How Value Circulates

Volume III's distinction between platform logic and protocol logic applies to the internal economy as directly as it applies to the technological architecture. Platform logic centralizes value — participants generate value that accumulates to the platform, which then distributes some portion of it back to participants according to the platform's own criteria. Protocol logic distributes value — the protocol enables value-generating interactions between participants, and the value remains with the participants who generated it.

Providence's internal economy must operate according to protocol logic. The specific mechanisms through which this is achieved will vary across contexts and will evolve as the architecture develops. But the constitutional principle is clear: Providence's role in the economic interactions of its participants is to reduce the friction of coordination and stewardship, not to extract value from the coordination it enables. This principle has implications for every economic mechanism the institution designs — from how it charges for services, to how it handles the economic value generated by participant contributions to the shared knowledge base, to how it manages the economic relationship between communities operating at different scales of the network.