Where 2026 went

Lined up, this year's work is one question asked at different scales: what does it take for strangers to do something together without a boss in the middle? Sometimes the strangers are token holders, sometimes firms, and lately they're robots.

Token holders. My day job is ZKsync governance. The system I designed for the ZKsync Association has three bodies: a Token Assembly, a Security Council and Guardians. It went live onchain in September 2024 and approved and executed over a dozen protocol upgrades in its first year.

Organizations. I lead Protocols for Business at the Protocol Institute. It's a research group on how organizations coordinate through protocols, and what changes when AI agents join the work. Sessions run every other Monday from 2 November, and the group keeps its own blyg. Alongside it I published an AI capability maturity model: five levels, from shadow AI use to strategic capability.

Machines. There's a rover you can drive from your browser, a speculative task market where operators bid to send robots on site surveys, and Wobblebots, a field guide to home robots with verified specs and prices.

Infrastructure. At DAWO26 I gave a talk on software as a substrate of control. And in It's time to discover, not file, water data I argued that finding rate sheets matters more than standardising them.

Management. NPC Memo keeps going: a speculative field guide on management, written since 2025.

And this site got rebuilt from scratch, mostly out of protocols.