2025-06-13 –, Side Stage - Cinema 6
The cypherpunk dream wasn't just permissionless finance—it was freedom to conduct peer-to-peer commerce without gatekeepers. Silk Road offered the first glimpse of this world before its collapse shut down that vision along with the marketplace. Meanwhile, Web2 platforms built trillion-dollar empires by intermediating commerce, extracting 20-30% while controlling who can participate. My research fellowship at the Ethereum Foundation examines why blockchain has revolutionized finance but failed to disrupt commerce. I'll present how recent advances in programmable cryptography, attestation frameworks, and AI agents now make it possible to realize the original cypherpunk vision of trustless commerce—not just for contraband, but for the trillion-dollar markets of goods and services that power our economy.
After extensive analysis of previous attempts and interviews with builders across the ecosystem, I've identified key technical gaps and emerging solutions that could finally make peer-to-peer commerce viable at scale. The findings challenge conventional wisdom and offer a provocative technical roadmap.
I'll cover:
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The forgotten cypherpunk vision: How digital cash was always meant to enable peer-to-peer commerce, not just speculation and DeFi.
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Why OpenBazaar, district0x, Swarm City, and other attempts failed: The critical infrastructure gaps that doomed early marketplace projects.
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The technical breakthroughs reopening the design space:
- zkTLS bringing Web2 credentials onchain,
- Cryptographic approaches to blind matching and hidden ratings computation
- Portable reputation across marketplace silos
- Solutions to the "subjectivity problem" in commerce where human judgment is needed -
Marketplace design considerations:
- Why full decentralization fails for commerce (and what partial decentralization looks like)
- How a "contribute-to-access" data commons aligns economic incentives
- The unbundling of commerce platforms into composable protocols -
The missing standards: Which technical primitives the ecosystem must build to enable the next wave of commerce infrastructure beyond DeFi
Ori Shimony is a Research Fellow at the Ethereum Foundation exploring decentralized commerce and other under-explored use cases. He also maintains the Mechanism Library, a resource for designing better onchain systems. Previously, he cofounded dOrg, the first service DAO and first legally-recognized DAO in the US.