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Starproject Missive 5

Paper Summer of Protocols

This is the fifth missive from the Summer of Protocols initiative, a community-driven project exploring protocols through fictional and theoretical narratives. The document represents contributions licensed under the Ethereum Foundation with a transition to open licensing after 2026.

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Paper

Composable Life: Our Island and Us

This paper explores the intersection of protocol design, community formation, and digital culture through the framework of onchain artificial life (OALife), examining how composable systems create new forms of existence and social organization. The authors investigate what it means when autonomous agents designed to be eternal on the blockchain disappear, challenging assumptions about permanence and presence in decentralized systems.

community culture design

Fangting, Botao Amber Hu

Paper

Dispatches from Cascadia

This paper uses Cascadia as a speculative case study to explore how bioregional governance frameworks might organize communities around ecological rather than political boundaries, with bears and watershed patterns replacing state/provincial lines. Rajamohan examines how protocol-based systems could coordinate resource management and social infrastructure across overlapping ecoregions facing polycrisis challenges like climate instability and housing crises.

community fiction governance

Rithikha Rajamohan

Paper

Ghosts in Machines

Ghosts in Machines is a Protocolized anthology woven from stories of science fiction and science fact. Writers explore strange rules and familiar haunts through the lens of protocols.

protocols fiction culture

Protocolized