Protecting Value in the Market Place

Hello All,
I am looking for responses from the community involving protecting intellectual property, or propitiatory ideas in an open source environment. Suppose you were to launch a Dapp where you, or the “investors” (investing time, and monetary relevance) want to protect the value (potential energy) of your product. What guidelines should be in place to protect a project with value in an ungoverned, unregulated, open source code environment?
Thoughts?

Yes this is indeed one of the core questions that open-source software movement had for a long time (good read Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source) and how crypto actually was able to demonstrate that you can actually build and capture value, even when all your code is open-source by default. The jury is still out on the long term sustainability, but each year that passes will reinforce the point.

I think two interesting reads on value capture on the crypto side from a16z
Crypto’s Business Model is Familiar. What Isn’t is Who Benefits and Crypto Tokens: A Breakthrough in Open Network Design

If you noticed, recently many governance tokens like COMP (Compound Finance), BAL (Balancer Labs) and earlier veteran MKR (MakerDao) were all quite popular.

Of course, token model is not the only way, as you have seen how CryptoKitties and other NFT based projects didn’t have a token (service/utility token ERC-20 style), but built a very strong community that brought on a strong network effect (another term you will hear often in crypto). Probably on this last topic, we could bring some experts in the field to chip in some additional insights :slight_smile:

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Thank you unlocked. Any one else have a contribution for further discussion?