A new primitive for collective action — a machine for turning private intentions into public facts, atomically, privately, and without a master. The internet's missing association layer.
Two actors would both gain from cooperation, yet each is tempted to defect. Selfishness wins. The century's answer: regulate, tax, coerce. Restrain the defector by force.
Both hunters want the stag. Neither wants to defect. The only problem is assurance — what if the other doesn't show? No selfishness. Just the absence of binding commitment.
We've been solving the wrong problem. Yonatan Sompolinsky — Kaspa's co-founder and Harvard researcher — argues on hashd.ag that most social failures are not defection problems. They are coordination problems. The demon is not Moloch. It is Azazel — the deity of the wilderness, before civilization, where humans wander alone and no associations form.
If Moloch is the demon of defection, Azazel is the deity of the wilderness — where humans wander alone and no associations form. The remedy is not coercion. It is mechanisms to bind shared action.
A better equilibrium is spotted.
An entrepreneur posts a Hunt — the target outcome, the execution logic, and who may join. The stag is visible to all. No one moves yet.
Commitments accumulate — opaquely.
Participants submit intendos: signed conditional commitments — "I will do X if N others do X" — each with its own threshold. No one can see how close activation is. The manipulation surface is zero.
The pack hunts — atomically.
A qualifying subset crosses all mutual thresholds and executes simultaneously. Everyone moves at once. The platform launches with users already there. The stag is caught.
The four axioms impose hard requirements on the settlement layer. Atomicity, opacity, multiplexing, composability — most chains fail at least one. Kaspa satisfies all four at once, through Real-Time Decentralization: each consensus epoch holds a majority of honest blocks, finalized within one internet round-trip. Coordination markets resolve in seconds; the manipulation window approaches zero.
The internet gave us free speech and constant participation — and almost no capacity to govern itself. What we need is an association layer: the ability for dynamic communities to acquire write permissions to shared state.
Building coordination markets on Kaspa? Researching the mechanism? Or just want to talk about turning private intentions into public facts? Send a signal.