As our world continues to veer further towards new paradigms in fields ranging from politics to finance to socializing, it’s imperative that we begin to approach the perspectives and values that will define this fast emerging era of development. The economic and incentive models unlocked by blockchain projects around the world carry not only major implications in terms of the digitization of value or decentralized systems, but should also influence the nature of the way we cooperate.

Blockchain and the Ethereum developer ecosystem in particular have often exemplified the positive elements of coopetition, the notion that a community has more to gain in cooperating in the short term to establish a platform upon which they may all healthily compete later on. Coopetition has long been evident in the tech space since the inception of Linux and the open source movement, but can also be found in institutional settings around the world. According to Arie Levy-Cohen, CFO of Singular DTV: “Coopetition is required, so that all of the best minds can come together to create a brand new economy around what actually unites people.”

In Part 1 of Unshrugging Atlas, an interview series with Levy-Cohen, we laid out the central tenets of coopetition and how it relates to SingularDTV’s mission of creating a decentralized entertainment economy. In part 2, we go deeper into how individuals and teams can go about manifesting coopetition in practice, and take a bird’s eye view of the macro processes underway in the global economic and geopolitical landscape that make the present such a critical moment for humanity as a whole…

Is there any specific individual or project that you think exemplifies coopetition and what it can achieve well?

Coopetition is the art of understanding the disruptive nature of a technology when shared by a group of those who will actually leverage and implement its impact. If you look at someone like Joseph Lubin, you will see him as a founder of the Ethereum protocol and the Ethereum Foundation. He invested a lot of his time in helping that come to life. It was pretty revolutionary at the time. When Ethereum’s development came to pass, he had a library and a language with which he could build a lot of things, and he also had a community. You need a lot of people to come together to realize that cooperating right now so that something like Ethereum can be born is in all of our best interests.

Cooperating first means that you can compete later to build the best applications on top of it. That mentality is at the heart of what we do with blockchain. We bring the cooperative to the table in order to deliver that which will enable the competitive landscape to emerge. This isn’t an entirely novel concept. It’s evident in industries all over the world, from insurance companies to Linux.

How does this relate to the discussion of open source technology vs. proprietary solutions?

I think you need both. Open source has been a very powerful mechanism in bringing people a truthful environment in which they can cooperatively build things that would have otherwise taken a lot more money to deliver. Open source makes the product more resilient, more malleable, it can be bifurcated, it can be pulled in many directions. If done right, kind of the way Linux has done and Makerbot did in the early days, and in the way the Ethereum protocol is still doing, I think that open source has a lot of value. It goes to show you that coopetition has a deep-rooted impact in the way we do things in blockchain.

I think open source allows for a certain type of community to create a groundswell and a type of resilience that paves the road for some more proprietary interpretations, iterations, and/or applications or instances in which you can instantiate some of those free, open source concepts. The idea is that the open source protocol nature is kind of like a language, or the metric system. I don’t think that should belong to anyone. But anyone who can use those tools to create something new and unique that actually helps people with something, that can be proprietary.