Community-driven investing faltered not because blockchain failed to deliver on its trust-less nature. It faltered because there was missing trust infrastructure amongst the humans using the blockchain.
Dating back to 2021, investor groups used NFTs to track membership, and ERC-20 to track financial units. It was a seemingly complete solution at the time; infrastructure was cheap to use, and many Venture DAO experiments proliferated with small amounts of capital. The average size of these pooled investment clubs was ~$1000 total. Why?
Because even though the infrastructure was scalable, investor trust was not accounted for, and therefore capital did not scale with the system itself. Outside of crypto, private markets scale because investors trust the system. They trust lawyers, and well-understood, widely adopted financial frameworks that most people simply accept via herd mentality. Even though investor trust is technically a non-financial asset attributable to both individuals and institutions, we believe it impacts just about every single private market transaction.
This led us to believe there was a missing primitive - until now.
A Fish Pool is the basic, minimal capital pooling smart contract unit designed to support a single off-chain asset. This enables private investor groups to leverage the primitive for their own deals, while maintaining 100% control. It also enables smaller individual investors to get exposure to asset classes they would otherwise be locked out of. Furthermore, the open source version of a Fish Pool provides the lowest cost infrastructure for people to pool and distribute capital together for any use case outside financial services.
Fish Network introduces a new standard to track investor reputation and track record on-chain. This is a delibrate attempt to codify and standardize an abstract, non-financial metric. Even though investor trust is a simple concept in theory, and well-understood by the market, there is no agreed-upon mechanism today to evaluate, reward, track, or record investor trust in a distributed and determinstic way. Fish Protocol attempts to standardize the approach to investor reputation, so that reputation can scale with capital and vice versa.
Fish Points are the scorekeeping ledger for an evidence driven attestation network, where off-chain documents and records are verified and subsequently etched on-chain to represent investor reputation and track-record.
Fish points are not a narrative-driven, gamified or social investor reputation score.
Fish Network has developed the basic infrastructure needed to enable investors to pool capital with confidence. No overhead, no middle-men taking fees, no custodians. We believe this infrastructure should be available as a public good to everyone, and can be used for any use case. While investor trust is technically a non-financial asset, we believe it has very real, financial implications in the long-run. Fish Pools, together with Fish Points, enable the foundation for reputation-based capital to be deployed into traditional private markets at scale.
Fish Protocol will be released pending the closure of our Seed round. We have developed the MVP, but currently do not have the resources to support an ecosystem that the protocol deserves.
We are looking for early adopters and businesses who want to use or extend the capital pooling primitive. Drop us a line at fish@fishnetwork.co!