What is Ante?
Ante is a way to make on-chain promises (recorded immutably on blockchains) backed by crypto that powerful governments and institutions can’t break or renege on with impunity.
“Immutably” means that it’s “impossible to manipulate or delete data after it has been validated and placed in the blockchain, because if attempted, the subsequent blocks in the chain would reject the attempted modification (as their hashes wouldn’t be valid.”
Here’s a brief explainer of “immutability,” which is one of the main value propositions of blockchains. Another is privacy, as this concise summary shows.
In this sense, Ante is a way to counter information and power asymmetries in the emerging web3 economy based on trustlessness.
What do we mean by “trustlessness”? Trustlessness doesn’t mean that a world governed by computer code and blockchains no longer requires trusted intermediaries or guarantees of trust in order for users to feel comfortable conducting transactions online. Rather, the idea is that the amount of trust required from any single actor is minimized — something that is accomplished by “distributing trust among different actors in the system,” through various mechanisms that “incentivize actors to cooperate with the rules defined by the protocol.” More on blockchain trustlessness here.
Historically, trust has been centralized and highly gatekept. Intermediaries and custodians of all stripes still dominate the space of financial transactions. The idea of fiat currency itself, for example, presupposes a government that will never become insolvent, or default on its loans to you as a holder of its bonds. Trustlessness is the idea that you don’t need to worry about whether you should trust these governments, companies, or other counterparties in any transaction you enter into, because there are no single gatekeepers or points of failure that determine the integrity of any single transaction.
These on-chain promises that Ante records can be aggregated over time, and verified by the general public, long after the promises were made.
In this sense, Ante can be thought of as a new kind of public infrastructure that provides the protection and peace of mind needed for that public to feel comfortable using a whole range of new primitives — fundamentally new types of financial tools — that the innovations of blockchains and decentralized finance have brought about.
One analogy that has been drawn to illustrate the key differences between web2 (the present-day mainstream internet where your personal data is owned, manipulated, and sold by private companies) and web3 is that web2 is akin to private property, while web3 is a public park.
But maybe that analogy is still a bit confusing…here’s a summary of the key themes, use cases, and advantages of Web3.
Ante itself is a new primitive or financial tool, and also offers users protection and peace of mind with respect to other primitives (crypto projects) offering swapping, liquidity pool, arbitrage, loan, yield bearing, staking, bridging, and many other services.
All of these primitives rely on logic that executes on a blockchain —a smart contract, which is basically a kind of legal contract written in code that executes transactions, pays out, and so on, according to predefined parameters.
Another way of defining “primitives” is pieces of public infrastructure that are part of a newly emerging economic system known as decentralized finance (“DeFi”), accessible to any online user on a global, decentralized financial system with no single points of failure. Here’s a good summary of the main and most important primitives, which also explains what a smart contract is in detail.
To recap, here’s a quick collection of links that delve into detail into each of the key themes outlined above, and elsewhere on this site.
Immutability: https://medium.com/fluree/immutability-and-the-enterprise-an-immense-value-proposition-98cd3bf900b1
Privacy: https://medium.com/@yi.sun/privacy-in-cryptocurrencies-d4b268157f6c
Trustlessness: https://www.preethikasireddy.com/post/what-do-we-mean-by-blockchains-are-trustless
Web3: https://learn.metamask.io/lessons/what-is-web3
Primitives (and Smart Contracts): https://medium.com/@njess/defi-101-some-basic-primitives-where-they-came-from-and-why-it-matters-35f8c0cf8557
Self-custody: https://medium.com/blockchain/self-custody-explained-a96f0bf63c88
Schelling Point: https://medium.com/@willemvandenbergh_85885/on-schelling-points-network-effects-and-lindy-inherent-properties-of-communication-c4eb69b55c60
Four types of Ante use cases
What kinds of counterparties are there for the trustless, blockchain promises that Ante is seeking to create?
