Decentralization Against Isolation
Duration: 00:31:12
Speaker: E. Glen Weyl
Type: Talk
Expertise: Beginner
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Individuals make public goods contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is (proportional to) twice the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received. Under the “standard model” this yields first best public goods provision and some modest modifications can make it fairly robust against collusive or altruistic deviations from that model. We discuss applications to campaign finance, development ecosystems, news media finance and, more broadly, implications for the liberal-communitarian debate.
