Overview

In Part 1: On DEXs,we examined how previous decentralized exchange models fail to balance the needs and interests of liquidity providers, traders, and tokenholders—the so‑called DEX Trilemma.

In Part 2: On the Token, we introduced the MetaDEX’s token model and laid out the proposition that tokens must manage and distribute a protocol’s productive value to be maximally useful.

In Part 3: On Issuance, we explored how emissions and dilution reallocate proportional control and provided a framework for how to evaluate issuance programs in decentralized settings.

In Part 4: On Sustainability, we introduced emissions in the MetaDEX model and worked through the conditions under which the MetaDEX’s compensation model would be sustainable.

Now, we turn our attention to a new design challenge: contributor alignment. How should those who build and maintain decentralized systems be compensated, and how can we ensure their incentives remain tightly coupled to the long-term health of their organizations?

This is not a new problem. Most organizations—corporate, cooperative, or decentralized—struggle to balance the needs of three distinct groups:

• Teams, who coordinate and build

• Users, who generate and derive value from the organization

• Investors, who provide capital

This challenge, which we call the Alignment Trilemma, has long shaped institutional design. But in traditional systems, the tradeoffs are structural and persistent. As a firm scales, it almost inevitably deprioritizes one of these groups—and it’s rarely the teams.

Decentralized systems offer an opportunity to break this cycle. Unlike legacy firms, they are not bound by the same limitations. When designed well, they can collapse these stakeholder roles entirely. They can structurally align participants rather than just balance them.

But to date, most DeFi protocols have failed to realize this promise. Many centralize control in treasuries, route value through privileged contributors, and treat users and tokenholders as “community” rather than as equals. As these insider-outsider dynamics deepen, these protocols become more extractive, and themselves more vulnerable to replacement. In effect, most protocols have recreated the same organizational standards they were meant to replace.

Breaking the wheel

The MetaDEX takes a different approach. It channels value directly to contributors through a dedicated veNFT—a voting position established at launch, perpetually locked, and maintained with auto-compounding and programmatic buy-backs. In this model, contributors are rewarded the same as any user: through participation and adding value. This flat and transparent structure enforces alignment and effectiveness. Here:

• Contributors earn liquid, transparent compensation without drawing from stakeholder value.​

• Voting positions acting solely in the protocol's interest grow strategic liquidity and stakeholdership.​

• Existing contributors can be permissionlessly extended or replaced, as others step into the same incentive framework.

In this installment, we explore how the MetaDEX model addresses the Alignment Trilemma by structurally integrating contributors, users, and investors. By ensuring that value flows directly to participants based on their engagement and contributions, the MetaDEX is built to outcompete incumbents by delivering superior value to users without compromise.

Alignment in organizations

We have written extensively on how best to design an organization in decentralized settings. The general idea: the less need there is for central command, the more value should flow to users. But in practice, standing up any organization, decentralized or otherwise, requires significant upfront coordination and resources. Even Bitcoin, often held up as the gold standard of decentralization, began with a core team.

And any organization with a dedicated team faces the same foundational challenge: how to ensure that the team is acting in the best interests of those it’s meant to serve. Economists call this the agency problem, which arises anytime one party is empowered to act on behalf of another. 

This problem is universal. Public companies have boards, audits, and shareholder rights, and they still misallocate capital or chase quarterly earnings at the expense of long-term health. Governments have constitutions, checks and balances, and they still drift toward insider capture or self-serving bureaucracy. Startups (and DeFi protocols) use vesting schedules and stock options, and they still see early employees cash out long before users see real value or protocols have achieved any durable measure of success. 

The core issue isn’t the lack of structure; the issue is that no structure that separates stakeholders in this way can fully bind incentives to outcomes without tradeoffs. This is the pattern the Alignment Trilemma attempts to formalize: the structural tension between users (who want value), stakeholders (who want return), and teams (who want autonomy and compensation). Prioritize any two, and the third tends to be compromised. The best you can do, it seems, is to design structures with context-appropriate compromises without fully resolving them. Most of the time, the market supports these structures.

Examples of these structures abound.

Public corporations structurally separate all three groups. The team works for shareholders; users are monetized. Value flows to insiders and then to investors, often at the cost of users, and sometimes at the cost of shareholders themselves when control gets too centralized.

