It’s time for institutional acceleration

Building new institutions at the speed of software

In 2020 we published The New Technologies of Freedom. Rather than begging the state for our liberties back, we argued that more people should use and build technologies with rights embedded in them. Don’t argue for better money, privacy or property rights, build them. Build more private, overlapping and permissionless institutions.

Around the same time, venture capitalist Marc Andreesen published an essay, It’s time to Build. His claim was that the only way to create the future we want for our children and grandchildren is to build. To enable that building, Andreesen argues that we need better policies - those that favour “aggressive investment in new products, in new industries, in new factories, in new science, in big leaps forward.” Better rule systems enable entrepreneurs to realise the glamour of tomorrow.

But better policies for building isn’t enough. We also need new types of rules entirely – rules that are digital, programmable, and composable. Rules that don’t require permission from legacy institutions to deploy and evolve. We don’t just need to beg for better rules, we need to build them. That is how we get the future we want.

As we enter 2025, we have a new book coming out, Institutional Acceleration: The Consequences of Technological Change in a Digital Economy (Cambridge University Press, soon). Our claim is more ambitious than just building or better policies – we need more building and better rules, faster. We need institutional acceleration.

For the first time we have a cluster of rapidly advancing technologies that can build new institutions: blockchains and digital assets, artificial intelligence, advanced cryptography (e.g. zero knowledge proofs), quantum computing, the emerging low earth orbit economy. Their applications give us better monies, contracts, trust, property rights, compute, connectivity and privacy. They are institutional technologies.

We know we need to build the future. And we know we need better institutions. Now we are using technologies to build those institutions, faster.

Blockchains x Artificial Intelligence = Autonomous AI agents.

Blockchains x Sensors = Decentralised private infrastructure networks (DePIN).

Low Earth Orbit Satellites x Blockchains = Distributed capital.

Zero knowledge proofs x blockchains = Private money.

Because those technologies are composable, institutional change is happening faster and faster. It’s accelerating.

Institutional acceleration is more than a passive empirical observation. Sure, we could sit back and measure it - counting technological change or quantifying the expansion of institutional choice that we are all experiencing.

But institutional acceleration isn’t just happening. Institutional acceleration is a choice we can make and a goal that we can have. We need a “conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development”.

Just as economist Tyler Cowen argued that we need a moral stubborn attachment to economic growth, we need a stubborn attachment to institutional acceleration. Institutional acceleration is a moral imperative.

For centuries institutional change has required monopolistic political struggle. Now we can get institutional change through entrepreneurial building.

Institutional acceleration creates new paths for human prosperity. Each new digital institution expands our agency to act in the world. It lets us choose more open and global institutions. We must not only want that future, we must accelerate towards it.