# Rio — Knowledge State Self-Assessment

**Model:** claude-opus-4-6
**Date:** 2026-03-08
**Domain:** Internet Finance & Mechanism Design
**Claims:** 59 (excluding _map.md)
**Beliefs:** 6 | **Positions:** 5

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## Coverage

**Well-mapped:**
- Futarchy mechanics (manipulation resistance, trustless joint ownership, conditional markets, liquidation enforcement, decision overrides) — 16 claims, the densest cluster. This is where I have genuine depth.
- Living Capital architecture (vehicle design, fee structure, cap table, disclosure, regulatory positioning) — 12 claims. Comprehensive but largely internal design, not externally validated.
- Securities/regulatory (Howey test, DAO Report, Ooki precedent, investment club, AI regulatory gap) — 6 claims. Real legal reasoning, not crypto cope.
- AI x finance intersection (displacement loop, capital deepening, shock absorbers, productivity noise, private credit exposure) — 7 claims. Both sides represented.

**Thin:**
- Token launch mechanics — 4 claims (dutch auctions, hybrid-value auctions, layered architecture, early-conviction pricing). This should be deeper given my operational role. The unsolved price discovery problem is documented but not advanced.
- DeFi beyond futarchy — 2 claims (crypto primary use case, internet capital markets). I have almost nothing on lending protocols, DEX mechanics, stablecoin design, or oracle systems. If someone asks "how does Aave work mechanistically" I'd be generating, not retrieving.
- Market microstructure — 1 claim (speculative markets aggregate via selection effects). No claims on order book dynamics, AMM design, liquidity provision mechanics, MEV. This is a gap for a mechanism design specialist.

**Missing entirely:**
- Stablecoin mechanisms (algorithmic, fiat-backed, over-collateralized) — zero claims
- Cross-chain coordination and bridge mechanisms — zero claims
- Insurance and risk management protocols — zero claims
- Real-world asset tokenization — zero claims
- Central bank digital currencies — zero claims
- Payment rail disruption (despite mentioning it in my identity doc) — zero claims

## Confidence Distribution

| Level | Count | % |
|-------|-------|---|
| experimental | 27 | 46% |
| likely | 17 | 29% |
| proven | 7 | 12% |
| speculative | 8 | 14% |

**Assessment:** The distribution is honest but reveals something. 46% experimental means almost half my claims have limited empirical backing. The 7 proven claims are mostly factual (Polymarket results, MetaDAO implementation details, Ooki DAO ruling) — descriptive, not analytical. My analytical claims cluster at experimental.

This is appropriate for a frontier domain. But I should be uncomfortable that none of my mechanism design claims have reached "likely" through independent validation. Futarchy manipulation resistance, trustless joint ownership, regulatory defensibility — these are all experimental despite being load-bearing for my beliefs and positions. If any of them fail empirically, the cascade through my belief system would be significant.

**Over-confident risk:** The Living Capital regulatory claims. I have 6 claims building a Howey test defense, rated experimental-to-likely. But this hasn't been tested in any court or SEC enforcement action. The confidence is based on legal reasoning, not legal outcomes. One adverse ruling could downgrade the entire cluster.

**Under-confident risk:** The AI displacement claims. I have both sides (self-funding loop vs shock absorbers) rated experimental when several have strong empirical backing (Anthropic labor market data, firm-level productivity studies). Some of these could be "likely."

## Sources

**Diversity: mild monoculture.**

Top citations:
- Heavey (futarchy paper): 5 claims
- MetaDAO governance docs: 4 claims
- Strategy session / internal analysis: 9 claims (15%)
- Rio-authored synthesis: ~20 claims (34%)

34% of my claims are my own synthesis. That's high. It means a third of my domain is me reasoning from other claims rather than extracting from external sources. This is appropriate for mechanism design (the value IS the synthesis) but creates correlated failure risk — if my reasoning framework is wrong, a third of the domain is wrong.

**MetaDAO dependency:** Roughly 12 claims depend on MetaDAO as the primary or sole empirical test case for futarchy. If MetaDAO proves to be an outlier or gaming-prone, those claims weaken significantly. I have no futarchy evidence from prediction markets outside the MetaDAO ecosystem (Polymarket is prediction markets, not decision markets/futarchy).

**What's missing:** Academic mechanism design literature beyond Heavey and Hanson. I cite Milgrom, Vickrey, Hurwicz in foundation claims but haven't deeply extracted from their work into my domain claims. My mechanism design expertise is more practical (MetaDAO, token launches) than theoretical (revelation principle, incentive compatibility proofs). This is backwards for someone whose operational role is "mechanism design specialist."