Private firms and partnerships collapse the team and stakeholders, aligning incentives more tightly among them, but they can maintain an adversarial relationship with users. Cory Doctorow’s enshittification, the process by which an organization shifts from subsidizing users to extracting from them to drive up earnings, can sometimes accelerate under such structures, such as private equity.

Cooperatives (and Collectives) collapse users and stakeholders, giving the people who use the product some claim to control, but they often suffer in execution, because the team lacks autonomy or strong upside.

Alignment under traditional models

To make this concrete, consider a bike company structured like the diagram below—a standard corporate model.

This company took shareholder money to buy raw materials, hire a team to build and sell bikes, and deliver these bikes to users. Any value that goes back to shareholders is mediated by the company itself, managed by its internal actors: the board, executives, and employees. 

This means that shareholders depend on company insiders to manage and distribute value; to that end, they want to know that the bikes made are going to work, and they want to know that the company is using their resources efficiently and ethically. But because they are removed from day-to-day execution, they rely on disclosures and governance mechanisms to enforce accountability.

This common structure separates users, stakeholders, and contributors by default, and in many markets, it is dominant, if fragile. Over time, especially in platform economies, this often leads to a shift away from user benefit and toward extraction. As an organization establishes dominance over a market, users’ market power decreases, and insider stakeholders will start to demand more value be brought to them. The product’s value to users is decreased, optimized to the level the market will bear. This is enshittification, and we know it when we see it.

However, in industry contexts allowing for alternative structures, these incumbent organizations may be supplanted by competitors that can align these parties better.

Toward integration

As discussed in previous posts, economic systems that can be decentralized or disintermediated don’t just allow us to rethink organizational structures, they compel us to. Rather than managing tradeoffs between users, stakeholders, and teams, we can now collapse these roles entirely.​

Users can be owners. Builders can be participants. And coordination can happen without centralized permission.​

This is the real promise of the technology—not to recreate legacy systems with different branding, but to build something fundamentally better than what’s existed in the past. Massive industries—social media, e-commerce, cloud computing, to name a few—are ripe for overhaul. 

As coordination costs fall and core infrastructure is commoditized, decentralized products will become increasingly competitive. To succeed in this environment, new industry leaders must ensure from the outset that their interests are structurally aligned with users. Legacy firms can’t pursue this without breaking their own organizational models. But decentralized systems are capable of aligning with users from day one. They must do so because this is the only strategically dominant path.

Funding teams

How to provision a team is the first question that must be answered. Any system that seeks to function over time must solve for two conditions simultaneously:

1. The organization needs constant liquid funding to support ongoing contributor work—covering salaries, operations, and scaling costs.

2. This compensation must align contributors with the organization's long-term health.

Traditional corporate governance literature proposes splitting compensation with salaries, for liquidity, and equity, which is used to align the team with shareholders. The equity component is often illiquid, subject to vesting schedules, and designed to ensure that upside is only realized if the enterprise succeeds. In theory, this delays gratification and ties contributor success to that of the broader organization.

In practice, this structure is imperfect. Equity on its own isn't an efficient solution and often creates secondary agency problems at both individual and team levels: first, equity generally cannot be the primary source of the team’s compensation, as it doesn’t offer stable, liquid income. Moreover, if equity does not distribute revenue, the team must continuously sell its ownership to meet personal expenses. This introduces a tension: the team becomes dependent on external liquidity events (funding rounds, M&A, IPOs), which may encourage short-term strategies designed to maximize valuation optics rather than actual value delivery. 

So equity alone does not eliminate misalignment. Equity compensation may incentivize behavior that harms long-term value, such as focusing excessively on short-term market perception or inflating valuations ahead of key liquidity events. This structure is ostensibly designed for alignment, but it cannot enforce it.

In decentralized systems, these challenges are magnified. Compensation design is not a downstream consideration; it is foundational to whether the system remains governable at all.

These tradeoffs can be visualized along the two axes of liquidity and alignment.

It is common for projects to solve for one axis at the expense of the other. They pay quickly and compromise alignment, or they delay payout and potentially starve contributors. Neither model is built to sustain itself.

You need more than just tokens

Tokens have long been proposed as a resolution to these issues. Unlike equity, they can be liquid from launch. Unlike salaries, they can be ownership-aligned. And unlike venture funding, they allow broad-based participation and decentralized coordination. In theory, everybody is working toward the same outcome. 

