Bear with me here, this gets to our Venture Capital Fund soon I promise! I love the show Westworld. It consistently leaves me feeling fascinated, inspired, and disturbed all at once. It does this by shining a light on humans (and their imitations) at their best and worst and makes me challenge both the nature of consciousness and the nature of what is “real”. It never does this so effectively as in the finale of Season 1 with an episode entitled “the Bicameral Mind”. Bicameral means “of two chambers” and in a nutshell, the Bicameral mind theory is that pre-consciousness humans would interpret instructions, sometimes manifesting as voices, coming from the other hemisphere (or chamber) of their brain, as coming from an external source. They would interpret this voice as their biological instructions and follow it exclusively. Consciousness came upon realization that the voice from the other chamber was actually an internal monologue that could be influenced and introspected on. The voice remained a major influence on the mind, but the mind became an independent, self-contained, conscious entity.

While the theory has been largely disproven on a scientific basis for actual human development, the idea as a model for development remains fascinating, particularly when viewed through an organizational lens. A developing organization is governed on a day to day basis by nuts and bolts processes and systems but also influenced by another, strategic chamber of thought. This other chamber of thought begins as a codified relationship, but evolves to be internalized and create a whole new independent meld of organizational consciousness.

Welcome to Bicameral Ventures! An independent (and fully conscious), full service, future complete venture fund focused on finding, investing in and developing exceptional projects built on the blockchain. While our venture nuts and bolts are excellent on their own, where we’re unique is our deep strategic relationship with our “other chamber” the Aion Ecosystem. We believe that Aion is not only the premier smart contract execution platform in the current blockchain landscape, but that Aion’s decentralized interoperability fabric inherently de-risks projects’ technology and enables the complex, real-world business models that the blockchain industry desperately needs to evolve (and we desperately want to invest in).

Our thesis is that full blockchain adoption is a pyramid that roughly mirrors the current blockchain technology stack. And that the full pyramid is required in order to access the value of any one layer. The tip is the real world use case that has clear demonstrable value and can be explained at the gym without using the word “blockchain”. This is represented by dApps. The next layer down is the bare minimum understanding of the aspects of blockchain that power this use case and make it different from a traditional centralized solution. We believe that this is best constructed via a “Layer 2 Protocol” that is open source and sits on top of the base blockchain and adds additional targeted logic to the core blockchain functions (mobility, security, identity, incentives, key recovery, content management, etc). Then the base layer is the full cryptographically powered magic of the ground-floor protocols.

While in a fully developed blockchain economy, a meaningful amount of value may accrue at the ground-floor protocol level (the Fat Protocol theory), that value is never generated without adoption. Adoption happens at the dApp and Layer 2 protocol level and given its catalyzing role, we believe there is meaningful value that is trapped without investment in these layers. We call this the Trapped Protocol theory, and Bicameral invests in a structurally tailored manner to unlock this full value of adoption.

Bicameral’s vision is a portfolio of leading decentralized projects, created by exceptional teams, solving real-world problems with real-world business models all powered by the Aion Network and contributing to the Aion Ecosystem.