Black Sky is an emerging DAO on a mission to minimize dystopia and maximize harmony within the cosmos. Our aim is to organize a large-scale network of individuals who utilize crypto technologies to initiate change towards mitigating the damage nation states and corporations have imposed on the human experience.

We are currently a small collective of writers, researchers, artists, engineers, technologists, and DAO contributors who are launching Black Sky Nexus, a wiki and zine, for the purpose of developing relevant resources to promote greater engagement and community around the following topics: large-scale networks of cooperation; open source resources for new crypto explorers; the role of technology and privacy in the evolution of human rights; how crypto can benefit the arts and vice versa; new modalities for healing the ecosphere; humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.

‍Black Sky Wiki will curate, host, and develop open source resources with the goal of becoming a leading internet source on providing guides in which experts can continually contribute new knowledge as the crypto community and blockchain technologies each evolve.

‍Black Sky Zine will include resources from the wiki, in-depth inquiries, informational articles, embedded NFTs, in addition to comedic or sci-fi extrapolations, taking inspiration from Mondo 2000, The Whole Earth Catalog, EXTROPY, and CCRU.
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The zine and wiki will be translated into languages outside of English based on demand, prioritizing languages associated with authoritarian regimes to assist individuals in autocratic societies achieve greater financial freedom through a crypto-focused internet resource and publication.

The following are elaborations on some of the primary topics covered by Black Sky Nexus:

With the rise of smart contract technology it has never been easier to globally pool and self-administer capital over common missions, allowing people to work together towards anti-industrialist, democratic societies that favor ecologically sound technologies and economies.

DAOs that exist today typically have under 10,000 active members and are most successful when they have focused missions or projects. Black Sky would like to explore the possibilities of what larger scale DAOs, with as many as 100 million members, can accomplish and how these DAOs would operate. An autonomous organization with this many members entails each individual only contribute a small amount of capital on a yearly basis, such as $10 to $100, to be able to make a large-scale impact.

Research for this will draw on Öcalan’s democratic confederalism, John Restakis’ “Humanizing the Economy”, the outputs of the Metagovernance Project, and Design Global, Manufacture Local, the latter being an emerging productive model converging the digital commons with local manufacturing technologies.

To lead towards a realistic implementation, the following technical areas will also require analysis: 
- Solutions for anonymous participation;
- Sybil protection method to enable democratic governance;
- Innovative systems for accountability;
- Collaborative systems to share and distribute knowledge, analyze proposals, and prioritize ideas.

Newcomers to cryptocurrency often have difficulty finding comprehensive resources pertinent to their specific areas of interest. Additionally, the crypto community has created many resource guides in the form of blog posts or Notion spaces, but these resources cannot be easily edited, enhanced, or expanded upon by others beyond the original authors. Black Sky Wiki is an open source project that will include an evolving knowledge base that will initially focus on resources for those interested in learning about cryptocurrency, contributing to or founding DAOs, creating NFTs, and having more privacy or anonymity.

Internet culture has deviated from the earlier cypherpunk/hacker ethos of protecting freedom of speech online. Simultaneously entrepreneurs in software and tech now monopolize the market with sophisticated surveillance technology. The average person has sacrificed privacy and freedom for convenience without transparency. As technology evolves and becomes more ubiquitous, an amenable definition of human rights that is holistically integrated into technology development is crucial.

Unpredictably, a vehicle for greater crypto adoption has been art in the form of non-fungible tokens. Black Sky Nexus is exploring the relationship between art and technology, and its potential to impact artistic expression in novel ways. NFTs, AR, and innovative printing techniques are traversing the boundaries of the physical and extending the medium of the written word and artistic communication.

To elaborate on the role of art in innovation, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s classic The Theories of Games and Economic Behavior makes the profound point that the only strategy an opponent cannot predict is a random strategy. Black Sky Zine will deploy unpredictable, comedic, memetic, satirical, and even bordering on absurd content as a heuristic strategy to open the minds of readers to new ideas through these art forms.

Black Sky would also like to explore the role of crypto counterculture in providing arts grants, fellowships, and support to working artists of various mediums.

Addiction and mental health issues have reached a state of crisis all around the world. Alternative plant medicines may be able to accelerate mental and physical healing as well as having a marked impact in addiction recovery. PsyDAO is an emerging organization focused on funding advancements to psychedelic research with cryptocurrency. Black Sky Nexus will explore how crypto-enabled medical research can innovate alternative medicine in ways traditional institutions would either not consider or would only offer at exploitative costs.

Other areas of interest for crypto-backed research include ways of living more compatibly with the ecosphere such as: regenerative agriculture, off the grid living, and ecovillages.

We’re interested in the ways that cryptocurrency can further extraterrestrial intelligence research and facilitate a decentralized space program. Ideally humans can take preventive measures so as to avoid bringing colonial practices beyond Earth once space settlement and resource extraction become possible.

‍Black Sky Nexus is currently in talks with Marc Cohen, a NASA veteran with over 30 years of experience in the space industry, to collaborate on a project in which the topics of space exploration and psychoactive plant research are made more open to the general public, pairing experts with everyday citizens to further our knowledge base.

Beyond these more practical projects, Black Sky envisions the space programs of the future having a deeper integration with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There is mass appeal for understanding more about the existence of non-human intelligent life on Earth, yet the research has usually occurred by disparate groups. Black Sky Nexus is interested in the ways in which cryptocurrency and decentralized organizations can accelerate coming to more well-informed conclusions about the question: “Are we alone?”