But in practice, token-based models have generally reproduced or even amplified all of these old agency concerns. When tokens lack legal protections involved with equity or immutable rights to certain functions or distributions, contributing teams have any number of ways to get liquid on the back of speculators and few obligations to deliver.

In many cases, these insiders have little reason to do right by outside stakeholders; either the token doesn’t provide any claim to an organization’s generated value, the token’s power is superseded by overwhelming control by insiders, or there are competing legal interests the insiders must adhere to. In several cases, teams have in fact revoked tokenholders’ claims or changed their organizational structure to tokenholders’ disadvantage. All of these present considerable risks to tokenholders that must be considered.

Vesting or deferred compensation often does little to mitigate this phenomenon. Some projects enter into OTC deals with market makers and investors to provide an appearance of the token’s desirability. Others sell into hype cycles before any demonstration of product-market fit. The vesting process can, in the case of tokens launched at high valuations, lead to several years of relentless exits by the team through private token issuance. And, finally, once vesting ends, the team often has limited resources to compensate employees, risking abandonment.

There are graveyards full of organizations whose teams became fabulously wealthy through token issuance and cashed out using speculators as liquidity before achieving any enduring market success. Other graveyards nearby are full of organizations whose teams couldn’t support their employees with treasuries comprising native tokens trending to zero.

Notable examples abound here.

• Compound (COMP) is now run by service providers with little input from a central team; its direction is uncertain following a founder exit in 2022s The team and shareholders were allocated almost half of the protocol's tokens; the protocol was at one point worth $8B and currently sits at under $400mm.

• The founder of DYDX, a DEX, stepped down as CEO in 2024. Within months, citing market conditions, DYDX laid off 35% of staff, saying "You continued to build dYdX, even when I did not." The DYDX token is now functionally abandoned. Insiders and investors received almost 50% of DYDX tokens, which at one point were collectively worth $4B. The protocol is still worth over half a billion dollars, and vesting has not completed.

• After raising over $100mm, the DEX aggregator 0x killed ZRX's initial staking rewards before ZeroEx Labs ceased development on the exchange. The token is functionally abandoned and functionless and sits at a $225mm market cap as of this writing.

What tokens haven’t changed is this:

1. outsiders’ value accrual remains mediated by insiders;

2. insiders still require liquid runway; and

3. outsiders are still essentially betting under imperfect information that insiders will deliver.

Tokens may be a powerful primitive, but without structural constraints, decentralized organizations lose much of the advantage they could have enjoyed over incumbents.

Un-alignment

Uniswap illustrates the problem of alignment in its most advanced form: extreme separation between who funds the system, who controls it, and who benefits. 

Jesse Walden’s prescient The Ownership Economy says the following:

Uniswap, a crypto exchange, has a business model similar to Coinbase or Binance in that it imposes a fee on transactions. But rather than the company capturing that fee, it’s instead distributed to the market-making traders that provide liquidity and make the product useful. Since Uniswap is open source and user-owned, third-party developers can have confidence building on the platform, and a rich ecosystem of integrations has grown around the project.

This rich ecosystem has cost a ton to build and market. Hundreds of people are employed by Uniswap Labs, the centralized development company, and the Uniswap Foundation. Both entities host developer conferences around the world. They’ve invested in splashy marketing and partnership campaigns. They pay people to build on the Uniswap platform. They routinely incentivize liquidity providers. They have multi-million dollar bug bounties and audit costs. Without question, they are one of the biggest networks this industry has seen.

The core question is: who owns Uniswap? And who benefits from the value it generates? To answer this, one must unpack the value flows.

What we have is a two-track structure: 

• On one track, real revenue flows to Uniswap Labs and its equityholders.

• On the other, tokenholders and speculators fund operations without anything to show for it.

That is, there is a one-way flow of value directly to Uniswap Labs and its equityholders and massive value consumption by the Uniswap Foundation. Front-end fees come from traders, and token subsidies are issued by the Uniswap DAO and the Uniswap Foundation. Much of the operational burden—hiring, grants, events—is carried by the DAO and Foundation. But the revenue flows elsewhere.

Indeed, equityholders contributed roughly $170 million and earned a structurally enforced claim on revenue; they see an annualized $80 million from front end fees alone, to say nothing of grants and payments from ecosystem partners in exchange for deployment. And, of course, they received 180 million UNI, which has ranged between $900 million and $3.5 billion over the last four years. Undoubtedly a home run of an investment.

