Memetics and meta-hacking

From Pillar to Commons: Giveth and The Meta-Hack

Part 5: Where hard lessons meet hopeful visions and lead to new forms of coordination

After leaving Pillar, I attended the Web3 Summit in Berlin where I connected with the Giveth community. During those conversations, I started advocating for cryptoeconomic primitives like token curated registries, bonding curves, and webs of trust, while pushing the Ostrom narrative around commons governance.

Coincidentally, a new Giveth contributor named Jeff Emmett was starting to write for an emerging consultancy that would later become BlockScience. Though he wasn’t at the summit, this connection became a point of convergence when I found myself discussing commons governance and token engineering concepts with Giveth co-founder Griff Green over falafel, exploring how these cryptoeconomic primitives might work together.

Joining Giveth: A Different Approach

I moved on to work with Giveth, a crypto charity that was experimenting with more holistic organizational patterns like Holacracy. While it wasn’t exactly what I’d envisioned, it felt like a step toward using blockchain technology for social good rather than purely financial speculation.

Giveth was attempting to create transparent, decentralized funding mechanisms for public goods and charitable causes. The technical challenges were interesting, but what really captured my attention was the organizational experiment itself - could we build genuinely decentralized organizations that served broader social purposes?

Snowballing Toward Odyssey

The Berlin conversations began snowballing around January 2019. Commons governance frameworks, cryptoeconomic primitives, and Giveth’s existing community were creating conditions for something larger to emerge.

While Giveth Makers were preparing for the ETH Denver hackathon in Colorado, 4,500km away I had stumbled into the Nature 2.0 team presenting Odyssey at the ETHLondon event. It became apparent there was a circuit: AraCon (Jan 28-30), ETH Denver (Feb 15-17), ETH CC (Mar 5-7), ETH Paris (Mar 8-10), and the warmup events leading to Odyssey - so we decided to speed-run them all.

Deep Dives and Team Formation

While the original Giveth hackteam (who would brand themselves “Pactful”) was headed to ETH Denver to compete for social impact prizes, Jeff and I went to the Odyssey deep dives. Our goal was to recruit developers to build out the Giveth 2.0 vision - a biomimetic curation DAO with stigmergic governance mechanisms.

The deep dives took us around the Netherlands by train, visiting different track presentations. The first day was spent at a church in Den Bosch learning about Ocean Protocol - a rather biblical setting that felt like synchronicity from the track sponsor.

Day two in Amsterdam was particularly productive. At the Nature 2.0 presentation by Boom Chicago comedians, the brief was “building the unimaginable but buildable” - LEGO cities and connecting dots. Here, a primitive triad formed between myself and new friends Roberto and Ilia, whose projects “WeQuest” and “Comeo” had remarkably similar visions to Giveth.

On the train back to Amsterdam, we decided to form not just a team, but teams - plural. The recruiting had been so successful that we ended up with FOUR TEAMS collaborating to meta-game the hackathon.

The Commons Stack Vision: What Emerged from the Circuit

The Commons Stack concept crystallized from this sequence of hackathons and the ongoing conversations with BlockScience contributors, Giveth community members, and researchers exploring token engineering applications. Rather than building another DeFi protocol, we were attempting to create technical infrastructure that could enable different forms of human coordination - systems that incentivized the creation and maintenance of public goods rather than just more sophisticated financial speculation.

The challenge was translating the cryptoeconomic primitives and commons governance frameworks into working prototypes that could demonstrate these principles in practice.

The technical architecture consisted of five interconnected modules that we prototyped during the meta-hack:

Proposal Framework (Giveth 2.0): A refactored donation and project coordination system building on lessons learned from years of operating the original Giveth platform. The new version was designed to work on xDai (now Gnosis Chain), incorporating everything we’d learned about what actually worked versus what sounded good in theory.

Continuous Signaling Mechanism: A system where individuals could stake real value to signal support for proposals with weighted capacity, so that proposals would naturally decay without sustained support. The mechanism was passive by design but active by choice - you could remain neutral simply by not participating, but if you wanted action, you had to put “skin in the game.”

Curved Bonding Engine: Mathematical relationships for continuous funding that allowed communities to collectively determine resource allocation. Instead of traditional all-or-nothing fundraising, these curves enabled dynamic support that could grow or shrink based on actual community engagement.

