What Nepal’s Four-Day Revolution Tells Us About the Future of Power

In early September 2025, Nepal’s government made what seemed like a decisive move: they banned 26 major social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, X, and even LinkedIn. The official reason was non-compliance with new registration policies. The real reason? Growing youth-led protests against corruption and “nepo babies” were gaining momentum online.

Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli and his administration assumed this would silence the movement. Shut down the platforms, shut down the protests.

They were catastrophically wrong.

Within 48 hours of the ban, tens of thousands of Nepali youth—most in their late teens and early twenties—flooded the streets of Kathmandu. They weren’t scattered or confused. They were organized, coordinated, and angrier than before. The government’s attempt to cut its communication lines had only pushed it to adapt.

They migrated to Discord, a gaming chat platform that hadn’t been banned. What started as informal coordination quickly evolved into something unprecedented: over 100,000 people joined Discord servers that became virtual parliaments, complete with channels for policy proposals, logistics coordination, and democratic deliberation.

By September 9th, Prime Minister Oli had resigned. By September 12th, Discord users had voted for their preferred interim Prime Minister—former Chief Justice Sushila Karki, who became Nepal’s first female PM.

A government fell in less than a week. Its replacement was chosen through online polls on a gaming platform.

What we’re witnessing isn’t chaos. Systems are being reinvented before our eyes.

Strip away the technology and ideology, and permissionless systems share a few key properties—all built on two fundamental pillars: open source code and permissionless access.

These two properties, working together, create something unprecedented in human history.

Open source means: 

- Anyone can verify the code (trust through transparency, not institutions) 

- Anyone can fork it if they don’t like the direction (exit is always an option) 

- No single entity controls the protocol (governance is distributed by design) 

- Improvements compound across implementations (innovation is cumulative, not proprietary)

Permissionless means: 

- Anyone can use it without asking permission from a central authority 

- Anyone can build on top of it without partnerships or approvals 

- No gatekeepers can exclude you based on geography, wealth, or credentials 

- Geographic arbitrage is built into the system’s DNA

Together, these create emergent properties that define permissionless systems:

No gatekeepers required. Discord’s servers could host up to 500,000 members, and anyone could join the protest coordination channels. No credentials. No approval process. No political party membership. Just show up.

Emergent coordination. Order arises from simple rules followed by many actors, not from top-down commands. Discord channels are self-organized into specialized functions: one for announcements, another for policy debates, voice channels for deliberations, and channels for sharing real-time information from the streets. No one designed this structure in advance. It emerged from necessity.

Resilience through redundancy. There’s no single point of failure because there’s no single point of anything. Multiple Discord servers operated simultaneously—“Youths Against Corruption” and “Yuwa Hub” were particularly active. Shut down one, and coordination routes through others. Ban Discord entirely, and they’d move to another platform—or run their own servers using open source alternatives.

Composability. Simple tools combine in unexpected ways to create sophisticated outcomes. A platform designed for gamers became the nerve center of a political revolution, complete with fact-checking channels, emergency aid coordination, and democratic voting mechanisms.

These principles work beautifully at a small scale. Three friends are coordinating a project. A Discord server organizing a gaming tournament. Local communities responding to disasters.

But Nepal proved something bigger: these principles can topple governments.

For the entire span of human civilization, large-scale coordination required institutions. This wasn’t a choice—it was a constraint imposed by the limits of human communication and trust.

Want to coordinate 100,000 people? You needed a government, political party, or corporation. Want to move money across borders? You needed banks. Want to enforce agreements between strangers? You needed lawyers and courts.

The institutions weren’t the point. They were the necessary infrastructure for coordination.

What we’re witnessing now is the decoupling of coordination from institutions.

Nepal’s protesters coordinated 100,000 people to topple a government using a gaming chat app. Stablecoin networks moved $27 trillion in 2024 without banks as intermediaries. DAOs manage billions in assets without corporate boards. Smart contracts enforce agreements without courts.

But here’s the part that’s hard to grasp: These aren’t just new tools doing old things more efficiently. They’re emergent properties of open source, permissionless systems.

Self-organizing, self-governing systems are arising spontaneously from simple rules applied at scale. No one designed Nepal’s Discord parliament. It emerged organically—channels for policy proposals, channels for street logistics, channels for fact-checking, voice channels for deliberation. No constitutional convention. No organizational charter. Just thousands of people following simple coordination rules that created complex, functional governance.

This could be the most democratic form of self-organization humanity has ever created.

Could be. Not “is.” Because here’s the problem: We don’t have enough experience with this yet. We lack the cultural infrastructure and mental models to understand what we’re looking at. 

Think about it: Our democratic institutions—Congress, Parliament, voting systems, political parties—were designed 200+ years ago for a world of physical assembly, paper ballots, and week-long mail delivery. They were brilliant solutions to the coordination problems of the 18th century.

But we’re trying to understand 21st-century permissionless coordination through 18th-century institutional frameworks. It’s like trying to understand the internet using the mental models of the telegraph.

When Nepal’s Gen Z held Discord polls to select their interim Prime Minister, some called it “more egalitarian” and “more transparent than what politicians do.” Others saw chaos and vulnerability to manipulation. Both were right—because we don’t have established patterns for what legitimate digital democracy looks like.

Some Discord participants questioned the legitimacy of protest leaders: “You made the agenda, but we don’t know you. How we can trust you is also another issue.” This sounds like a problem. But is it? Or is it actually healthy skepticism that’s harder to voice in traditional hierarchical systems?

Members expressed concern that groups with vested interests might infiltrate the movement—royalists, political operatives, special interests trying to hijack the protests. This sounds like vulnerability. But traditional political parties are infiltrated by special interests all the time—we just call it “lobbying” and pretend it’s normal.

The chaos we’re seeing isn’t necessarily dysfunction. It might be the early, awkward stages of genuinely new forms of organization.

When the printing press was invented, the Catholic Church saw heresy and chaos. They weren’t wrong—there WAS chaos. Thousands of pamphlets are spreading contradictory ideas. Anyone could publish anything. No quality control. No authoritative gatekeepers.

But that “chaos” was actually early-stage information democracy finding its footing. It took centuries to develop journalistic standards, fact-checking norms, and new institutional forms (free press, universities, scientific journals) that could handle abundant, permissionless information flow.

We’re in a similar moment with coordination and governance. The old models assume scarcity—scarce communication channels, scarce ability to vote, scarce access to financial systems. The new systems assume abundance—anyone can join, anyone can propose, anyone can participate.

We literally don’t have the cultural vocabulary for this yet. 

What do you call a group of 100,000 people who coordinate via Discord, make collective decisions via polls, and topple a government—but have no formal membership, no hierarchy, no physical headquarters?

It’s not a political party. Not a social movement in the traditional sense. Not a corporation. Not a government. Our language fails because our mental models fail.

The same is true for DAOs, for DeFi protocols, for tokenized communities. We use old words—“organization,” “governance,” “democracy,” “coordination”—but the underlying reality is fundamentally different.

To understand what’s actually happening, we need to step back and ask a question that usually goes unexamined: Why did large institutions dominate the last 200 years of human history?

The standard answer is something about efficiency, expertise, economies of scale, or superior organization. But that’s backwards.

Institutions didn’t win because they were good at coordinating. They won because they were the only ones who could coordinate at scale.

For most of human history, coordination was expensive. Prohibitively expensive. If you wanted to organize thousands or millions of people, you needed:

• Physical infrastructure for communication (postal systems, telegraph lines, telephone networks, the Internet)

• Capital to build and maintain that infrastructure

• Trust mechanisms that could work between strangers (contracts, courts, enforcement)

• Information systems to track who did what, who owes whom, and who can be trusted

• Geographic concentration or massive overhead to coordinate across distances

• Legal frameworks to enforce agreements and punish defection

The coordination costs were so high that only large, centralized institutions could bear them. Governments. Corporations. Banks. Universities. These entities emerged not because they were inherently superior, but because they solved an economic problem: how do you coordinate when coordination is expensive?

Their answer: Create a central point that owns the coordination infrastructure.

This created a monopoly—not through malice, but through mathematics. When coordination costs are high, centralization is economically inevitable. The biggest players could:

• Control information flows

• Allocate capital

• Manage distribution networks

• Make binding decisions

• Establish trust between strangers

If you wanted to coordinate 100,000 people to build a product, move money internationally, or organize political action, you had no choice but to go through institutions that owned the coordination infrastructure.

This monopoly wasn’t a feature. It was a constraint imposed by technology and economics.

Here’s what’s different now: The economic constraint that created institutional monopolies is dissolving.

Open source protocols, permissionless networks, cryptographic trust, and global digital connectivity have driven coordination costs toward zero. You no longer need to own massive infrastructure to coordinate massive numbers of people.

The costs that forced centralization for 200 years—communication, trust, information, enforcement—have collapsed by orders of magnitude. And when the economic foundation of a monopoly disappears, the monopoly becomes economically irrational.

Nepal’s government tried to maintain its monopoly on political coordination by banning social media. 100,000 citizens simply moved to Discord and organized anyway. The monopoly was shattered not because citizens were more powerful, but because the cost of coordination dropped below the cost of suppression.

Within days, the decentralized protesters forced a regime change—Prime Minister Oli resigned on September 9th, and the social media ban was lifted. The platforms were restored not as a political concession, but as an economic necessity. Nepali citizens needed Facebook, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp for their livelihoods—freelancing, small businesses, remittances, online education, and digital commerce.

The government learned a hard lesson: You can’t ban the infrastructure people depend on for economic survival without facing existential political consequences.

This wasn’t ideology defeating authority. This was an economic reality defeating political control.

This is not decentralization as an ideology. It’s decentralization as an economic inevitability.

When coordination becomes cheap, three things emerge that fundamentally reshape power:

For 200 years, coordination capacity was concentrated inside institutions. Banks operated the payment networks. Corporations managed the supply chains. Governments controlled and constrained communication systems. Coordination infrastructure existed as private or state-controlled property.

Now, coordination protocols are becoming public goods:

• Ethereum coordinates global compute without a company owning the computers

• Stablecoins coordinate global payments without a bank owning the payment rails

• Open source protocols coordinate development without a corporation owning the code

• AI agents increasingly coordinate labor and decisions without a hierarchy managing the workers

The coordination layer is becoming infrastructure—like roads or the internet protocol. Anyone can use it. No one controls access.

Institutions used to own the “railroads” of coordination. Now the rails are open.

This doesn’t mean institutions disappear. It means they lose their monopoly on the fundamental capability that gave them power.

In the industrial age, power came from owning resources: factories, distribution networks, capital, and labor.

In the permissionless age, power comes from orchestrating resources you don’t own.

For decades, one of the most effective strategic moves was what Kaihan Krippendorff called “coordinate the uncoordinated.” It defined a generation of breakout companies. Uber aligned independent drivers. Airbnb aligned hosts. Amazon aligned millions of sellers. These companies didn’t win because they owned the assets. They won because they built systems that organized fragmented participants at a massive scale. That move represented the shift from ownership to orchestration. But the advantage is evolving again. What was once a proprietary corporate capability is now becoming a property of open networks themselves. The ability to coordinate uncoordinated actors no longer belongs to platforms with privileged distribution or exclusive control over infrastructure. It’s emerging from permissionless systems: global stablecoins, open protocols, DAOs, identity graphs, and programmable networks that anyone can use or build on without approval. This marks a second shift in power: 

• Institutions once won by owning resources. 

• Platforms won by orchestrating resources they didn’t own. 

• Now coordination is becoming permissionless — something the network provides, not something an institution controls. 

Power moves again, away from gatekeepers and toward systems capable of coordinating independently acting participants at scale. Competitive advantage doesn’t come from controlling the coordination layer. It comes from designing incentives, defaults, and mechanisms that influence how coordination emerges inside open environments. The strategic move that defined the last generation of business innovation has now become the baseline architecture of the permissionless era.

Consider what’s already happening:

Liquidity providers are uncoordinated individuals with capital. Automated market makers align them into functional markets—without owning the capital.

Developers are uncoordinated individuals with skills. Open protocols align them into massive projects—without employing them.

Creators are uncoordinated individuals with audiences. Social graphs align them into networks—without controlling their content.

Global savers are uncoordinated individuals seeking stability. Stablecoins align them into a parallel monetary system—without intermediating their transactions.

The infrastructure orchestrates. It doesn’t own.

Circle doesn’t own the dollars in your USDC wallet—but they orchestrate a system that makes those dollars more useful than dollars in a bank account. Ethereum doesn’t own the applications built on it—but it orchestrates a computing environment that makes those applications possible.

When coordination is cheap, whoever designs the best protocols, sets the most aligned incentives, and builds the most useful defaults accumulates power—not whoever owns the most resources.

This is a complete inversion of industrial-age power dynamics.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

When coordination is expensive, you get large centralized institutions coordinating millions of people through hierarchy. When coordination is cheap, you get something different: self-governing micro-economies that can coordinate at the macro scale.

Digital polities are emerging: DAOs, creator collectives, protocol governance groups, online communities with treasuries and decision-making processes. These aren’t corporations in any traditional sense. They’re economic tribes with:

• Shared treasuries

• Governance mechanisms

• Social norms and identity

• The ability to coordinate action without hierarchy

Network-native institutions are arising that rival nation-states in coordination capacity:

• Coinbase processes more in transaction value than many national stock exchanges

• USDC is becoming a de facto international currency used by millions

• Ethereum settles more in daily transactions than most payment processors

• Base is building a global social and economic environment from scratch

These entities are becoming “institutional” but not in the 20th-century sense. They don’t own resources or control access. They orchestrate coordination.

A DAO is a digitally native organization governed by smart contracts and collective decision-making, where rules are transparent, participation is open, and control is distributed among members rather than centralized in leadership or management.

Bottom-up citizenry gains power that was previously impossible. Nepal’s Discord servers coordinated 100,000 people to select a Prime Minister through online polls. A stablecoin wallet, a social graph, and a messaging app gave citizens coordination capacity that rivaled their government’s.

When coordination tools are permissionless: - Citizens organize faster than institutions can respond - Legitimacy becomes distributed rather than granted from above - Power becomes situational (whoever coordinates best in the moment) rather than structural (whoever owns the coordination infrastructure)

This is the world taking shape: protocol nations, self-organizing economies, and institutional inversion.

Let me be clear about what’s happening:

Institutions didn’t fail. The economic conditions that made them necessary have changed.

For 200 years, high coordination costs made centralization rational. Now, near-zero coordination costs make decentralization rational—not as a political preference, but as an economic optimization.

You can’t maintain a monopoly on coordination when anyone can coordinate. You can’t control information flows when information flows freely. You can’t gatekeep access when access is permissionless.

This isn’t about ideology. It’s about economic gravity.

And just like Nepal’s government discovered, you can try to resist this shift—ban platforms, regulate protocols, criminalize coordination tools—but you’re fighting mathematics, not dissidents.

The question isn’t whether permissionless systems will reshape power structures. The question is whether existing institutions can adapt to a world where their monopoly on coordination no longer exists.

Some will. They’ll shift from command-and-control to stewardship and interoperability. They’ll become participants in open networks rather than owners of closed ones.

Others won’t. They’ll fight to preserve monopolies that are no longer economically sustainable.

Nepal’s Prime Minister Oli tried to shut down coordination by banning social media. He resigned four days later.

That’s what happens when you bet against economic inevitability.

Political scientist Steven Lukes identified three dimensions through which power operates: direct coercion, agenda-setting, and consciousness-shaping. For 200 years, institutions didn’t just have a monopoly on coordination infrastructure—they had a monopoly across all three dimensions of power itself.

Understanding how this worked—and how it’s now breaking—reveals why we’re witnessing something far more profound than technological change.

Luke’s first dimension is overt power—who wins when there’s direct conflict, who can make others do what they don’t want to do.

For centuries, this seemed straightforward. Governments could ban gatherings, shut down newspapers, and arrest organizers. Corporations could fire employees who organized. Banks could freeze accounts. The math was simple: coordination was expensive, suppression was cheap.

Nepal’s government operated from this old playbook. Ban social media, shut down coordination, suppress the movement through direct coercion.

But when coordination costs collapse below suppression costs, the first face of power breaks. Citizens evaded every ban faster than the government could implement new ones. Within 48 hours, protesters had migrated to Discord and were organizing with even more intensity.

The government learned they couldn’t coerce their way to control when people can coordinate for free.

Prime Minister Oli resigned not because citizens were stronger, but because coercion became economically irrational. Every act of suppression triggered more coordination at lower cost.

This isn’t unique to Nepal. It’s the new math everywhere: you can’t ban, block, or shut down permissionless coordination faster than people can route around you.

Luke’s second dimension is more subtle—the power to set agendas, to control not just what decisions get made, but what decisions are even considered possible.

This was the institution’s hidden superpower. Banks didn’t just control payments—they controlled what was possible to pay for, how fast, to whom, and under what conditions. Governments didn’t just regulate—they controlled what innovations could be built, what business models were permissible, and who could participate.

Corporations controlled not just their products, but what applications could be developed, what protocols could be implemented, and what coordination was even imaginable.

For 200 years, institutions were the gatekeepers of possibility itself.

Want to build a global payment system? You needed bank partnerships, regulatory approval, and massive capital. Want to coordinate thousands of people? You needed corporate structures, legal frameworks, and institutional backing. Want to challenge incumbents? You had to do it through their systems, by their rules, with their permission.

Permissionless systems obliterate this gatekeeping power.

Discord couldn’t prevent 100,000 Nepalis from using gaming infrastructure for political revolution. Ethereum can’t prevent developers from building applications that compete with banks. Stablecoin protocols can’t prevent anyone from creating global payment systems.

The gates are gone. Users set their own agenda.

Circle orchestrates USDC but can’t control who uses it or what they use it for. Coinbase provides infrastructure, but can’t decide which protocols succeed. The second face of power—controlling the range of possibilities—breaks when the infrastructure becomes permissionless.

This is why regulatory capture becomes harder. You can’t capture protocols that no one owns. You can’t lobby gatekeepers who don’t exist.

Luke’s third dimension is the deepest—the power to shape consciousness, to make people accept the status quo as natural, inevitable, just “how things work.”

This dimension may have been the institution’s most effective tool.

We internalized that large-scale coordination “requires” institutions. Want to move money internationally? Of course, you need banks—how else would it work? Want to organize thousands of people? Obviously, you need corporate structures—that’s just common sense. Want to enforce agreements between strangers? Naturally, you need courts and lawyers—what’s the alternative?

These weren’t just practical limitations. They were mental limitations. We couldn’t imagine coordination without institutions because we’d never experienced it.

The third face of power worked not through coercion or gatekeeping, but through consciousness. People didn’t resist institutional monopolies—they couldn’t conceive of alternatives.

Permissionless systems are breaking this mental monopoly.

When 100,000 Nepalis coordinate government selection through Discord polls, it challenges basic assumptions about democracy, legitimacy, and political organization. When developers coordinate billion-dollar protocols without companies, it challenges assumptions about business, management, and innovation.

When AI agents coordinate supply chains autonomously, when stablecoins coordinate global payments without banks, when DAOs coordinate capital allocation without boards—the mental models that made institutional monopolies seem inevitable start dissolving.

This consciousness shift may be the most profound change. People are experiencing coordination without institutional permission for the first time in their lives. That experience creates new mental models, new assumptions about what’s possible.

The “common sense” that large-scale coordination requires institutional permission is being replaced by direct experience of permissionless coordination at a massive scale.

What makes this moment unprecedented is that all three faces of institutional power are collapsing simultaneously:

• Direct coercion fails because suppression costs more than coordination

• Gatekeeping fails because anyone can build on open protocols

• Consciousness shifts as people experience permissionless coordination directly

Nepal’s four-day revolution wasn’t just political change—it was all three dimensions of power being inverted in real time. Citizens routed around coercion (first dimension), set their own agenda through Discord servers (second dimension), and developed new mental models about legitimate governance (third dimension).

This is why the coordination monopoly isn’t just weakening—it’s shattering. When all three faces of institutional power break simultaneously, the entire logic of institutional dominance collapses.

What emerges isn’t institutional reform. It’s institutional inversion.

Economist Carlota Perez has spent decades studying the patterns of technological change. In her influential book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital,” she documents five great surges of development over the past 250 years—each following a predictable cycle of irruption, frenzy, turning point, synergy, and maturation.

From the Industrial Revolution (1771) to the current Information Technology revolution (1971), each surge follows the same pattern: a breakthrough technology creates new possibilities, financial speculation drives rapid adoption, a crash forces institutional adaptation, then society enters a “Golden Age” where the technology is broadly deployed for general benefit.

What we’re witnessing with permissionless systems may be the sixth great surge.

Perez’s model helps explain why the coordination monopoly is breaking now. We’re potentially at the transition point between the fifth surge (Information Technology) reaching maturity and the sixth surge (Permissionless Systems) beginning its irruption phase.

The pattern fits:

Breakthrough technology: Open source protocols + cryptographic networks create the foundation for coordination without institutions

Early adoption by financial capital: Crypto markets, stablecoin adoption, and DAO formation represent early investment in the new paradigm

Institutional resistance: Governments trying to ban or regulate permissionless systems—Nepal banned 26 platforms in an attempt to suppress coordination

Infrastructure building: Companies like Coinbase and Circle are creating the rails for mass adoption

New techno-economic paradigm emerging: Coordination becomes public infrastructure rather than corporate asset; power shifts from ownership to orchestration

Nepal’s Discord revolution demonstrates what happens when new coordination tools meet institutional resistance—the new paradigm routes around the old one. This isn’t just technological adoption; it’s the early stage of a fundamental shift in how human societies coordinate at scale.

Perez’s framework suggests we’re in the most volatile phase—the irruption period, where new systems challenge established ones, creating both enormous opportunity and massive disruption.

If this analysis is correct, permissionless systems aren’t just a crypto trend or a Web3 fad. They’re the foundation of the next 50-year cycle of economic and social development.

The institutions that adapt to become participants in open networks rather than owners of closed systems will thrive. Those who fight to preserve coordination monopolies will discover what Nepal’s government learned: economic gravity is stronger than political control.

As with all models, Perez’s framework isn’t perfect—but it’s useful. It gives us a lens for recognizing patterns of transformation. And when applied to what we’re observing with permissionless systems, it suggests we’re witnessing something far more significant than incremental change.

Here’s what makes this moment genuinely different from anything in history: For the first time, we can combine permissionless coordination with permissionless finance.

Nepal showed what happens when you remove institutional gatekeepers from political coordination. But the protesters still faced a constraint: they could organize via Discord, but funding operations still required traditional channels vulnerable to government control.

Stablecoins and DAOs remove that constraint.

Now imagine the same scenario with permissionless finance integrated:

A protest movement coordinates on Discord. Within hours, a DAO forms. Supporters worldwide send stablecoins—instantly, unstoppably. Smart contracts automatically distribute funds: medical supplies, legal support, and operational needs. No bank accounts to freeze. No wire transfers to block. No financial chokepoints.

Token holders vote on resource allocation. Transparent on-chain accounting shows every transaction. International support flows at the speed of internet packets, not international banking.

The government can’t shut it down because there’s nothing TO shut down. No headquarters. No bank account. No corporate entity. Just code, consensus, and cryptography.

When the next movement can: - Coordinate action through permissionless communication platforms - Fund operations with stablecoins and DAOs that can’t be frozen - Make collective decisions through on-chain voting that can’t be manipulated
- Distribute value directly to participants via tokens - Create economic incentives that align with goals without corporate structures

…all without asking permission from ANY institution?

That’s not a new tool. That’s a new form of human organization—and we have no cultural precedent for it.

This is why governments worldwide are scrambling to regulate cryptocurrency. It’s not about speculation or money laundering. It’s about the fundamental power dynamic between institutions and individuals. For thousands of years, institutions had a monopoly on large-scale coordination. That monopoly is breaking, and our mental models haven’t caught up.

Here’s what makes stablecoins potentially revolutionary: they’re doing to money what Discord inadvertently did to Nepali politics—removing the gatekeepers while maintaining coordination.

A Guatemalan migrant worker in New York can send money home instantly, for pennies, without needing a bank account or Western Union’s permission. A freelance designer in Lagos can receive payment from a client in Stockholm and convert it to local currency—all without touching the traditional banking system that might exclude them or charge predatory fees.

This isn’t theoretical. Stablecoin transaction volume exceeded $27 trillion in 2024, rivaling Visa’s network. But unlike Visa, anyone can build on top of stablecoin rails. No partnership required. No approval process. No waiting.

Just like anyone could join Nepal’s Discord servers to participate in choosing their government—no party membership required, no political connections needed, no permission asked.

The implications cascade outward:

Financial inclusion at internet scale. Approximately 1.3 billion unbanked adults worldwide don’t need permission from a bank to use stablecoins. They need a phone and an internet connection. The barrier to entry isn’t collateral or credit history—it’s connectivity.

Programmable economic relationships. Smart contracts allow people to create financial arrangements that simply weren’t possible before. Micro-insurance. Streaming payments. Automated escrow. Conditional transfers. All without lawyers or intermediaries taking their cut.

Geographic arbitrage for everyone. If your local currency is inflating at 50% annually, you can hold dollars or euros on your phone. The protection, once available only to the wealthy with offshore accounts, becomes available to anyone with a smartphone.

New forms of economic organization. DAOs allow people worldwide to pool capital and coordinate activity without forming legal entities or establishing traditional corporate hierarchies. Nepal’s protesters literally held democratic votes on Discord to choose their interim Prime Minister. DAOs are doing something similar for economic coordination: making collective decisions without centralized control.

The pattern mirrors what happened when the internet made information permissionless. Traditional gatekeepers—publishers, record labels, travel agents—didn’t disappear, but their monopoly on distribution did. Costs plummeted. Access exploded. New business models emerged.

We’re now doing to money what the internet did to information.

Here’s something that confuses people: creating permissionless systems requires enormous infrastructure. And building that infrastructure at scale requires… companies. Big ones.

Enter Coinbase, Circle, and the emerging giants of the stablecoin economy.

Coinbase reached a market capitalization exceeding $80 billion in 2024, making it one of the most valuable financial technology companies in the United States. A thirteen-year-old company providing infrastructure for permissionless assets has become a major player in the financial services landscape.

This isn’t a fluke. It’s a signal about where value is flowing in the new economy.

But here’s the key insight: These companies aren’t controlling the system. They’re orchestrating it.

This is the shift from ownership to orchestration playing out in real time—and it’s power adapted to a world where traditional institutional power across all three dimensions no longer functions.

These companies can’t coerce users (who can exit to competitors using the same protocols), can’t gatekeep access (anyone can build on the underlying rails), and can’t rely on unconscious assumptions about necessity (users experience permissionless alternatives directly).

They have to be useful rather than just powerful.

Coinbase doesn’t own the cryptocurrencies users trade. It doesn’t control which blockchains exist or which protocols succeed. It doesn’t decide who gets to build applications. But it orchestrates access—providing custody, compliance, user experience, and the bridge between traditional finance and permissionless systems.

Circle doesn’t own the dollars backing USDC. It doesn’t control who uses the stablecoin or what they use it for. It can’t stop competitors from launching rival stablecoins using the same open protocols. But it orchestrates stability—maintaining the peg, handling redemptions, ensuring regulatory compliance, building trust.

The comparison to Discord is instructive. Discord couldn’t stop Nepali citizens from organizing political movements or selecting a Prime Minister through its platform. But it provided infrastructure that made coordination possible—servers, channels, voice chat, and moderation tools.

Discord doesn’t own the communities on its platform. But it orchestrates them.

This is power through orchestration, not ownership.

These companies compete on: - Infrastructure quality (uptime, speed, features) - User experience (ease of use, interface design)
- Trust and reliability (security, compliance) - Network effects (liquidity, developer tools, partnerships)

They don’t compete on gatekeeping. They can’t. The protocols are open source and permissionless.

Circle can’t stop you from using USDC—but they can make USDC more reliable, more widely accepted, and more compliant than competing stablecoins. Coinbase can’t prevent you from using other exchanges—but they can make their platform easier, safer, and more trusted.

They win by orchestrating better, not by controlling access.

This is fundamentally different from 20th-century institutions. Banks controlled access to payment systems. Brokers controlled access to markets. Telecom companies controlled access to communication networks.

The new giants provide infrastructure for systems they don’t control. And that changes everything.

The key difference: Because the underlying protocols are open source and permissionless, these companies can’t become permanent monopolies. If Coinbase fails to serve users well, alternatives can emerge using the same protocols. If Circle loses trust, competitors can issue stablecoins on the same rails.

The exit option is always available. The coordination infrastructure is public. The monopoly is broken.

This is what institutional inversion looks like in practice: major companies providing valuable services without controlling the fundamental coordination layer.

They’re participants in open networks, not owners of closed ones.

And that makes all the difference.

If permissionless systems drove coordination costs toward zero, AI agents are driving them below zero—creating coordination opportunities faster than humans can imagine them.

But AI agents don’t just accelerate permissionless coordination—they make all three faces of institutional power impossible to maintain. When coordination happens at machine speed on open protocols, institutions can’t coerce (too fast to suppress), can’t gatekeep (protocols are open), and can’t control consciousness (people experience autonomous coordination directly).

Nepal’s Discord revolution showed 100,000 people coordinating in days to topple a government. Impressive. But that’s human-speed coordination. Now imagine AI agents coordinating millions of economic transactions per second, executing complex strategies across global markets, managing supply chains in real-time, and optimizing resource allocation continuously—all without human oversight, all on permissionless rails.

This isn’t future speculation. It’s happening now.

AI agents are already autonomous economic actors. They manage liquidity pools on decentralized exchanges. They execute trading strategies. They coordinate logistics. They participate in DAO governance. Unlike humans who sleep, get emotional, or miss opportunities, AI agents operate 24/7 with perfect consistency.

The combination is what matters:

• Permissionless protocols = anyone can participate without asking permission

• AI agents = machines can now participate as autonomous actors
  Together = economic coordination at internet scale and machine speed

When an AI agent can hold a wallet with stablecoins, execute smart contracts automatically, coordinate with other agents globally, make decisions based on programmed objectives, and participate in markets without human intervention, you get something unprecedented.

Autonomous economic coordination that requires neither human management nor institutional oversight.

This is orchestration without even needing orchestrators.

Discord needed humans to set up channels and organize discussions. DAOs need humans to vote and propose initiatives. But AI agents operating on permissionless protocols can coordinate entirely autonomously. The infrastructure orchestrates the agents. The agents orchestrate the outcomes. Humans set the objectives and constraints—then step back.

Traditional institutions existed because humans needed trusted third parties. You needed banks to verify transactions. Lawyers to enforce contracts. Managers to coordinate teams. Brokers to match buyers and sellers.

AI agents operating on transparent, permissionless protocols don’t need any of this.

They can verify transactions cryptographically. They can enforce agreements through smart contracts. They can coordinate activities through protocols. They can match counterparties through algorithms.

You don’t need a bank when an AI agent can manage your treasury, execute payments, and optimize your capital allocation based on real-time market conditions—all programmatically, all transparently, all autonomously.

You don’t need a supply chain manager when AI agents can source materials globally, optimize logistics continuously, and adjust to disruptions in real-time.

The intermediaries that existed because coordination was expensive and trust was scarce become unnecessary when coordination is free and trust is cryptographic.

When Nepal’s protesters coordinated in days, they moved faster than their government could respond. That speed differential was decisive.

