A Next-Gen Business Built on Public Digital Infrastructure

The Factland Protocol leverages public digital infrastructure for decentralized applications, particularly in the realm of fact verification and emergent consensus. An innovative and necessary model is developing among pioneering organizations, where initial investment is made into credibly neutral services, but then opinionated applications spearhead the first business to make use of it.

Factland's underlying protocol operates as a credibly neutral and censorship-resistant foundation, and individuals, institutions, and applications are welcome to make use of it permissionlessly.

Credibly Neutral and Censorship-Resistant Protocol

At its core, the Factland Protocol is designed so that any individual or organization, regardless of location, background, or ideology, can participate in the ecosystem. The protocol's smart contracts — handling everything from token balances and jury pools to claim data and rulings — are governed by the DAO, which itself is made up of users, employees, donors, and investors.

This design principle aims to align the incentives of stakeholders and create self-sustaining momentum.

The Factland App: A Model for Sustainable Business

While the Factland Protocol serves as a public good, the Factland client is a demonstration of how a private business can have a generative relationship with its infrastructure. Instead of building walls around users in order to extract value, the Factland client specializes in a particular use case and audience while leaving the protocol open for a wide variety of other clients to emerge without seeking permission from the Factland client team, or anyone else.

The client, which is curerntly a web app, but could extend across many other platforms, offers enhanced user experiences, additional features, and specialized services that leverage the underlying open infrastructure.

In this model, Factland joins a growing number of peers who see closed-network businesses as a failed experiment. They were able to achieve network effects temprorarily, but then bled users and attention as they increasingly extracted value in order to justify the giant business operations around them.

The unique use cases that require network effects are still the most interesting, but they can't be owned and controlled by a single entity and still maintain those effects over time.