Reputation and Attestation Network: Building on SourceCred’s contribution tracking, this would map flows of value in collaborative projects, attempting to make visible the kinds of contributions that typically go unrecognized - emotional labor, facilitation, translation between different groups.

Fair-Trade Mutual Credit System: A mechanism for value exchange that didn’t require debt-based money creation, enabling communities to trade value based on actual productive capacity rather than promises of future extraction.

The vision was ambitious but grounded in practical experience. We called it a “load balancer for society” - a way to distribute resources and attention toward genuine collective needs rather than manufactured scarcity. The patterns were designed to be modular and fractal, allowing communities to adopt pieces that worked for them rather than requiring wholesale systemic adoption.

The Odyssey Meta-Hack

The breakthrough came during Odyssey 2019, which took place on a pirate ship called “Mars” - literally a coliving/coworking environment on water. This wasn’t your typical hackathon; it was an experiment in “meta-hacking” - multiple coordinated teams working on interconnected aspects of larger systemic challenges.

I served as a “Jedi” - focused on networking and communication rather than just coding. My role was helping different teams understand how their projects could connect and support each other, creating a larger ecosystem rather than individual applications.

The five-team strategy proved remarkably successful. Each team worked on different pieces of what we were calling the Commons Stack, and several teams won prizes which covered the boat costs and validated the collaborative approach.

The stories we shared and collective dreams we developed during Odyssey were compelling. We envisioned leveraging cryptographic primitives to build and barter social critical infrastructure while manifesting “moving cities” - nomadic communities that could coordinate resources and governance across geographic boundaries.

The pirate ship setting wasn’t just romantic; it was practical demonstration. Here we were, a temporary autonomous zone on international waters, experimenting with new governance forms and resource sharing while building technology to enable similar experiments at larger scales.

We were developing “Hack-alongs, not Hackathons” - extended collaborative processes allowing deeper relationships and more sophisticated coordination rather than weekend sprints.

Mental Models Integration

Around this time, my intellectual frameworks were integrating into something more coherent. I’d always read broadly - Kahneman, Taleb, and other mainstream voices - but was now diving into more esoteric territory: Gurdjieff, Robert Anton Wilson, and thinkers who approached systems from non-conventional angles.

Everything was coming together into a second-order meta-model. I was seeing causal patterns across previously unrelated domains. The Riso-Hudson enneagram model provided a framework for understanding social dynamics that helped explain organizational challenges I’d witnessed at Pillar.

The integration connected my audio engineering background (laws of vibration, harmonic relationships) with organizational dynamics (power structures, emergence patterns) and economic mechanisms (incentive design, coordination problems).

Organizational Challenges and Competing Visions

As the Commons Stack concept gained traction, it began attracting participants with different visions of what the project should become. The collaborative, experimental approach that had made the initial meta-hack successful came into tension with more conventional approaches to funding and organizational structure.

Different factions emerged: some wanted to focus on narrow technical implementations that could attract traditional VC funding, while others wanted to maintain the transformational vision but struggled with practical implementation challenges.

The decentralized, collaborative spirit that had made the pirate ship experiment work was gradually being replaced by more conventional organizational hierarchies and gatekeeping around project direction and narrative control.

The experience highlighted how complex the challenge really was: we were building technology for individual data sovereignty while learning firsthand how collective coordination actually happens through informal agreements and emergent hierarchies.

Moving Forward

The Commons Stack experience demonstrated both the potential and the challenges of collaborative meta-hacking. The technical architecture we developed was sound, and the five-team coordination proved that sophisticated collaboration was possible without traditional management hierarchies.

But the fragmentation also showed how difficult it is to maintain collaborative spirit when projects gain traction and attract participants with different motivations. The very success that validated our approach also created conditions for its dissolution.

The experience left me with valuable technical skills in cryptoeconomic mechanism design and a clearer understanding of what it takes to sustain commons-based collaboration at scale. What came next would build on these lessons while exploring new approaches to community coordination - but that’s a story for the next post.

Next in the series: “Liminal Beginnings: The First Hackalong” - where lessons from commons experiments meet intentional community building and new approaches to coordination.