[Research] d/acc Market Map #142
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- Short Description: The d/acc Market Map maps the defensive acceleration ecosystem across digital and physical infrastructure.
- Tags: governance, infrastructure, privacy
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What Is the d/acc Market Map?
The d/acc Market Map – sometimes written as the dacc Market Map – is a structured overview of the defensive acceleration ecosystem, mapping physical and digital systems that embody the principles of defensive acceleration. It answers a practical question: Where does defensive acceleration exist in deployed systems today?
Defensive acceleration (d/acc) is a framework introduced by Vitalik Buterin in his November 2023 essay "My techno-optimism," and expanded upon in his January 2025 follow up “d/acc: one year later.” The framework argues that technological progress should prioritize systems that favor defense over offense, as well as systems that accelerate technology that distribute power instead of concentrating it.
Rather than focusing narrowly on blockchain or artificial intelligence, the d/acc Market Map zooms out to interdependent sectors like: biosecurity, cryptography, decentralized identity, governance tooling, capital allocation systems, energy infrastructure, manufacturing resilience, and civic technology. Its goal is translation of defensive acceleration from a philosophical position into an observable coordination stack.
The current version of the d/acc Market Map is below:
The Two Axes of the Defensive Acceleration Ecosystem
The defensive acceleration ecosystem is organized across two intersecting dimensions:
- Atoms vs. Bits: material-world systems versus digital systems
- Survive vs. Thrive: baseline defensive capacity versus long term positive-sum coordination
Atoms vs. Bits is the primary organizing dimension, distinguishing between technologies that operate in the physical world and those that operate in the informational domain.
Survive vs. Thrive is a secondary lens that cuts across both domains, distinguishing between technologies that prevent catastrophic failure and those that enable sustained prosperous coordination.
Together, these axes allow systems to be evaluated not just by sector, but by structural role in shaping resilience.
Atoms vs. Bits: Material and Digital Defense Layers
Atoms: Physical-World Resilience
The Atoms quadrant encompasses technologies that protect bodies, infrastructure, and material systems: biodefense, public health, decentralized energy, resilient manufacturing, open source hardware, property registries, and civic infrastructure.
Within the defensive acceleration framework, physical resilience is foundational – as digital coordination systems depend on material stability. For example: a decentralized identity protocol cannot compensate for a fragile energy grid, and cryptographic guarantees weaken when physical production and distribution are centralized and brittle. The defensive acceleration ecosystem therefore extends well beyond software into the material architecture of survival.
Deployed examples in this quadrant include:
- Balvi and Kanro: Vitalik Buterin's scientific investment and direct gifting funds, which have distributed over $400 million to support open source biosecurity, pandemic prevention, and indoor air quality programs. Balvi grantees include Varro (airborne pathogen biosensors) and OpenWater (personal-scale medical imaging using ultrasound). This represents the most direct institutional expression of d/acc principles in the physical domain.
- RISC-V: An open source instruction set architecture that provides an alternative to proprietary chip designs from ARM and Intel. By making processor architecture freely available, RISC-V reduces hardware-level dependency on centralized vendors – a structural chokepoint in global infrastructure.
- Decentralized energy networks: Community-scale solar, battery storage, and microgrid systems that reduce dependency on centralized power generation and transmission infrastructure. These systems determine whether communities can maintain material stability during infrastructure failures or geopolitical disruption.
Bits: Digital Agency and Coordination Infrastructure
The Bits quadrant includes digital systems that preserve agency in the informational domain: cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized identity, privacy-preserving computation, formal verification, governance tooling, oracle networks, crosschain infrastructure, and epistemic systems.
These technologies are central to defensive acceleration because they alter the structural cost of attack. For example: public-key cryptography enables secure communication even against vastly more powerful adversaries; zero-knowledge systems enable verification without exposure; formal verification reduces the attack surface of critical infrastructure.
