Code that runs free, forever, and without maintenance

Technology has scaled by increasingly relying on large, trusted, and centralized institutions like data hosting by Amazon Web Services, identity graphs by Facebook, or the advertising network of Google AdX. However, these have costs, downtime, and censorship risk.

I’m exploring digitally-native order books and request-for-quote marketplaces in different industries. Some of these marketplaces can be replaced by code, and with an open and transparent marketplace, increase business outcomes by easing the process of price discovery.

How might we conduct business when you can remove operating expenses, interested parties can directly transact with each other, and code becomes your counterparty?

Traditional infrastructure like power grids and social media platforms require a trusted intermediary to maintain and operate it. This technology infrastructure would run on an open crypto protocol. As long as the underlying blockchain is running, this code will run without a maintainer or operator.

Crypto protocols have reached the scale, latency, and cost efficiency needed to operate at internet-level scale. For example, Solana has 100% uptime for 6 months, handling 10k transactions per second (tps), 400ms latency, and per transaction costs of $0.00025, with Firedancer able to take this to 100k tps. LayerN is an Ethereum L2 for finance use cases which theoretically handles 100k tps with <50ms latency.

Whether this is a B2B or B2C product, our users or businesses would choose use because we provide significantly better financial outcomes. Primarily, this could come from removed middlemen costs or better price discovery. Secondary ways this occurs is due to more options due to lack of regulation, aka being available 24/7, lower settlement times, or wider range of product availability.

An example of this is Uniswap, a decentralized financial exchange, vs. a centralized exchange competitor like Coinbase. Uniswap often has better prices due to deeper liquidity, removes middlemen fees, and has every digital asset available.

Inspiration, and much of the content, comes from this article: