A vision of the world in which fluid and dynamic entities evolve together in a decentered fashion, exploring each other’s properties in a performative back-and-forth dance of agency.

Andrew Pickering. Cybernetic Brain: Sketches for Another Future.

Cascadia is the world’s first neocybernetic blockchain, natively integrating ve-tokenomics and control theory to develop an organic ledger with emergent behaviors.

The Tragedy of the Commons

In Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Nakamoto succinctly introduced the concept of incentives. Miners, acting in their own self-interest, expend computing power/energy to maintain the Bitcoin network, and receive block rewards in return. This idea — converting self-serving behavior into a public good — sparked a revolution.

Over time, we have drifted quite far from this design due to the transformation of cryptocurrency from “networks” to “money.” Blockchains are now inundated with a variety of actors, no longer just miners. End-users, contributors, developers, early investors, late speculators, service providers, and most recently, regulators, all seek to maximize their own conflicting interests, regardless of the negative impact this might have on others. The end result is depletion of the public resource, dead chains, rugged projects, and it is usually the uninformed retail user that is left holding the bag.

Introducing Cascadia

Cascadia proposes a novel approach— that through the adoption of cybernetics, symbiotic relationships can be formed between ordinarily incompatible parties on a blockchain network.

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary branch of mathematics studying the behavior of dynamic systems. At the core of cybernetics is the concept of circular causality or feedback; stated simply, observed outcomes are taken as inputs for further action in the same system. Cascadia will integrate two feedback loops which allow for growth and adaptation. One loop makes adjustments based on observation of the system’s output, enabling learning. The other recognizes environmental changes and replaces obsolete information in the system with new data, enabling evolution.

The end goal is a fully autonomous blockchain.

As a complex adaptive system (CAS), Cascadia retains the following characteristics:

1. Mutuality: Blockchain actors interact in parallel, cooperatively, creating simultaneous interactions among subsystems.

2. Evolvability: Cascadia evolves in an opportunistic manner, rather than via top-down planning.

3. Reflexivity: Cascadia is rich in internal and external feedback, both negative and positive, leading to reflexive phenomena such as self-organization, self-production, and self-regulation.

We endeavor to return to Nakamoto’s original vision — incentivizing individuals through innovative tech stacks — and further it, by incorporating cybernetic control theory. This shall allow Cascadia to dynamically optimize alignment amongst network participants through responsive, systemic loops. Native integration of ve-tokenomics directly into the fabric of the Cascadia blockchain will be our first exploration of this concept.

For more details about Cascadia’s technical specifications and initial ve-models, we invite the reader to peruse our forthcoming whitepaper.

The world doesn’t need yet another L1 based on yet another programming language that offers incremental or no improvement over current market offerings. Our mission is to build a chain that people actually use and economically makes sense. Blockchain networks are, at their core, a gathering of people and a basket of incentives. Networks cannot be artificially maintained by loose money, and organisms cannot function without the sum of their parts. Cascadia seeks to create a differentiated value proposition by diving deeper than the consensus layer, to explore emergent coordination and incentive alignment in complex adaptive systems.