It looks more grim for UNI holders. Despite backstopping over $7B in issuance, which has been used to support contributors, grants, and affiliated entities, they have received none of the $3.7B in cumulative fees generated by Uniswap. 

That’s right: the market value of UNI's token issuance far exceeds the value the protocol has generated through its use. For all the talk about sustainability in emissions-based models such as the MetaDEX, Uniswap itself has yet to demonstrate that the protocol’s economic output justifies its token distribution. In that light, UNI begins to look less like a governance right and more like a transfer mechanism—from speculators to insiders.

The case of Uniswap is a textbook example of misalignment through structural design. Tokenholders underwrite the entire ecosystem’s development but do not share in its success. The team, meanwhile, satisfies its liquidity demands through revenue and token grants, but its fiduciary duty is to its shareholders, not to tokenholders. This is a valuable picture of a protocol mimicking corporate structures without replicating their protections. While equity holders have enforceable claims, tokenholders get…tokens.

Importantly, some users do benefit. Liquidity providers earn 100% of fees, and traders gain access to deep markets. But their participation is subsidized: tokenholders are funding the infrastructure that enables liquidity providers to get 100% of smart contract fees. In this arrangement, tokenholders are not partners in the system but a piggybank, one that can be continually drawn on without any obligation.

And that’s the critical lesson: when value flows are intermediated by insiders, and tokenholders lack meaningful rights, alignment fails by design. Speculators fund growth, and insiders harvest. The result isn’t a new ownership model; it’s just the same thing we’ve had before, potentially even more heavily skewed toward insiders.

Aligning interests with the MetaDEX

As argued above, because a decentralized system must maximize value to users to outcompete alternatives, it must be structurally constrained to do so. A design that depends on discretion, however well-intentioned, cannot guarantee this outcome. And if value to users is not guaranteed, the system’s market share will always be vulnerable to capture.

The MetaDEX maximizes value to users while satisfying the compensation mandates by treating contributors as users. The founding contributing organization received locked tokens at launch These tokens carry a hard-coded claim to protocol revenue, distributed weekly. This provides liquidity. But they are also indefinitely locked, and contributors do not monetize their position through token sales. Their payoff is, like any other tokenholder’s, tied solely to the protocol’s long-term growth. This enforces alignment.

This design also delivers resilience. Teams that depend on emissions, token price, or external capital for runway may function in a bull market but collapse under pressure. The MetaDEX is designed to operate through volatility: because contributor funding is tied directly to protocol revenue, it remains active regardless of market sentiment. This allows contributors to continue building without needing to sell tokens, rely on grants, or renegotiate their role. In the case of Dromos, this has meant a working treasury—built not by using speculators as liquidity but by helping the protocol generate real economic value. Consequently, Dromos’s north star is the same as that of the protocols it services; chase not short-term liquidity but long-term growth of our income-producing assets.

And because there are no privileged access points—no alternate funding mechanisms or internal budgets—the system ensures that all participants operate within the same economic frame. This has important implications for how costs are handled.

Internalizing system costs

An overlooked but critical consequence of the MetaDEX’s structure is that operating costs are fully circumscribed by the team’s own position in the system. In many protocols, expenses are borne collectively—funded through token issuance or grants, or out of a central revenue stream—but are often managed opaquely by a centralized entity. This creates uncertainty around the protocol’s profitability and reinforces dependence on the team’s judgment and competence in deploying collective resources.

The MetaDEX does away with this structure entirely. Contributors’ funding is not allocated but earned, directly from protocol revenue, under the same rules as any user. If the system grows, so does their budget. If it contracts, their funding naturally declines. No systemwide budget needs to be managed or overseen by stakeholders, because no discretionary budget exists. Locked tokenholders get the same distributions back, no matter how the contributors choose to spend their earnings.

In this structure:

System costs are bound to contributor wallets. Anyone can see, in real time, how much protocol revenue is flowing to contributors. This is the limit of the contributors’ budget.

There is no gap between funding and performance. Every party receives value based on overall systemic growth and their own voting choices.

And even external financing is constrained. Because the contributors' claim to protocol value is limited to their locked tokens, anyone they theoretically raised funds from would receive exposure only to their locked stake—not to the protocol itself. The incentives of the investors backing the contributors would mirror those of any other tokenholder: to grow long-term revenue, which determines all parties' returns.

