Today’s Collaborative Economy has three challenges:

1. It relies on centralized hubs, that in order to monetize use the massive collection of personal data as business models.

2. There is a big difference of power between the owners of the infrastructure and the user communities, where decisions are concentrated on the latter.

3. The economic profits derived from the communities’ activity are again concentrated in the owners of the infrastructure.

Can we build platforms that are decentralized, democratic, and where profit is distributed? In this talk, I will present P2P Models (p2pmodels.eu), a new ERC 1.5M€ research project to build Blockchain-powered organizations which are decentralized, democratic and distribute their profits, in order to boost a new type of Collaborative Economy. The project has three legs:

1. Infrastructure: To provide a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for Collaborative Economy organizations, providing building blocks to build agent-mediated “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs).

2. Governance: To enable democratic-by-design models of governance for communities, whose rules are, at least partially, encoded in the software to ensure higher levels of equality (using “smart contracts” of those DAOs).

3. Economics: To enable value distribution models which are interoperable across organizations, improving the economic sustainability of both contributors and organizations.