Broadly speaking, there are four:
1. Crypto projects to users, or p2org (peer-to-organization)
Ante Tests can be understood as user-oriented service license agreements (SLAs) that compel crypto projects and organizations to honor the promises and guarantees that they make to users and customers.
In other words, Ante seeks to provide users with greater measurable trust and accountability, in addition to substantive monetary recourse through its staking rewards mechanism, if those guarantees are not met.
While the overarching theme of “trustlessness” implies a lack of human actors and the historical gatekeepers or custodians of trust, in practice the integrity of these commitments and promises can be boosted by appointing third party arbitrators, or electing community- or pre-vetted individuals as commitment-settlors.
2. P2P guarantees
Due to the high costs of creating, securing, deploying, and then staking an Ante Test, most existing Ante Tests are focused around core guarantees of crypto projects, many of which are high-stakes. Peer-to-peer cryptographic commitments, however, are also an important avenue of commitments to support for the future.
Certain use cases for Ante are centered on the idea that fellow members of a pre-vetted community may already be predisposed to interact among each other with a higher level of engagement, compared with the anonymity or pseudonymity of web2 social media networks, for example.
While entirely anonymous interactions in web2 comment threads, for example, are easy and fairly trivial to dip in and out of, P2P staking with real (crypto) money behind it involves a higher psychological hurdle.
3. P2E (influencers to followers)
A prime example of this kind of pre-vetted community are the fans, followers, and subscribers who coalesce around influencers or public figures: in effect, micro-communities whose members have already been verified, thanks to common interests and passions and elective affinities that tie them together.
There is a certain comfort level involved in engaging with and committing to fellow members of the same tribe or community. Someone who has already been accepted into the fold, so to speak, can more readily take the other side of any particular commitment with less friction, and a lower threshold of participation. These commitments — or guarantees of trust and security — can be one to many, or many to many.
4. P2Sys (AI safety)
Amid the hype surrounding ChatGPT, we’re now seeing the rise of autonomous systems and AI-powered agents and actors. This creates a new category of commitment made by autonomous entities that Ante also hopes to address — a kind of backstop, or system of checks and balances.
One example of this would be “AI-safety-violation-proof-checking,” or an Ante Test that verifies a proof of knowledge of a verifiable computation of a signed version of a given AI model that fails a pre-defined “language safety” checkpoint.
Why is Ante building this?
As previously mentioned, the “public park” setting of web3 demands a system of backstops and security features that effectively constitute an entirely new network of public infrastructure.
Similar to the concept of self-custody, free and open networks mean that the burden of securitization falls on the individual user or counterparty, who should be able to look up any given claim or promise, and verify it in a transparent way.
Self-custody in the crypto context basically means that your crypto is stored at a digital address or “wallet” that is totally controlled by you. Only the holder possesses and controls the private key to that wallet. More on self-custody here.
We want to build a Schelling Point of trust and make it easy for people to make promises on Ante.
A Schelling Point is a natural point of convergence for users or consumers: “a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural, special, or relevant to them”.
In other words, Ante hopes to become the protocol for guaranteeing trust and peace of mind for users in this newly emerging, global and decentralized financial system that users would tend to converge on over time.
To take another example, Bitcoin “maximalists” also hope that Bitcoin might eventually become a Schelling Point for money in the long run: more here.
Traction info
Zellic, an auditing firm, writes & reviews Ante tests for projects, has staked some
5+ crypto projects have staked Ante tests
Over 150+ Ante tests in our Github repo
Calls to Action
How can our early believers and enthusiasts help us spread the word about Ante?
Developers can check out our REQUEST FOR TESTS board and write an Ante test!
For non-developers and those who might not be technical, we have an alpha community-insiders webapp that prototypes P2P commitments that you can check out and give input on!
Otherwise, you can join our Telegram group for KEYSTONE ANTE [LINK], give UI feedback, or suggest MyAnte presets [LINK]
