Ever since Jacob Horne bombastically demanded we all apply mathematical models of thinking to cryptoeconomic structures sometime in early 2022, I have been deep in thought. If I’m being honest, it’s truly just been utterly captivating to me. Horne’s structured philosophy of hyperstructuralism is both elegant in its premises, easily adaptable to new paradigms within the cryptosphere, and endlessly scalable in modeling ever-growing structures. That said, I approach with a singular critique that perhaps the name is a bit too grand for what it accomplishes as it stops more or less at the protocol: No meta-entity could ever truly embody the label of being a hyperstructure by definition, as the network effects of the DAO may necessitate governance over non-hyperstructures simultaneously with their true cousins. I contend that hyperstructures can only ever exist at the DAO specific level (that is, that entity governing a protocol) and could never exist outside that: They are too narrowly defined to extend to higher levels and thus, I find the hyperstructure model to be limited in application beyond the singular, individual DAO. In this article, I hope to introduce a more defined set of models for metagovernance, what that looks like, how it might work, and thereby define the next logical step: Metastructures.

The US Federal Reserve estimates that in the US alone, ostensibly one of the major superpowers of the world, about 22% of the population remains in a classification of “unbanked”—someone that either doesn’t have a bank account or is operating on a prepaid account only. This population is underrepresented and underserved, not just in the US though, but around the world. Many populations worldwide struggle to find proper banking and consequently are denied access to advanced financial features that wealthier people have at their disposal. The unbanked are unable to generate wealth because they are unable to put their money back to work for them and they can’t do that because they are blocked from the simplest financial entry point: The banking system. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, aims to change that and is the only viable solution to this problem that has a working proof of concept already operational worldwide.

To date, most modern societies with powerful economies have functioned around some form of capitalism, or at least benefited from borrowed theories of such. And this is fine: Capitalism, when in a healthy, burgeoning state, encourages the individual accumulation of wealth through entrepreneurship which eventually stimulates economic growth through the tools of labor and wages. And when it works, it can work really well! In a capitalist society, you can have an idea and start a business on that idea that sells to others around you. To expand on that idea and further grow the business, you can hire other people to work on your idea. This provides you with labor, one of the most important tools available to us for the creation of wealth, and it provides the employee with wages, money that will then get spent back into the economy and drive further demand for goods and services. At its most fundamental, simplified core, we have just described a market and it is this foundation upon which capitalism tends to be built.