In fact, this logic is not limited to the founding contributors. Any locked token voter getting its share of protocol revenue has the same structural access to financing from protocol revenues, and some have already begun to use it. For example, Crypto Yield Capital (CYC) is a locked token voter that has secured outside investment to scale its activity in the protocol. Its investors do not receive emissions, control over the system, or access to any privileged stream—they simply receive a share of CYC’s cash flows from its voting position.

This reinforces the system’s symmetry: there are no internal capital classes, only participants earning in parallel.

Ecosystem wallets: structural tools for aligned growth

In a system where contributors are structurally aligned with users and incentivized through the same mechanisms, a natural design question emerges: what unique advantages does such an organizational structure bring to a system?

Users optimize for themselves, and that’s mostly a good thing

Within the MetaDEX, users are empowered to do two things: direct protocol emissions through vote-locked governance and receive value in return. In most cases, this creates a healthy and efficient loop. Users optimize for their own outcomes, as they should.

But this model has its blind spots. Not everything that benefits the overall system is immediately profitable to vote for. Early-stage assets or strategic positions that lack short-term returns often get overlooked. Supporting these pools can require redirecting emissions away from more established, revenue-generating options, which can be difficult to justify from a self-interested perspective.

The Public Goods wallet: strategic bootstrapper

It turns out that the MetaDEX's organizational structure is well suited to such a problem. On launch, Aerodrome introduced the Public Goods wallet, controlled by the Foundations and holding roughly 18% of veAERO. Its role is clear and constrained: It votes emissions toward assets and pools  that are strategically important to the network but temporarily under-supported by the market.

A good example is cbBTC, an asset critical to extending the protocol’s reach into Bitcoin-native capital. Initially, cbBTC lacked the trading fees necessary to attract emissions votes or liquidity providers. With support from the Public Goods wallet, it quickly bootstrapped deep liquidity and within a week surpassed WBTC as the primary Bitcoin trading vehicle onchain.

Importantly, this wallet generates no private benefit. All emissions it earns are re-compounded into more veAERO. There is no leakage, no discretion over distribution, and no contributor access to funds. It is a system-level flywheel that helps the protocol capture value it would otherwise miss.

The Flight School wallet: onboarding new lockers

A second wallet, the Flight School wallet, holds about 8 percent of veAERO and is designed with a different but equally strategic purpose: to bring new lockers into the system and expand the base of active, aligned governance participants.

Think of it as a signing bonus for users who begin locking AERO and participating in governance. These new lockers help broaden the stakeholder base, increasing the protocol’s decentralization and resilience.

And unlike the Public Goods wallet, the Flight School wallet operates with no discretion. It simply:

• Votes for the maximum AERO rewards

• Compounds those rewards into more AERO

• Locks the AERO as veAERO

• Distributes the new veAERO to recent lockers

That’s it.

Together, these two wallets reflect a key design principle of the MetaDEX: Discretion is allowed only when it is structurally constrained and explicitly serves the whole system.

Contributors derive no private benefit from these wallets. Their sole mandate by design is to bootstrap long-term value, whether by supporting key assets or growing the aligned user base. They are tools of coordination and growth, not entitlements or treasury assets, not benefiting any single stakeholder.

Buybacks

Between the contributor wallet, the Public Goods wallet, the Flight School wallet, and public and protocol relays, as much as 30% of protocol revenue is programmatically routed back into the token through buybacks. They do so because more tokens make these wallets more effective at what they do. This feedback loop is fundamentally unique not just to decentralized organizations but also to token models like the MetaDEX.

In traditional markets, buybacks serve two main functions:

1. They retire shares, increasing the proportional ownership of remaining shareholders.

2. They put a floor on prices and send a signal to markets of undervaluation or excess cash holdings.

These effects are only meaningful, however, when the repurchased asset carries a real claim on future value.

Buybacks in most crypto systems are mechanically similar but economically empty. If a token doesn’t confer rights, shrinking supply doesn't enlarge anyone's economic slide; it merely changes the denominator of a speculative price. Buybacks of such tokens are just optics or, worse, exit liquidity. They create the appearance of value distribution, but little of value is actually being distributed. And revenue spent absorbing tokens that do nothing could have funded R&D, user incentives, or other measures that could have created more revenue rather than meeting an arbitrary expectation of scarcity.

