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28 Fear

The Loop Economy: A Combinatorial Marketplace Without a Platform

Original title: The Loop Economy: A Universal Combinatorial Marketplace Without a Platform

Ethereum Foundation 8:42 37 views on YouTube ETH −0.9%

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Summary

In a Devcon talk on the Futures Worth Building track, Peter Foldiak presented a design for a combinatorial marketplace built on Ethereum without a platform. The talk argues that most mutually profitable trades never happen because the cost of discovering them exceeds their surplus, a double coincidence of wants left unsolved off-chain. The proposed design uses one uniform, content-addressed offer form in which meanings, time windows and regions are ordered by a single fits-within relation, described as a concept DAG. Personal tokens act as per-maker numeraires, so k asks and m bids need k+m offers rather than k×m rates. Loops are found as negative cycles by competing solvers and settled in batch auctions. The offer book is kept as signed feeds on Swarm, so there is no platform to capture or censor. The talk also names what stays hard: oracles for physical delivery, zero-knowledge fits-within proofs for private matching, wash loops and ontology capture.

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Key points

  1. The talk addresses the double coincidence of wants, which it says remains unsolved off-chain because the cost of discovering mutually profitable trades exceeds their surplus.
  2. Offers take one uniform, content-addressed form in which meanings, time windows and regions are ordered by a single fits-within relation, described as a concept DAG.
  3. Personal tokens serve as per-maker numeraires, so k asks and m bids require k+m offers instead of k×m rates.
  4. Loops are found as negative cycles by competing solvers and settled in batch auctions, generalizing intent and solver design beyond tokens.
  5. The offer book is stored as signed feeds on Swarm, with no platform to capture or censor it.
  6. Stated open problems include oracles for physical delivery, zero-knowledge fits-within proofs for private matching, wash loops and ontology capture.

Questions

Who gave the talk and on which track?
Peter Foldiak gave the talk on the Futures Worth Building track at Devcon.
How many offers are needed when personal tokens are used as numeraires?
With k asks and m bids, k+m offers are needed rather than k×m rates.
Where is the offer book kept?
It is kept as signed feeds on Swarm, so there is no platform to capture or censor.

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