The Origin Story of Sweetbridge
Learning from supply chain masters, a trial-by-fire in complex value chains, and sudden exposure to blockchains.
Spider-Man had a spider bite. The Hulk had gamma rays. Every good comic book needs an origin story, in which a normal human is suddenly transformed into a superhero. What’s novel about this story is that it was no instant transformation — it took a couple decades. And it wasn’t just our hero that gained new capabilities— it was the world we lived in.
This is how the idea for the Sweetbridge economic framework was born.
Google defines the word economy as: “…the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services…”. Most people don’t realize that supply chains manage the majority of the $50+ trillion in global trade (i.e., the bulk of the world’s GDP). Supply chains — today’s mechanisms of production carefully synchronized to meet global consumption demand — are by their very definition distributed and autonomous, and have been so for centuries. Naturally, people who have spent decades as supply chain practitioners must have a deep interest in the world’s economies.
In the midst of a continuing global recession in 2003, a group including supply chain and logistics professionals met with non-profit leaders and planners for a long weekend retreat, to explore creating more sustainable economic activity in distressed communities and underdeveloped countries.
Since a DAO was not a common term at the time, they considered pairing these non-profits with businesses on a global scale in a “federated model.” They envisioned this distributed, autonomous trade and services federation could create and operate more efficient supply chains to benefit millions of people.
The weekend was sponsored by Scott Nelson, founder of Trax Technologies, Inc. The group concluded that the idea was compelling and they encouraged Scott to work on a plan.
For the next 18 months, Scott worked on creating a viable plan, but the idea faced three key issues:
- The technical infrastructure and development work required to make the idea viable required significant investment.
- Though there had been some early application successes — Craigslist, wikipedia, the Apache Project, etc. — distributed autonomous models were seen as unproven by supply chain professionals.
- The idea required a trusted intermediary, significant financial backing and had transaction costs that limited its application.
Over the next 12 years, Scott revisited the “federation” model in hopes of pairing economics with supply chains in this manner, but continued to conclude that it was too early to attempt it.
Fast forward to 2016. Scott and a team of like-minded executives who had founded and built technology businesses in the supply chain logistics industry decided it was time to move forward. They knew that:
- The economic models of venture capital, private equity firms and financial markets are broken,
- Connectivity was becoming ubiquitous, while platform technologies had matured and were becoming inexpensive,
- Settlement is a key mechanism to foster business partner trust and monitor financial results,
- Knowledge workers get a poor deal when they employ their intellectual property in service to companies for a mere fee or salary, and
- The Gig Economy diminishes workers’ future prospects.
The team saw the increasing pace and size of change, and that disruptions in products and business models make businesses ever more fragile. They saw massive amounts of underutilized assets, and that stagnant resources are locked up in companies, value chains and economies around the world.
The team knew this was true, because they had a front-row seat to these disruptive changes. More leaders from technology companies that spurred these changes were starting to have similar concerns. Readily accessible computing power, increased bandwidth and agile software delivery methods helped deliver huge efficiency gains at lower cost, but at what benefit to the economy as a whole?
These executives also realized that Blockchain, Ethereum, smart contracts, decentralized apps, crypto-law, the serverless internet, and decentralized governance can together clear a better path for economic activity. This new decentralized path significantly increases economic productivity and trade velocity.
This new decentralized path may be massively disruptive, even more disruptive than the Internet. By taking this path, the very structures and institutions on which we depend today could change.
So how can individuals and companies move from centralized to decentralized models of work and trade? Can change be transformational instead of disruptive? Is there anything of value in the centralized era or must everything become decentralized? What is the impact of “trustless” trust?
The Sweetbridge Foundation was formed to incentivize peer-to-peer economies that will help all participants realize answers to these questions.
What will happen next? Stay tuned, readers!
Sweetbridge (sweetbridge.com) is a transformative economy that creates value by connecting resources, talent and capacity. Starting with the $54T logistics and supply chain industries, our blockchain-based ecosystems help people and companies collaborate to improve performance while facing business disruption.