Black Sky Nexus will complete a blockchain ecosystem analysis and survey, to provide recommendations on the next steps that should be considered to bring greater privacy in Ethereum. We hope to answer the question: should there be crucial protocol level changes that are adopted sooner rather than later? Or should the greater emphasis be in equipping Ethereum developers with more tools, SDKs, and patterns to develop private applications?

First, we will analyze technologies and teams that are at the cutting edge of developing or enabling private applications or L2s on Ethereum and the tradeoffs being made.

Next, we will analyze more privacy-native smart contract chains such as Mina, Espresso, Aleo, etc. and how they solve for the tradeoffs (if they do).

Based on the two analyses, we will create a survey that will be completed by at least 50 individuals, including Ethereum protocol developers, Ethereum dapp developers, Ethereum L2 developers, and privacy developers external to Ethereum - to properly gauge the sentiment on the preferred path that the Ethereum ecosystem should adopt.

Leveraging the work from Nic Carter’s master thesis on “A Cross-Sectional Overview of Cryptoasset Governance and Implications for Investors”, we will analyze the top 10 blockchain networks with smart contract capabilities, based on market cap, and assess the dimensions of decentralization to come up with a rating system that can be applied to the networks.

We will release each analysis as completed, per blockchain, and then compile the results into a final report. Additionally, we will create one page infographics and entertaining videos to make this content accessible to the general public and to educate people on the importance of decentralization.

The results of this work will be hosted in Black Sky Nexus’ open source repos, where further analysis can be applied for more networks and can be a living resource that is continuously updated and refined.

Technology has the property of always being a double edged sword. How can we better guide technological development to minimize dystopian outcomes?

We propose the development of a Dystopia Minimization Framework or DMF. The initial idea is that the DMF will contain a list of 20 qualities that a project or idea can be evaluated against. 10 of these qualities are considered “dystopian” whereas the other 10 are considered “utopian” qualities. Each dystopian quality that is valid for a project will get -1 point, and each utopian quality that is valid will get +1 point. The DMF score is a sum of these points. Hence if a project / idea scores -10 it would be highly dystopian, whereas if it scored +10 it would be highly utopian, whereas 0 would be neither.

This project will involve defining the 20 qualities in addition to the recommended score to be considered a project or idea that minimizes dystopia

We hope for the DMF to be a tool that other teams can use before deciding to implement an idea and that a community grows around enhancing the framework. One potential path can be a DAO where projects apply to receive a “Dystopia Killer” badge, to more virally signal an intention to minimize dystopia (inspired by the organic foods movement).

Articles and resources will be added to a digital “pre-print” zine on a regular basis. Black Sky Nexus will initially be created using an open source tool such as MKDocs or mdBook, with articles and resources written in Markdown so it’s easy for other people to edit the resources. It will be hosted on a centralized server yet will also be mirrored on IPFS (or other decentralized storage systems) for decentralized access.

In the future, it might be important to build a tool that is more catered towards maintaining a decentralized wiki and zine hybrid publication, that’s easier to contribute to than updating git files, although this is not our immediate priority.

Grant funding received will be used to commission original content that will be licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0. In general, the majority of written content for the zine and resources will be CC BY-SA 4.0. The only exception may be for pieces that are curated such as works of writing or original graphical art that may be showcased, where the copyright is actually managed and retained by the artist.

We also see some content eventually becoming CC0 where it seems attribution isn’t necessary and there are many contributors to a resource.

The initial languages supported are English and Mandarin. As more funds are raised for this project and the community grows, Black Sky Nexus hopes to be able to target other languages, especially ones associated with authoritarian regimes to assist individuals in autocratic societies achieve greater financial freedom through a crypto-focused internet resource and publication.

‍Black Sky Zine plans to become physically distributed as a way to develop into a financially sustainable project. The physical zine will be printed with eco-friendly materials, where possible and financially viable, and sold online. Language translations and shipping locations for the physical zine will be prioritized based on demand. Physical zines will include at least two pages of cut-out pages that includes the QR code that links to a copy of the free digital zine issue that people are encouraged to continue sharing and passing on, creating a physical viral mechanism.

To be able to better manage costs related to the print initiative, one idea is that once there are at least 1,000 interested customers for a particular language/region, an order can be placed with a regional printing partner.

We are seeking funding from DAOs, foundations, private donations, and NFT sales to produce the initial content for Black Sky Nexus and to build a community of contributors around the project. The initial project budget is $130,000.

If it’s not possible to successfully fund the entire project from the initial wave of grant applications, the scope can be reduced to deliver less articles - see the Funding Milestone table in the next section.

Ideally enough funding will be received in total to produce 24 articles, which is an estimated amount of content to create a 100 page print publication in the future.

This would include:

Project duration: 26 weeks (6 months)

We are currently a growing collective of writers, researchers, artists, technologists and DAO contributors. The main editors of Black Sky Nexus are Stellar Magnet, E. Øss, and Sun Deep. Additional contributors are Giulio Prisco, Typto, Wadada, and Koldghost. Read our team bios and learn more about Black Sky here.

Beyond the team members listed, contributing to Black Sky Nexus will be open to members who join our Discord community and have the appropriate knowledge and skills.

You can support Black Sky Nexus by making a donation to our Ethereum-based Gnosis Safe:

0xdf85b6c1BeCaf3248365B2C0b458387A17153adb

(More wallets coming soon)