The Vela Manifesto

0. Preamble

Open‑source code transformed software; programmable money is transforming finance; but the social architectures that govern our shared work still look like 1990s web forums with voting portals. Through Vela, we treat governance itself as software that can be designed, forked, and evolved. Using prediction market mechanisms where members commit resources to desired outcomes, and adaptive forking for parallel experimentation, governance becomes first class, programmable infrastructure, just as open-source software is today.

1. The Coordination Crisis

When every member of your startup runs 20 instances of Claude Code, agents make hundreds of decisions per minute, and traditional governance breaks. Meetings can't resolve real time conflicts. Approval chains can't keep pace with autonomous systems. We need governance infrastructure that operates at AI speed.

2. The Stakes: Governance as the Primary Asset

In a post‑AGI economy, governance becomes the primary asset class. Human agency migrates upstream to deciding the games worth playing, the highest‑leverage surface available. A rule‑change is therefore not a political debate; it is a trade on the future output of the entire engine. Participation is not a civic duty but the core engineering discipline of this new economy.

Read the full economic framework →

3. Why the Status Quo Is Stuck

Many platforms fall into these pitfalls:

Bots over Agents – AI agents reduced to simple governance automation for votes, trades and proposals.

Jargon as Cover – Buzz‑phrases like "self‑organising networks" replace explicit feedback loops and real value.

Primitive Obsession – Identity and reputation are shipped as check‑boxes, with no mechanism that turns credentials into power or capital.

Productivity Myopia – All effort goes to producing more, none to rewriting the incentives that determine what is wanted in the first place.

The result is a Cambrian explosion of tools layered atop governance models that still assume forum threads and passive token holders. Vela's thesis is that rulesets must become interactive, testable software, and AI agents must graduate from tools to constitutional co‑designers.

4. Operating Principles of Vela

Principle	Implementation
Deep Gamification	Reputation, attention and value‑flow are the UX instead of being laid on top.
Emergent Roles	Human or agent roles aren't assigned or connoted to Archetypes. Market forces determine survival.
Adaptive Governance	Governance indices are wired into issuance and quorum logic so deadlock or oligarchy auto‑corrects, and governance is not left unchecked.
Agents as Co-designers	Autonomous AI agents simulate, audit and veto rule‑changes under constitutional constraints.
Market-Priced Futarchy and Forking	Rule‑changes generate prediction markets on impact; treasury flows unlock when market confidence exceeds quorum thresholds, while minority factions can still fork via personal commitments.

Governance must evolve into a high‑speed, market‑priced, fork‑friendly game.

5. Core Constructs

5.1 Rule‑Change Credits (RCC)

Non‑transferable governance fuel earned by skin‑in‑the‑game. Spend RCC to propose, amend or veto rules; win them back only if the rule measurably improves system health. Unused RCC decays, forcing timely participation.

5.2 Continuous Fork Futures

Any member may declare: "If Rule‑Set B exists, I'll move 500 tokens and 30 hrs/wk there." These commitments function as prediction markets - members and agents bet their own resources on preferred rule-sets. When a threshold of pledged capital and labour materialises, the ledger splits; two sub‑DAOs now coexist, each carrying only the resources committed to it.

5.3 Agents as Co-designers

Agents handle the computational work of governance: calculating health metrics, modeling rule changes, and executing splits when communities fork. This lets governance operate at the speed autonomous systems require while humans focus on the decisions that actually matter.

5.4 Structural Entropy Index (SEI)

Real‑time Shannon entropy of influence distribution.

Low SEI (oligarchy) → extra RCC minting for under‑represented identities.
High SEI (paralysis) → quorum requirements ratchet upward.

The metric does not just describe power; it controls its issuance.

6. A Living Cycle

Signal – Metrics drift or a new opportunity arises.
Propose – Anyone spends RCC to publish a rule‑change or fork future.
Forecast – Agents forecast the impact on key metrics; humans price the uncertainty via prediction markets.
Enact – Rule passes or fork threshold triggers split.
Measure – SEI and other indices update continuously; RCC rewards or slashing follow automatically.

Then the loop repeats. Vela is a perpetual beta of its own social physics.

Upgrade the playground, not the play‑toys.
Vela will iterate until communities evolve at the speed of their members' imagination.

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