Engineering better markets

We're building Flourish, a blockchain for fairer, more efficient, and better connected markets.

The Flourish Vision

Flourish is an L1 blockchain under active development, built around three goals:

Provide the market commons for all.

Markets shape the world. A market landscape that is fragmented and non-inclusive leads to a world shaped in the same way.

To make things better, a decentralized alternative is needed: a market commons for all. Flourish intends to fill that role.

In service of that goal, Flourish will include native markets and various financial services built into the blockchain itself, not layered on top as smart contracts.

These will be more open and accessible than centralized alternatives while being more efficient than independently designed DeFi protocols.

Let value flow freely.

Value flows most freely when the intent behind an action can efficiently achieve its desired outcome.

Anything in between dilutes that intent, whether it’s a card fee on a purchase, MEV on a trade, or a transfer that takes days to clear. Each costs little on its own, but together they leak a great deal of value.

Rather than patching these inefficiencies, Flourish’s approach is to make them obsolete through the design of the system itself. One such example is Tidemark, our batch auction protocol, which mitigates MEV and latency arbitrage.

Let our values evolve.

As humanity has progressed, so has our understanding of reality. Our understanding of money, and of what is valuable, will keep changing with it.

Some monetary systems, such as Bitcoin, lock in their understanding of value permanently through a fixed set of rules. Flourish is built so that what it holds as valuable can change as our understanding does.

To that end, Flourish will offer baskets. Each is a single token that holds several assets and keeps them in balance automatically, much like an index fund that anyone can create. As our understanding of value changes, so can their composition.

Making this work is one of the primary reasons why Flourish’s markets are native. Rebalancing is carried out by the validators themselves, which requires them to see market state directly, not through a layer of smart contracts.

Why Towards Type Two

Most companies name themselves after some thing, real or imaginary, like Apple, or Target or Nike.

We didn’t do that.

Instead, Towards Type Two is named after a process. It’s not some thing, it’s a direction, pointing to something far off and greater in the future.

Our process is to envision better future states, then ask what would still be true across them. From there, we design mechanisms and apply strategies, grounded in present-day reality, that move things in that direction.

For any of these distant future states to come to fruition, we need the capacity to coordinate effectively across space and time. Blockchains, and the markets and monies they facilitate, are the requisite coordination mechanisms. They are the lead domino for the whole endeavor, and so they are where we begin.

We’re looking for others to be a part of this process: those who are willing to challenge existing paradigms, in the traditional world as well as in crypto. We want people who are energized by creating something new and by building it together, and who can maintain a long-term vision while remaining grounded in the present.

For more on who we are and where we’re headed, check out our About page.