“We’re educators and informers. There’s a mass audience out there. They’ve heard about blockchain. They’ve heard about the decentralized ecosystem, but they are not really sure what it is, where they fit into that picture or what value they’re going to accrue from it. So we try to provide mental models, context and information.”

Based mostly in Singapore and Sydney, the research institute Speculative Rationality believes in elevating human collaboration. And it sees blockchain as an important piece of the puzzle. Founded over a year ago by self-described hobbyists who were fascinated by blockchain’s disruptive potential and wanted to do more than just read and invest, Speculative Rationality cuts through the noise of the blockchain space by providing theoretical models, curating information and highlighting real world projects that bring its mandates to life, including – as it so happened – ICON.

“We offer context and information to people who don’t necessarily have access to the best information.”

NOTE TO READERS: Though we talked with a trio of individuals from Speculative Rationality, they asked we refer to them collectively as, well, “Speculative Rationality.” And that is what we will do.

Imagine all the people, collaborating in the world

Speculative Rationality is about creating an ecosystem that elevates human collaboration in a trustless environment, or as they put it, a “reimagining of the Internet in a trustless setting.”

Looking at what the Internet has done for humanity over the last three decades or so, they believe the wealth and value generated speaks for itself. They also believe, however, that we’ve begun to see the limits of the Internet’s existing infrastructure, especially over the last two years. They point to issues such as privacy, data ownership and censorship. These problems impede people from working together, making all of us poorer for it. “If we concede for a second that human collaboration leads to value creation,” they say, “then these kinds of impediments to that collaboration will likely mean that collaboration itself is inhibited.”

The good news, they say, is that blockchain has enabled people – for the first time in history – to collaborate in a trustless environment without help from a centralized intermediary.

“If we could reimagine the Internet in the absence of the issues we’ve seen spring up over the last five, ten years as the Internet has matured, what would it look like and could we enhance and elevate human collaboration from this innovation? And what kind of value could we yield?,” they ask. “And the answers to those aren’t fully formed yet. We’re still trying to see what that world will look like. We want to be part of that discussion.”

A handbook to a better Internet

Speculative Rationality’s bread and butter, as it were, is writing. Much of their work is theoretical, conceptualizing models that allow people to pursue their own benefits and opportunities for value creation. In particular, they focus on a trio of maturity hurdles facing the blockchain space: interoperability, scalability and privacy.

One of their initiatives is a series of handbooks highlighting projects that address those hurdles in innovative ways.

Even if a founder of blockchain project has a clear idea of what they want to do, those ideas are often complex – too complex, in fact, for the general public to understand. What Speculative Rationality does is take a project’s story and weave a coherent narrative.

“We start from our theory, what is our view, what do we want this space to achieve, what is our vision for this ecosystem,” they say. “And then we pick out projects that are living, breathing examples of those initiatives. We try to highlight and contextualize why they are special, why they stand out to us, and how they are moving the dial.”