Ten years of video. One question: how do strangers coordinate at scale when no intermediary can be trusted to referee them?
The answer on this channel developed in stages. First law, then code, then decentralized architecture, then reputation, and now mechanism design for machine agents. This page arranges every video along that arc, in five movements. Watch in order and you watch an argument assemble itself.
The papers behind the videos live on SSRN. The proofs live in the books, at the end of this page. The channel itself is here.
The Arc
Movement I. The Legal Question (2017). Technology moves faster than the institutions that govern it. The pacing problem is stated, and the doctrinal baseline is set.
Movement II. Lawyers Who Read Code (2018, refreshed 2020). If obligations will be written in code, lawyers must read code. A full curriculum, recorded.
Movement III. The Decentralized Turn (2018). The thesis goes on record at Davos: decentralized anonymous systems evolve through verified, domain-specific reputation. Society, corporate governance, token markets, and the web itself are examined through that lens.
Movement IV. The Reputation Framework (2020 to 2021). The mechanisms get their formal architecture: validation pools, reputation staking, doing business via reputation. The hinge of the arc.
Movement V. The Agentic Economy (2026). AI collapses the scarcity assumptions underneath modern economics. Computative economics names the replacement discipline, reputation becomes capital, and AI governance becomes mechanism design.
Movement I. The Legal Question (2017)
The arc opens where the work began: in law. Two short clips state the problem and plant the baseline that the final movement returns to.
Blockchain Innovation in Law (2017, 4:17) The program in four minutes: blockchain is not a compliance headache for law, it is a redesign opportunity. AI, machine learning, and big data enter as accelerants.
Teaching Corporations: The Business Judgment Rule (Smith v. Van Gorkom) (2017, 1:25) A teaching clip on the doctrine that defines how much deference human boards receive. Keep it in mind: Movement V measures the traditional board against this exact baseline.
Movement II. Lawyers Who Read Code (2018, refreshed 2020)
The logic of this movement: you cannot govern what you cannot read. Before arguing what decentralized systems should do, the channel taught lawyers how those systems actually work, from the Ethereum Virtual Machine up. The full course, recorded.
Coding for Lawyers: Why Lawyers Should Learn to Code (2018, 1:01:57) The case for the course. Lawyers who cannot read code will negotiate against counterparties who can. One hour on why the skill is doctrinal, not decorative.
Coding for Lawyers: Legal Coding Solutions (2018, 1:00:23) Legal problems restated as coding problems: which obligations translate into executable logic, and which resist translation.
Coding for Lawyers: EVM and Solidity Basics (2018, 33:38) The Ethereum Virtual Machine and Solidity from zero: basic contracting, functions, and oracle patterns.
Coding for Lawyers: Solidity Structure (2018, 22:06) Solidity by example: state variables, functions, function modifiers. The anatomy of an enforceable artifact.
Coding for Lawyers: Session Recording (March 2018) (2018, 33:38) A live class session from the spring 2018 course: basic contracts and oracles worked in real time.
Introduction to Coding for Lawyers (2020) (2020, 11:08) The refreshed entry point: the curriculum compressed to eleven minutes for lawyers deciding whether to start.
Movement III. The Decentralized Turn (2018)
With the toolkit in place, the thesis scales. The claim, stated in two minutes at the World Economic Forum and defended at lecture length for the rest of the year: decentralized anonymous systems become reliable when verified, domain-specific reputation disciplines their participants. Law, corporate governance, token markets, and internet infrastructure are each read through that claim.
ConsenSys Panel, World Economic Forum, Davos 2018 (2018, 2:18) Two minutes from Davos: blockchain evolution via verified, domain-specific reputation in decentralized anonymous systems. The sentence that organizes everything after it.
Decentralized Society: Blockchain Solutions for Law (2018, 1:00:16) The full lecture behind the Davos thesis: what a decentralized society requires from law, and what law can offload to protocol.
Blockchain Innovation in Law and Corporate Governance (2018, 1:05:18) An hour on the corporate side: how distributed ledgers rewire disclosure, monitoring, and the agency problems that corporate governance exists to police.
2018 ICO Market Outlook and Regulation (2018, 6:42) The token market read: coin offerings as a live governance experiment running ahead of securities regulation. The pacing problem in miniature.
The Decentralized Web (2018, 37:16) Infrastructure for a web without platform custody: identity, verification, and reputation as public rails rather than corporate assets.
The Decentralized Web: Extended Session (2018, 50:57) The companion recording, argued at lecture depth: internet infrastructure, reputation verification in decentralized systems, and where the emerging stack is heading.