As artificial intelligence lowers the cost of misinformation, surveillance, and automated exploitation, strengthening this digital layer becomes increasingly critical to preserving decentralized coordination.
Deployed examples in this quadrant include:
- Zero-knowledge proof systems (Polygon zkEVM, StarkNet, Aztec): Cryptographic systems that enable verification without revealing underlying data. ZK proofs are foundational to d/acc because they make it possible to prove identity, eligibility, or compliance without exposing private information – structurally shifting the cost of surveillance while preserving accountability.
- Polymarket and prediction markets: Decentralized information markets that aggregate distributed knowledge into probability estimates. Buterin has described these as "social epistemic tools" that can help separate signal from noise, making them a key component of d/acc's information defense layer.
- Signal and encrypted communications: End-to-end encrypted messaging that ensures private communication even under adversarial conditions, protecting the coordination layer that all other defensive systems depend on.
- Gitcoin Passport and decentralized identity: Attestation-based identity systems that enable sybil resistance and eligibility verification without centralized identity authorities. These systems sit at the intersection of privacy preservation and coordination integrity.
Survive vs. Thrive: Defensive Capacity and Durable Coordination
Survive Systems
Survive technologies preserve baseline agency and prevent catastrophic failure. These include biosecurity infrastructure, privacy-preserving cryptography, secure communications systems, and formal security tooling. Within defensive acceleration, Survive systems form the defensive foundation. Without them, higher-order coordination systems collapse under adversarial pressure.
Survive systems span both Atoms and Bits. In the physical domain, they include pandemic detection infrastructure, open source vaccine development platforms, and decentralized water and food supply systems. In the digital domain, they include zero-knowledge proof systems, encrypted communications, formal verification of smart contracts, and anti-collusion infrastructure.
Deployed examples include:
- MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure): A cryptographic voting system that prevents bribery and vote-buying by making it impossible for voters to prove how they voted. MACI protects the integrity of collective decision-making under adversarial conditions, serving as defensive infrastructure for governance processes.
- Zero-knowledge proof systems: ZK proofs make it structurally cheaper to verify claims than to extract private information, shifting the offense-defense balance toward defense in identity verification, financial privacy, and compliance contexts.
- Open source cybersecurity tooling: Community-maintained security tools, vulnerability databases, and audit frameworks that distribute defensive capability rather than concentrating it in proprietary vendors.
Thrive Systems
Thrive systems enable sustained positive-sum coordination, things like: governance tooling, decentralized monetary systems, democratic funding mechanisms, treasury streaming infrastructure, and crosschain coordination tools. These systems allow communities to not merely defend themselves, but to allocate capital, coordinate decisions, and build durable institutions without centralized authority. In this sense, Thrive technologies represent the institutional layer of defensive acceleration.
Like Survive systems, Thrive technologies span both Atoms and Bits. In the physical domain, they include community land trusts, cooperative energy governance, and open source agricultural coordination platforms. In the digital domain, they include democratic funding mechanisms, DAO governance frameworks, and treasury management infrastructure.
Deployed examples include:
- Quadratic funding (Gitcoin Grants, Giveth, clr.fund): A capital allocation mechanism that amplifies small contributions, distributing funding decisions across communities rather than concentrating them in committees. QF has distributed over $60 million through Gitcoin alone and has been adopted across multiple ecosystems.
- Retroactive public goods funding (Optimism RetroPGF): An allocation mechanism that rewards demonstrated impact rather than proposals, with over 60 million OP distributed to contributors across seven completed rounds. RetroPGF shifts execution risk while creating incentives for durable public goods work.
- Protocol Guild: A collective fund that distributes donated tokens to Ethereum Layer 1 core contributors through long term onchain vesting, addressing the persistent compensation gap for infrastructure maintainers without directing their work or influencing protocol governance.
- Superfluid, Sablier, and Drips: Streaming payment protocols that enable continuous, programmable fund distribution rather than lump-sum transfers, providing the execution layer for sustained contributor compensation.