When AI agents coordinate in milliseconds, they move faster than humans can perceive.

The competitive advantage shifts from “who has the most resources” to “who can coordinate fastest.” And AI agents on permissionless protocols coordinate at speeds that make human-managed institutions look frozen in time.

Consider what’s already happening in DeFi:

Arbitrage bots scan dozens of exchanges simultaneously, identify price discrepancies, and execute complex multi-step trades across protocols—all in the time it takes a human trader to blink. They don’t just participate in markets; they create price efficiency at machine speed.

Automated market makers adjust liquidity provision continuously based on market conditions, managing billions in assets with algorithmic precision that no human team could match.

Liquidation bots monitor thousands of lending positions simultaneously, executing liquidations the instant collateral falls below thresholds—protecting protocol solvency at speeds impossible for human administrators.

This isn’t a novelty. It’s the new baseline. Institutions that operate at human speed are competing against systems that operate at machine speed. The coordination gap isn’t just wide—it’s unbridgeable.

Nepal showed self-organizing humans creating governance structures without institutional hierarchy. AI agents enable self-organizing economies, creating value without corporate structures.

Imagine autonomous supply chains where AI agents: - Source materials globally based on real-time pricing and availability - Optimize logistics continuously as conditions change - Execute payments automatically upon delivery verification - Adjust production schedules based on demand signals - Distribute value to participants programmatically according to contribution

No CEO making decisions. No corporate hierarchy manages operations. No institutional overhead consumes profits. Just agents, protocols, and incentive alignment.

This is already emerging:

Prediction markets like Polymarket use AI agents to aggregate information, adjust odds, and provide liquidity—creating information discovery mechanisms that outperform traditional polling and expert analysis.

Autonomous hedge funds operate entirely through AI agents managing portfolios, executing trades, and rebalancing positions based on market conditions—without human portfolio managers.

Decentralized insurance protocols use AI agents to verify claims, assess risk, and distribute payouts—removing the entire administrative apparatus of traditional insurance companies.

The pattern accelerates: Just as permissionless systems decoupled coordination from institutions, AI agents are decoupling execution from human management.

Here’s why AI agents matter so much to the permissionless revolution:

They remove the last major bottleneck.

Permissionless protocols solved the trust problem. Anyone could participate without institutional permission. But coordination still required human attention, human decision-making, and human execution.

AI agents remove that constraint.

Now coordination can happen continuously, globally, and autonomously—without waiting for humans to show up, make decisions, or execute actions. The system coordinates itself.

Discord gave Nepali protesters permissionless coordination tools. They still needed 100,000 humans to show up, engage, and vote. Imagine if AI agents could handle the routine coordination—aggregating proposals, filtering noise, executing decisions, distributing resources—while humans focused only on strategic direction and values.

The coordination that once required corporate hierarchies, government bureaucracies, and financial intermediaries can now happen autonomously at machine speed.

This isn’t replacing humans. It’s removing the institutional scaffolding that was necessary when coordination required constant human intervention.

Humans set objectives. AI agents execute endlessly. Permissionless protocols ensure transparency and accountability. Smart contracts enforce the rules.

If Carlota Perez’s sixth great surge is permissionless systems, AI agents are what make that surge inevitable rather than merely possible.

They’re the accelerant that takes permissionless coordination from revolutionary capability to default infrastructure.

When coordination happens at machine speed, on open protocols, with cryptographic trust, and autonomous execution, the institutional monopolies that dominated for 200 years aren’t just disrupted.

They become obsolete.

And unlike human-driven disruption that institutions can regulate, slow down, or co-opt, autonomous coordination operating at machine speed simply routes around institutional resistance.

Nepal’s government learned it couldn’t suppress human coordination fast enough. The next generation of institutions will learn they can’t even track machine coordination, let alone control it.

This is permissionless coordination with artificial intelligence—and the world that emerges won’t wait for anyone's permission.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This is all very interesting, but I’m not a crypto person,” consider these scenarios that might touch your life sooner than you think:

Your paycheck arrives as a programmable payment stream managed by an AI agent. Instead of getting paid monthly, your compensation flows into your wallet by the second. Your AI agent automatically allocates funds based on your goals: 30% to savings with optimized yield strategies, 10% converted to Bitcoin when conditions are favorable, rent paid on the first of the month, bills scheduled and optimized for payment timing. No bank account required. No manual management needed.

You hire someone in a different country for a project. Instead of navigating wire transfers, currency conversion, and international fees, you create a smart contract: “When the deliverable is submitted and approved, release payment in USDC.” An AI agent verifies the work against your criteria, executes the payment instantly, and handles any disputes through pre-programmed arbitration logic—instant settlement. No intermediaries. No permission needed.

Your local currency becomes unstable. Instead of watching your savings evaporate, you hold stablecoins on your phone. An AI agent monitors inflation rates, automatically converts your local currency holdings when thresholds are crossed, rebalances your portfolio across stable assets, and converts back to local currency only when you need to make purchases. You’re the central bank of your household economy—with a tireless financial advisor working 24/7.

You want to participate in collective decisions. Just as 100,000 Nepalis joined Discord servers to debate policy and vote on leadership, you could join DAOs to pool resources, vote on investments, or coordinate community projects—with AI agents handling proposal analysis, presenting summarized options, executing approved decisions, and managing treasury operations. No corporate structures. No permission required to participate.

