Challenge: The Market Gap

Human freedom is often constrained by invisible barriers such as social norms, status, religion, and geographic distance, preventing much of one’s potential from being transformed into real opportunities, regardless of individual effort.

In this context, freedom is not merely the right to choose, but the capacity to turn choice into outcomes in real life. For freedom to become real, two foundational conditions are required at the same time:

• First is economic self determination, which provides room for decision making, reduces dependency, and enables the pursuit of long term goals.

• Second is the ability to access and sustain a high quality network of relationships, in order to expand opportunities, foster cooperation, and increase the likelihood of realizing long term objectives.

Lacking either one renders freedom incomplete: possessing economic autonomy without connections easily leads to isolation and a narrowing of achievement's meaning; having many connections without economic autonomy makes it difficult to translate opportunities into real change.

The problem is that the current system lacks an infrastructure layer reliable enough to turn interactions into genuine connections and recordable value, making it difficult to nurture both aforementioned foundational conditions equitably. This infrastructure gap is evident in three points:

• First, there is a lack of mechanisms to measure and recognize contributions in a way that accurately reflects the value created by users.

• Second, there is a lack of structures that encourage meaningful action rather than merely generating surface level interaction.

• Third, there is a lack of an approach that enables users to receive commensurate benefits, allowing them to gradually accumulate economic self determination over time.

The issue becomes more severe as the prevalent operating model of many Web2 platforms optimizes attention time to serve ads and data collection. Dark patterns in design are used to prolong usage time and drive return behavior, rather than supporting users in creating real results such as building quality relationships or expanding opportunities.

Thus, the "infrastructure gap" becomes the paradox of our era: interaction is abundant, but real connection and the capacity for freedom that users can hold remain scarce.