Movement IV. The Reputation Framework (2020 to 2021)
The hinge. Movement III claimed that reputation makes decentralized systems work. This movement shows the machinery: the formal framework developed with mathematician Craig Calcaterra, and the innovation dynamics that explain why incumbents will not build it first.
Disruptive Innovation (2020, 6:22) Six minutes on disruption mechanics: why incumbents rationally ignore the technologies that replace them, and where decentralized infrastructure sits on that curve.
Decentralized Reputation Governance Framework Summary (2021, 20:58) The framework end to end: platform architecture, doing business via reputation, validation pools. A twenty-minute summary of the De Gruyter book and the single most load-bearing video on this page.
Movement V. The Agentic Economy (2026)
The final movement runs the framework forward into the AI economy. The sequence below is the intended viewing order: an empirical anomaly, a failing theory, a replacement discipline, a new form of capital, a new form of firm, and a new definition of governance. Machines join humans as economic agents, and the reputation architecture of Movements III and IV turns out to be what governs them.
95% of Enterprise AI Deployments Generate Zero Measurable Return: No Government on Earth Knows Why (2026, 6:20) The anomaly that opens the movement: massive enterprise AI adoption, near-zero measured return, and no governance body with an explanation. The failure is institutional before it is technical.
The AI Layoff Trap: The Fallacy of Scarcity (2026, 8:17) The corporate misread: layoffs driven by scarcity-era cost logic misjudge what AI actually changes about production.
The Collapse of Scarcity Economics (2026, 6:16) Five schools of economic thought meet computational abundance and do not survive contact: neoclassical, behavioral, information, general equilibrium, New Institutional. Introduces Agentic Decoupling and the Coasean Singularity.
Computative Economics: The Discipline Replacing Scarcity Economics (2026, 4:45) The replacement discipline gets its name. Computative economics takes computation as the primitive and asks how distributed systems coordinate effort, attention, and trust at protocol speed.
Reputation as Capital: Why Your Reputation Should Be Your Most Valuable Asset (2026, 6:03) The missing primitive of the decentralized economy: cryptographically verified, domain-specific, non-transferable reputation. The asset class that routes around institutional gatekeepers, built on the reputation research published between 2018 and 2023.
The Anonymous Firm: A Trust Blueprint (2026, 7:34) A firm where nobody knows anyone’s name, nobody can be fired, nobody can be sued, and the work product is better. The De Gruyter framework walked step by step: Arrow’s trust problem, folk theorems, incomplete contracts, DAO structure.
The Board of Directors Is Obsolete: Blockchain Proves It (2026, 6:57) The corporate governance conclusion of the arc: what continuous, reputation-weighted decision systems make of the quarterly board meeting. The Smith v. Van Gorkom clip from Movement I is the baseline this argument measures against.
Your AI Is Making Decisions Right Now, and Nobody Is Watching (2026, 7:05) AI agents already trade, contract, and diagnose under governance that cannot keep pace. Static rules, centralized safety boards, and reactive regulation share one structural failure: they adapt slower than the systems they govern. The alternative presented here: WDAG architecture, governance by real-time reputation.
AI Evolution Is Mechanism Design (2026, 7:04) The capstone. AI evolution is not weather to be predicted. It is a mechanism to be designed, and whoever writes the reward writes the species. Companion essay on the blog.
Watch by Playlist
For topic-first viewing rather than arc-first viewing:
From Screen to Shelf: The Books
The videos compress arguments. The books carry the proofs.
Decentralization: Technology’s Impact on Organizational and Societal Structure (De Gruyter, 2021), written with mathematician Craig Calcaterra, formalizes Movements I through IV. What the lectures assert, the book derives: why trust fails among strangers (Arrow’s information paradox, the folk theorems, incomplete contracts), how a decentralized organization holds together anyway (DAO structure, validation pools, reputation staking), and what it takes to do business on reputation rather than identity. Two videos above are direct companions: the Framework Summary condenses the book to twenty minutes, and The Anonymous Firm walks it chapter by chapter. Available on Amazon.
The books ahead extend Movement V.
Advanced Introduction to Blockchain and the Law (Edward Elgar, forthcoming) consolidates the doctrinal arc of Movements I through III into a field introduction: what a decade of blockchain jurisprudence settled, and what it left open.
A monograph with World Scientific (forthcoming) carries the Movement V research program into long form.
An edited volume with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (forthcoming) assembles a wider research community around the same questions.
The logic of the sequence: the videos name the mechanisms, the first book proves the framework, and the next books scale it from firm, to economy, to field.
Subscribe to the channel here. New videos continue Movement V.
Wulf Kaal 