Cascade
Citation-driven value propagation for creative works.
Watch a short video overview of the architecture
Cascade is an architecture in which the act of citing a prior work — the act of acknowledging influence — is the mechanism by which economic value flows. Citation becomes load-bearing: when a new work registers and identifies the prior works that influenced it, that identification is not merely metadata. It is the wire through which subsequent patronage of the new work will flow back to the works that made it possible. A single act of patronage at a downstream work cascades through generations of citation lineage in one transaction, compensating ancestral creators across the network without requiring enforcement, agreement, or any external resolution event.
The architecture is positioned as an augmentation to existing intellectual-property regimes rather than a replacement for any of them. Copyright, patents, statutory royalty schemes, and other established mechanisms continue to operate. Cascade supplies a function that none of those regimes provide: a positive economic mechanism for channeling value through the acknowledgment of influence, operating in parallel with adversarial enforcement systems without preempting their protections.
A whitepaper articulating the architecture is available above.
Why I built it
The seed of Cascade goes back to 2021. Years in the intellectual-property industry had made its flaws plain to me, and one day a single question reframed the whole thing: what if, instead of a system that punishes the inspired, we built one that rewards the inspirer? Once I started designing toward that inversion, the citation network clicked almost immediately into place as the solution. Blockchain was everywhere at the time, and it struck me at once as the natural framework for it; years later, in 2026, I still believe it is. I did nothing with the idea back then, but I held onto it — and in 2025 I began validating it with AI. It is, at last, something I hope one day to build.
What surprised me
What surprised me most is how clean the solution turned out to be. The citation network is neat in a way I did not expect, and the paradigm built on it is remarkably self-contained — a closed economic world that largely takes care of itself. Economically it is exotic; it does something the familiar mechanisms simply do not. What stays with me is that combination: a system at once simple and intricate, elegant on the surface and unexpectedly deep underneath.