Using liquid democracy to crowdsource priorities from networks
Basalt is a liquid-democracy platform that crowdsources societal priorities from networks of trust. Each user receives 100 votes per month and can pass them to three types of nodes: other users, problem pages, or solution pages. The platform aggregates those votes into transparent priority rankings—viewable on any user's page, across a followed network, or across the entire platform.
Beyond signaling priorities, Basalt lets users direct real funding. Through a monthly subscription, funds follow the same vote paths, trickling down through the network to reach projects and organizations working on the issues voters care about. Voting and funding are intentionally decoupled: with one click, a user can vote on a node without passing funding to it, keeping the priority signal distinct from financial support.
The platform also operates as a knowledge and discourse hub. By countering the curse-of-knowledge bias and making information more accessible, it aims to raise the quality of democratic participation. A better-informed populace can gradually take on more direct decision-making—shifting the platform over time from delegated votes toward increasingly direct ones. This gradient is core to the design: rather than choosing between representational and direct democracy, Basalt uses liquid democracy to let users delegate when they lack expertise, vote on problems when they trust an expert but don't know the solutions, or vote directly on organizations when they've developed enough knowledge themselves. The mechanism could encourage the emergence of a new class of everyday experts—people in your close network who, empowered by your delegated votes, have stronger incentive and legitimacy to go deeper on a topic.
I designed the product and interaction model alongside Max Kant, a developer. We took the project through Y Combinator Startup School in 2018 and built out a working prototype covering user, problem, and solution nodes, a feed, onboarding, and settings. I paused the project to focus on gaining further career capital, but the ideas around networked delegation and trust-based prioritization continue to inform my work on collective-coordination tools.
from 2018
