About the Stichting
A stichting is a unique legal entity under Dutch law, characterised by having no shareholders or members and executed by a notarial deed, which lays out the statutes that define the specific purpose for which it is created.
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A stichting can be thought of as an "ownerless trust" and can hold assets or intellectual property, receive donations and generate income but can only use profits for the nominated activities contained in its statutes.
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The Fourth Transition Initiative employs some highly unusual and innovative business and intellectual property models requiring a unique legal structure such as a stichting as the safe repository for funding and asset retention, including digital assets.
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Obsolescence of Existing Institutions
The Financial System
A rapidly increasing number of experts are concluding that the global financial system is head-on towards irretrievable breakdown and that purely monetary modes of social organisation are no longer adequate to provide for the ongoing needs of humans as a social species.
The introduction of money substitutes such as carbon credits, cryptocurrencies, leveraged derivatives and even fiat currencies themselves have failed to deliver any kind of meaningful transition to alternative systems that offer hope for a sustainable future.
Global Governance
The corollary of the financial system is the hierarchical governance structure that creates, maintains, enforces and depends upon its existence. As faith in the financial system and government issued money falters, so does governance at all levels.
The crumbling of traditional monetary technology necessarily leads to a crisis of governance. In order for new foundations of social cohesion and mutually beneficial commerce to be built, the emergence of an alternative underlying paradigm of exchange then becomes inevitable.
Problematic Technologies
Challenging the Existing Order
Autonomous Agents
Digital code that once initiated is capable of sustaining and maintaining itself independently without any form of user intervention.
Autonomous agents that can sustain themselves indefinitely challenge traditional legal definitions of agency, liability and beneficial ownership. Immutable data structures such as blockchain smart contracts make possible autonomous agents that could theoretically outlive all human social constructs or even human civilisation itself.
Decentralised Organisations and Protocols
Contractually based structures that are self sovereign and self enforcing and thus not dependent on traditional regulation, government or legal systems.
Decentralised structures, whilst still having functional boundaries defined by the contract entry points and participants, cannot by definition exist in a physical sense. Without the need for third party verification (as would be the case with a company structure for example) decentralised organisations challenge the notion of jurisdiction in regulation and oversight.
Artificial Intelligence
Synthetic systems capable of interacting with humans in human-like ways.
Non-deterministic behaviour in programmed systems complicates the attribution of agency and liability for undesirable outcomes when such systems become integrated into, or interact with, human social systems and living agents.
Cryptocurrencies and Digital Tokens
Open, trustless systems that can operate as mechanisms of value exchange, storage and accounting without any requirement for trusted third parties.
Sovereign digital contract settlement systems and programmable tokens blur the lines between money, contracts, agents, utilities and securities, rendering conventional legal classifications impotent to cope with the rapidly morphing digital ecosystem of trade, assignment of rights and representations of value.
The Stichting as a Solution
In accordance with the Cool Planet Foundation's charter, the transition to more sustainable ways of living and social organisation must start from where we are now.
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The technologies described above have vast implications for how new forms of governance and trade may emerge but, as we have identified, they are in many respects fundamentally incompatible with traditional corporate structures, legal and regulatory frameworks.
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For the time being, the stichting is the available legal entity that most closely fits the requirements to act as a wealth base in the existing TradFi world whilst new systems are built upon these emerging technical bases.
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The Cool Planet Foundation is very active in supporting research and development beyond the state of the art in the above fields as part of its support for the Fourth Transition Initiative.
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