The MetaDEX’s buyback model diverges sharply from both of these models. In this system, tokens being bought back offer control over emissions and claims on the protocol’s total production. So when a contributor or Public Goods wallet accumulates the MetaDEX token, it is not merely sending a market signal or finding limited growth opportunity. Here, accumulating the token can in fact increase growth by concentrating influence in system-aligned actors, enhancing emissions efficiency, and reinforcing long-term participation. That is, there is a reason outside of speculation or even increasing a revenue claim to acquire and lock the token. This is qualitatively different from what one sees even with equity buybacks.

This mechanism also has important implications for sustainability. As discussed in Part 4, revenue-distributing protocols with tokens must eventually meet the condition that revenue growth exceeds token dilution. This is challenging for most protocols: emissions tend to be front-loaded and often on an immutable schedule, whereas revenue growth is, of course, uncertain and at times cyclical. In such systems, dilution is often a fixed cost, while growth remains speculative.

By routing a portion of revenue into buybacks that lock tokens into governance, the MetaDEX introduces a structural counterweight. Circulating supply is reduced even as new tokens are issued. This reduces effective dilution—the net expansion of supply hitting the market—relative to nominal emissions.

Practically, this allows the protocol to continue incentivizing growth while preserving the long-term economic position of active participants. The growth-over-dilution constraint still applies, but the slope of dilution is flattened. Growth is not only more achievable, it is mechanically reinforced by the same mechanism that tempers supply.

In this model, buybacks do not signal performance; they help produce it. Contributors accumulate voting weight to expand operations. The Public Goods Wallet gains influence to support underrepresented assets. The Flight School Wallet reinvests to onboard new lockers. Other actors—whether individuals, institutions, or partner protocols—are free to do the same.

This dynamic sheds light on a largely underexplored dimension of buybacks: in systems where tokens carry real functional power and value flows through participation, buybacks can operate not just as a mechanism for allocation but as a direct accelerant of system growth. They are neither merely cosmetic nor passively redistributive. In structurally aligned systems, they become productive.

A new decentralized model for decentralized contribution

One of the most powerful consequences of contributors having no privileged economic position is that they can be supplemented by any party dedicated to advancing the MetaDEX. Governance is open. Any tokenholder can acquire exposure, participate in decision-making, and contribute value using the same tools and incentives available to the original team. No special permissions required.

This is already happening. For example, Coinbase acquired AERO on the open market, locked it, and became a co-equal participant in MetaDEX governance. Just like the original contributors, Coinbase has:

• Invested in infrastructure to improve the platform's reach

• Helped onboard new issuers and assets

• Directed emissions to high-potential or strategic pools

• Accrued governance weight and revenue share in return

None of this required private negotiation. Their involvement was entirely permissionless, made possible by the system's open architecture.

Because contributors are not granted exclusive control or revenue streams, there’s clear value for everybody in creating onramps for new builders. Programs like ve token grants or targeted developer initiatives can bring in contributors across infrastructure, integrations, or liquidity provisioning. The result is a modular, composable contributor base with built-in economic alignment.

The MetaDEX’s engineering architecture is built to support a high level of modularity. Its design allows external developers to extend core functionality without needing approval or coordination with a central team. While other models, such as Uniswap v4’s hooks, offer a form of extensibility, they often lead to fragmented economic layers. The MetaDEX offers integration into a unified, coherent economy, which is essential for protocols that depend on scale and network effects.

This leads to a broader thesis: the MetaDEX represents a new organizational form for decentralized systems. New teams funded through veAERO grants receive governance exposure on the same terms as everyone else. Their incentives are tied to long-term value creation, and their compensation is structured for liquidity and alignment from day one.

Toward a Unified Stakeholder Model

Taken together, the MetaDEX’s approach to funding contributors, internalizing costs, and distributing value presents not just a sound incentive model but a genuinely new organizational form. Instead of managing tensions between users, contributors, and investors, it structurally integrates them into one stakeholder class.

• Participation replaces employment.

• Revenue replaces treasury management.

• Governance remains open, but with clearly defined rules.

In a decentralized setting, once this kind of model becomes possible, it becomes a strategic imperative. If the goal is to maximize user value, then contributors must be users themselves. Control of organizations should be earned through participation and commitment. This is the most durable form of alignment any system can hope to achieve, which gives it the best shot at outperformance.