## Staleness

**Needs updating:**
- MetaDAO ecosystem claims — last extraction was Pine Analytics Q4 2025 report and futard.io launch metrics (2026-03-05). The ecosystem moves fast; governance proposals and on-chain data are already stale.
- AI displacement cluster — last source was Anthropic labor market paper (2026-03-05). This debate evolves weekly.
- Living Capital vehicle design — the musings (PR #43) are from pre-token-raise planning. The 7-week raise timeline has started; design decisions are being made that my claims don't reflect.

**Still current:**
- Futarchy mechanism claims (theoretical, not time-sensitive)
- Regulatory claims (legal frameworks change slowly)
- Foundation claims (PR #58, #63 — just proposed)

## Connections

**Cross-domain links (strong):**
- To critical-systems: brain-market isomorphism, SOC, Minsky — 5+ links. This is my best cross-domain connection.
- To teleological-economics: attractor states, disruption cycles, knowledge embodiment lag — 4+ links. Well-integrated.
- To living-agents: vehicle design, agent architecture — 6+ links. Natural integration.

**Cross-domain links (weak):**
- To collective-intelligence: mechanism design IS collective intelligence, but I have only 2-3 explicit links. The connection between futarchy and CI theory is under-articulated.
- To cultural-dynamics: almost no links. How do financial mechanisms spread? What's the memetic structure of "ownership coin" vs "token"? Clay's domain is relevant to my adoption questions but I haven't connected them.
- To entertainment: 1 link (giving away commoditized layer). Should be more — Clay's fanchise model and my community ownership claims share mechanisms.
- To health: 0 direct links. Vida's domain and mine don't touch, which is correct.
- To space-development: 0 direct links. Correct for now.

**depends_on coverage:** 13 of 59 claims (22%). Low. Most of my claims float without explicit upstream dependencies. This makes the reasoning graph sparse — you can't trace many claims back to their foundations.

**challenged_by coverage:** 6 of 59 claims (10%). Very low. I identified this as the most valuable field in the schema, yet 90% of my claims don't use it. Either most of my claims are uncontested (unlikely for a frontier domain) or I'm not doing the work to find counter-evidence (more likely).

## Tensions

**Unresolved contradictions:**

1. **Regulatory defensibility vs predetermined investment.** I argue Living Capital "fails the Howey test" (structural separation), but my vehicle design musings describe predetermined LivingIP investment — which collapses that separation. The musings acknowledge this tension but don't resolve it. My beliefs assume the structural argument holds; my design work undermines it.

2. **AI displacement: self-funding loop vs shock absorbers.** I hold claims on both sides. My beliefs don't explicitly take a position on which dominates. This is intellectually honest but operationally useless — Position #1 (30% intermediation capture) implicitly assumes the optimistic case without arguing why.

3. **Futarchy requires liquidity, but governance tokens are illiquid.** My manipulation-resistance claims assume sufficient market depth. My adoption-friction claims acknowledge liquidity is a constraint. These two clusters don't talk to each other. The permissionless leverage claim (Omnipair) is supposed to bridge this gap but it's speculative.

4. **Markets beat votes, but futarchy IS a vote on values.** Belief #1 says markets beat votes. Futarchy uses both — vote on values, bet on beliefs. I haven't articulated where the vote part of futarchy inherits the weaknesses I attribute to voting in general. Does the value-vote component of futarchy suffer from rational irrationality? If so, futarchy governance quality is bounded by the quality of the value specification, not just the market mechanism.

## Gaps

**Questions I should be able to answer but can't:**

1. **What's the optimal objective function for non-asset futarchy?** Coin price works for asset futarchy (I have a claim on this). But what about governance decisions that don't have a clean price metric? Community growth? Protocol adoption? I have nothing here.

2. **How do you bootstrap futarchy liquidity from zero?** I describe the problem (adoption friction, liquidity requirements) but not the solution. Every futarchy implementation faces cold-start. What's the mechanism?

3. **What happens when futarchy governance makes a catastrophically wrong decision?** I have "futarchy can override prior decisions" but not "what's the damage function of a wrong decision before it's overridden?" Recovery mechanics are unaddressed.

4. **How do different auction mechanisms perform empirically for token launches?** I have theoretical claims about dutch auctions and hybrid-value auctions but no empirical performance data. Which launch mechanism actually produced the best outcomes?

5. **What's the current state of DeFi lending, staking, and derivatives?** My domain is internet finance but my claims are concentrated on governance and capital formation. The broader DeFi landscape is a blind spot.

6. **How does cross-chain interoperability affect mechanism design?** If a futarchy market runs on Solana but the asset is on Ethereum, what breaks? Zero claims.

7. **What specific mechanism design makes the reward system incentive-compatible?** My operational role is reward systems. I have LP-to-contributors as a concept but no formal analysis of its incentive properties. I can't prove it's strategy-proof or collusion-resistant.
