Altlift got a chance to assess and evaluate the tokenomics project of the Free Republic of Liberland. In case this is the first time you’re hearing about the document, you can find more information in an interview with its founder Vít Jedlička.
Tl;dr we can say, the project is neither lame nor rushed out. The tokenomics documents are being developed and we are waiting for the final version, however, we see the working version as a piece of good work and a solid fundament for a model of liquid governance and meritocracy. Having said that, we still highlight, this is an experiment.
Our evaluation does not concern with the political setup of the Liberland project (for which we do not have a proper expert background) but with the model of tokenomics (for which we do).
In our opinion, the tokenomics design is inspirational. Currently, crypto governance is in the rapid evolutionary phase when people discover possible solutions. Some of these deployed solutions will be later seen as dead ends. Nevertheless, even those will play their part in the journey of development.
Liberland has proven its vitality and sustainability, it attracted the attention of many people. Using tokenomics, these people now can vote with their money. Such voting is sincere and comparably rational by design. Also, the choice is liquid, all stakeholders (citizens, voters) can change their effective opinion more flexibly. They can participate in the decision-making over common goods and common projects more intensively compared to traditional representative democracy which only has an election once in a few years. Above it, Liberland is an example of the modern quasi-state project where the physical location of its citizens plays but a minor role.
We like the idea of forking the verified Polkadot protocol. It is the copyability of DLT solutions and their employability in new contexts that accelerates the search for an adequate model. We see this as another strength of cryptoassets-based governance. Compared to the example of El Salvador where the majority of the population did not truly adopt Bitcoin, we have lesser concerns about this issue in Liberland. In terms of tech savviness, the population of Liberland is more homogenous. Its people are likely to adopt crypto governance easily.
We cannot conclude much on the figures presented in pivot tables without a deeper understanding of the input data and without the systemic testing using a stock-flow consistent model. Also, we are concerned with the privacy, or rather its absence, within the voting. The model might be legit, yet unexpected outcomes will probably arise.
Overall, we congratulate the Liberland team on an outstanding endeavour in the field of bringing tokenomics to real life. We wish them good fortune. We are looking forward to seeing more similar attempts soon.