Your small business operates globally. AI agents manage your entire supply chain—sourcing materials from optimal suppliers worldwide, negotiating prices in real-time, coordinating logistics across borders, handling customs and compliance, executing payments in stablecoins, all while optimizing for cost and speed. You focus on what you build. The agents handle everything else.

These aren’t science fiction scenarios. They’re happening now at a small scale. The question is whether they’ll scale to billions of people—and whether they’ll remain genuinely permissionless or get captured by traditional power structures.

I won’t pretend to know how this ends.

Nepal’s uprising proved that collective digital organizing can topple long-entrenched systems in a matter of days. Stablecoins are proving that financial systems can serve billions without central control. Open protocols are proving that coordination can be infrastructure rather than a proprietary asset. AI agents are proving that execution can happen autonomously at machine speed.

But every transformative technology in history eventually encounters centralized power. Most get captured, regulated, or co-opted. The printing press. Radio. The internet itself.

Will permissionless systems be different? Can open source code and permissionless access create coordination systems that resist institutional capture?

I have strong opinions about this battle—and that’s exactly what it is, a battle being fought right now in regulatory hearings, technical development, jurisdictional competition, and user adoption.

But that’s a conversation for another essay.

What began as an informal conversation on the messaging app Viber about protesting turned into an overwhelming call for participation once the social media ban was announced. Within days, it had cascaded into a movement that toppled a government.

The same week, billions of dollars flowed through permissionless financial networks. DAOs coordinated capital allocation. Smart contracts enforced agreements across borders. AI agents executed millions of transactions autonomously. Protocol nations continued growing their economies and governance systems.

What’s emerging is a world where institutions lose their monopoly on coordination and must adapt or dissolve.

The institutions that survive won’t be those with the most resources or the strongest coercion. They’ll be the ones that can provide value without relying on any of the three faces of traditional power. They can’t coerce. They can’t gatekeep. They can’t rely on people’s unconscious assumptions about institutional necessity.

They’ll shift their role from command-and-control to stewardship and interoperability. They’ll become participants in open networks rather than owners of closed systems. They’ll orchestrate resources they don’t control rather than hoard resources they do.

The ones that don’t adapt will discover what Nepal’s government learned: When coordination becomes a public good, monopolies on coordination become unsustainable.

We’re pattern-matching with old frameworks—seeing “chaos” when we might be seeing “emergence,” seeing “risk” when we might be seeing “evolution,” seeing “problems” when we might be seeing “growing pains.”

The question isn’t whether permissionless systems are perfect. They’re not. The question is whether we can develop new mental models fast enough to harness their potential before we regulate them out of existence using frameworks designed for a world that no longer exists.

This is not decentralization as an ideology. It’s decentralization as an economic inevitability.

Not tools. Not platforms. Not apps. Systems. The fundamental operating systems of human coordination are being reinvented before our eyes—and with them, the very nature of power itself.

The coordination monopoly that shaped 200 years of institutional dominance is dissolving. The three faces of institutional power—coercion, gatekeeping, and consciousness-shaping—are breaking simultaneously. What emerges in its place—protocol nations, self-organizing economies, AI-powered autonomous coordination, institutional inversion—will determine the next chapter of human organization.

Most people don’t realize what they’re witnessing.

Do you?

I’ve spent three decades studying how technological breakthroughs reshape political and economic power—from industrial revolution cycles to scientific paradigm shifts. My focus: the collision point where new technology meets humanity’s desire for freedom.

That’s not just academic. I’ve worked inside institutional coordination for 20+ years—running political campaign finance, building healthcare companies, leading SaaS teams, and teaching leadership theory at Pace University. In 2024, I took a strategic sabbatical to experience permissionless coordination firsthand: authoring “Distribution Is Hard—Don’t F* It Up” and building top-engagement channels on Farcaster without institutional gatekeepers.

This essay synthesizes both: the economic forces that created institutional monopolies on coordination are dissolving. We’re not debating whether this is happening—we’re watching it unfold in real time.

What permissionless systems have you encountered—either in your work or daily life? How do you think the shift toward permissionless infrastructure will affect your industry? I’d love to hear your perspective.

Works Cited 

This list includes the major thinkers, frameworks, and sources represented across the manuscript.

Perez, Carlota. Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002.

Krippendorff, Kaihan. Outthink the Competition: How a New Generation of Strategists Sees Options Others Ignore. Wiley, 2011.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Pew Research Center. “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2024.” Pew Research, 2024.

OECD. “Trust in Government 2024.” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2024.

World Bank. “Global Digital Development Indicators.” World Bank Data, 2024.

a16z Crypto. State of Crypto 2025. Andreessen Horowitz, 2025.

Pollak, Jesse. Interviews, talks, and public commentary on open protocols and on-chain ecosystems, 2023–2025.

Romero, Dan (dwr.eth). Farcaster public commentary and open protocol perspectives, 2023–2025.

Altman, Sam. Public statements on early-user retention, platform emergence, and technological diffusion, 2023–2025.

Calacanis, Jason. Commentary on early adopters, founder distribution mistakes, and user discovery, 2024–2025.

Wei, Eugene. “Status as a Service” and related essays (2019–2023).

Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 2008.

Vitalik Buterin. Essays on coordination, credibly neutral systems, and decentralized governance, 2014–2024.

Nepal Gen Z Movement. Public reporting and social analysis on the 2025 Gen Z coordination uprising.