo-chambers and sold as lucrative bounties. Knowledge is kept restricted behind paywalls or submerged under advertisements into oblivion. Rather than liberating humanity through borderless interconnectivity, we became subjected to even deeper polarization and radical divergence.

Despite early hopes, the internet sold out by selling us out. It did so at no fault of its own, but in mimicry of a broken system. Perhaps most damning is the disillusionment: as we feel powerless against the all-knowing algorithm, we sedate ourselves with indifference and grow dependent on its prediction. The monopolized internet became another notch in the epoch of purgatorial decadence from which we’ve become relentlessly cynical.

In the abundance of apathy, we are starved of meaning. In our constant oppression, we yield distrust. Over time, we have a surplus. From the absence of trust in our governments, banks, employers, and now our internet, we seek agency through our own means. The growing momentum towards decentralization has awakened potential for trustless coordination to shift the paradigm on our terms. With these new affordances, we reclaim the digital commons made rich from our contributions: Web3.

Web3 in its nascency has shown alternative monetary and contractual systems can sustain self-organization without centralized power or violent means of coercion. Ethereum blockchain and the emergence of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are developing new modes of internet-native governance that create and empower communities to securely fund and coordinate over common purpose. Despite their early promise, DAO infrastructures are yet to be defined.

Daoism Systems is joining the movement towards a borderless, permissionless, global society by supporting these emergent organizations with the best decentralized infrastructures. Our contribution to peaceful change is rooted in a commitment to excellence for those uniting in web3. We intend to work with our partners through interdependence, taking their specific needs as our own in pursuit of the decentralized renaissance.

As the 道(‘dao’) from Chinese philosophy, we don’t take sides in blockchain or framework wars to bring balance in the web3 space. We work towards wholeness through tolerance in an effort to cultivate meaning and empowerment over common goals in web3. We come from the DAO space and will dissolve in it by changing its form.

We are everywhere and nowhere. We are Daoism Systems.