The d/acc Ecosystem as a Coordination Stack
Viewed holistically, the d/acc Market Map describes a layered coordination stack – not a flat collection of projects, but a set of interdependent layers where each level enables the one above it.
Layer 1: Cryptographic primitives and secure computation. Public-key cryptography, hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs, and fully homomorphic encryption form the base layer. These primitives make it structurally cheaper to defend information than to attack it, providing the asymmetric advantage that the entire stack depends on. Without this layer, no higher-order coordination is trustworthy.
Layer 2: Identity and attestation systems. Decentralized identity protocols, attestation frameworks, and proof-of-personhood systems translate cryptographic primitives into verifiable claims about people and their actions. This layer determines who can participate in coordination systems and on what terms – making it the critical boundary between anonymous infrastructure and accountable governance.
Layer 3: Governance and capital allocation. Voting systems, funding mechanisms, and treasury management tools sit on top of identity. These systems determine how communities make collective decisions and allocate shared resources. Their integrity depends entirely on the identity and cryptographic layers beneath them.
Layer 4: Physical infrastructure. Parallel to the digital stack, material systems – energy, health, manufacturing, food – determine whether the communities using digital coordination tools can sustain themselves under adversarial conditions. A DAO with perfect onchain governance is useless, afterall, if its members lack reliable electricity.
Defensive acceleration does not emerge from any single breakthrough; it emerges from the interaction of these layers. For example: a zero-knowledge proof system protects identity verification → verified identity enables sybil-resistant funding → sybil-resistant funding sustains open source biosecurity tools → those tools protect the physical infrastructure that underlies all digital coordination.
The offense–defense balance is shaped by system architecture, and the d/acc Market Map intends to make that architecture legible.
What the Defensive Acceleration Ecosystem Reveals
Mapping the ecosystem surfaces several structural patterns.
Digital infrastructure is comparatively mature. Cryptographic tooling, decentralized identity, and governance experiments have advanced rapidly over the past decade. The Ethereum ecosystem alone has produced dozens of deployed coordination tools – from funding mechanisms, to privacy systems, through to prediction markets. Entrepreneur First's 2024 launch of a dedicated def/acc cohort in London signals growing institutional recognition that defensive technology represents a viable company-building category.
Physical-world resilience remains underdeveloped. Decentralized energy, manufacturing redundancy, and biosecurity infrastructure have not kept pace with their digital counterparts. Balvi's $400+ million allocation to biosecurity funding – while significant – highlights both the scale of investment needed and how few institutional actors are directing resources toward physical-layer defense. This asymmetry suggests that the next phase of defensive acceleration may depend on closing the Atoms gap.
Capital allocation infrastructure functions as a strategic lever. Buterin argued in "d/acc: one year later" that "strong decentralized public goods funding is essential to a d/acc vision, because a key d/acc goal (minimizing central points of control) inherently frustrates many traditional business models." Funding mechanisms determine which defensive technologies get built. In this sense, capital allocation systems are not a peripheral application of d/acc principles – they shape the trajectory of defensive acceleration itself. Quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, deep funding, and protocol-native allocation mechanisms each address different failure modes in how defensive technology gets resourced.
Why the d/acc Market Map Matters
The d/acc Market Map reframes defensive acceleration as an ecosystem rather than an ideology.
Instead of asking whether to accelerate or regulate, this framework asks:
Which technologies structurally distribute power?
Which systems reduce reliance on centralized chokepoints?
Which coordination mechanisms remain stable under adversarial conditions?
By mapping projects across physical and digital domains – across Survive and Thrive layers – the defensive acceleration ecosystem becomes visible as a coherent systems architecture. As artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and distributed systems continue to scale, the structure of technological progress will determine whether power concentrates or distributes.
The d/acc Market Map provides a lens for evaluating that structure.
Further Reading
- My techno-optimism – Vitalik Buterin
- d/acc: one year later – Vitalik Buterin
- Introducing def/acc at EF – Entrepreneur First
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