Their rules.

1. A Problem Without a Precise Name

Some afternoons, people who do not know one another begin to gather in an ordinary square. They walk slowly, look at their phones, and stop at the same three corners. No one from the neighborhood called the meeting. A company did, in fact: a company that owns not one square meter of that plaza and decided, from another city and sometimes another country, that those three corners mattered. Among the people who go there, a body of local knowledge has taken shape: which corner at what time, which route works best. Half of it lives in a messaging group and half on the company’s servers. We will return to that plaza. Keep it in mind.

If someone asks who governs that plaza at that moment, every available answer falls short. It is public space, but the municipality did not choose the corners. It is a private product, but the product depends on a plaza it does not own. It is a community, but the community cannot change a single rule that organizes it.

This kind of relationship, in which several actors share a resource or a flow, each depending on the others and none fully in charge, appears in more places than one might expect. An irrigation system, a training fund that distributes subsidies, a wiki, a union, an entire village. The usual words explain it poorly. “Public” and “private” divide the world in two, and this does not fit wholly into either half. “Blockchain,” “tokenization,” “DAO,” and “DeFi” name technologies, not relationships, and they almost always arrive with the promise that the technology has already solved the problem.

RUC-D, Decentralized Shared Unique Resources, is an attempt to give this kind of relationship a name precise enough to study. Its thesis can be stated before any example: it is an institutional-design proposal and a developing research program for describing verifiable relationships among actors who share a resource or a flow. It makes explicit the rights, rules, authorities, interdependencies, and evidence that can distribute coordination without assuming that the institution must disappear or that a particular technology will solve the problem on its own.

Put in one sentence, to keep in mind throughout the rest of the text:

Decentralization does not mean doing away with institutions. It can mean making a relationship more direct without losing authorization, rules, accountability, or proof.

2. Ostrom: A Third Way

In 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin published a parable in the journal Science that became one of the most widely cited of the century. A pasture is open to everyone. Each herder, acting sensibly as an individual, adds one more cow. The sum of sensible decisions destroys the pasture. Many drew a blunt lesson: a shared resource with open access will end in ruin, so it must be handed to a private owner or the state. For decades, that was the whole menu.

Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) spent her career showing that the menu had a third course. She was a political scientist. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for this work. Her method was not a grander theory but fieldwork: Swiss villages that had managed mountain pastures and forests under their own rules for centuries, irrigation communities in Spain with a water tribunal older than the modern state, canal systems built and maintained by farmers in the Philippines, small-scale fishers in Turkey who allocated fishing spots by lottery, and groundwater basins in California where users who competed with one another wrote their own allocation agreements. None of these systems was entirely private, and none was run by a central authority. They endured, and they were governed: by the people who used them.

A technical pause is useful here, because this is where the most common mistake occurs. To compare cases like these, we need to ask two separate questions. Combining them into one is what ruins the analysis. First: does one actor’s use of a unit reduce what remains for another? A fish caught cannot be caught by anyone else. An article read remains intact for the next reader. Second: how costly is it to prevent someone from gaining access? Fencing off an ocean fishing ground is almost impossible. A password costs almost nothing. In the project’s terminology, a common-pool resource (CPR) occupies one cell in that matrix: high subtractability, costly exclusion. Pastures, aquifers, fisheries.

Ostrom also catalogued what durable systems had in common:

• clearly defined boundaries
• rules fitted to local conditions
• a way for those affected by a rule to take part in changing it
• monitoring by the users themselves or by someone accountable to them
• graduated sanctions
• fast, low-cost conflict resolution
• external authorities that do not override local arrangements.

It is tempting to read that list as a certification checklist: six out of eight means the system is well governed. Ostrom spent her final years warning against exactly that. The list describes regularities observed after the fact. It is not a certificate. Used as a checklist, it becomes the “panacea” she argued against throughout her life: the idea that one institutional recipe works across different contexts.

One more piece is needed, because RUC-D builds on it. In this tradition, property is not something one either has or does not have. It is a bundle of separable rights, including access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation (the right to transfer that authority), that can be distributed among different actors. Someone may have the right to withdraw and no right to decide the rules. Someone else may decide the rules without ever withdrawing anything. Many durable systems were governed by actors who could manage and exclude others but could not sell that power. This also disproves a common argument: that without full, transferable ownership, there is no incentive to care for anything.

3. Francisco’s Transformation

RUC-D is Francisco Toro’s work. He came to Ostrom’s tradition as a sociologist and did what a good paraphrase does: he kept the engine and changed the vehicle. The family of questions remains the same: cooperation, rules, interdependence, who provides, and who appropriates the value. The object expands.

Ostrom built her framework around subtractable resources that are difficult to fence off: pastures, water, fish. Francisco points it toward something broader: shared systems of relationships across associative, digital, and institutional settings, in which the resource may be a flow rather than a stock, coordination may run on decentralized infrastructure rather than a village assembly, and not every case is a common-pool resource in the technical sense. The distinction is deliberate, and the project keeps it in view:

RUC-D grows from a creative paraphrase of Ostrom’s common-pool resources. It preserves her questions about cooperation, rules, and interdependence, while expanding the object to shared unique resources whose relationships may be organized through decentralized infrastructure. Not every RUC-D is a common-pool resource in the technical sense, although both belong to the same intellectual lineage.

The same family of questions, a new and broader object.

“Unique,” the U in the acronym, is the part that belongs to Francisco rather than Ostrom. It does not mean rare. It names a recognizable, bounded universe or system of relationships, rules, and shared value: something one can point to and say where it ends. Its units may be singular, differentiated, finite, or scarce by design. That last phrase matters. In a lake, scarcity is a fact of the world. In a game, a “rare” creature is scarce because a line of code says so, and whoever wrote that line can rewrite it. RUC-D insists on distinguishing these two kinds of scarcity, because treating designed scarcity as natural imports a tragedy that is not there: one actor can create and eliminate the resource at will.

Fiction is a good place to think this through precisely because nothing material is at stake. A world of collectible creatures lets us examine what “unique” does to a shared system without pretending that creatures are fish. Later, we will follow those creatures into a real plaza, where the boundary between natural and programmed scarcity becomes visible.

4. A Research Program in Formation

Whatever this essay does, it should not claim that RUC-D is already an established discipline. It is not. It is a research program just beginning to take shape, after years of shared work by Francisco Toro and Andrés Peña.

“Research program” is a demanding phrase. To deserve it, RUC-D must be able to state, for every case it takes on:

• the object and its scale
• the resource or flow, and its units
• the actors and how they depend on one another
• each actor’s rights and obligations
• the formal rules and the rules that actually operate
• the authorities, the claims being made, the attestations, and what can be proved
• the infrastructure, and where it ends
• the conditions that would support, correct, or refute a given hypothesis.

That last point separates a research program from a sales pitch. A sales pitch cannot say what would prove it wrong. RUC-D must be able to. Negative results count, too: a case may show that RUC-D does not apply, or applies to only one layer of a system. In this program, that is a finding, not a failure. A framework’s boundary can only be drawn by cases that fall outside it.

5. The Anatomy of an RUC-D

Before looking at any case, the framework asks the same questions in the same order.

The resource or flow. What is shared, and what are its units? A stock that generates units, a body of knowledge, a fund, a physical space, or a certification circuit behaves differently from the units taken from it. The analysis proceeds layer by layer, never across the system as a whole: almost every real system overlays physical space, technical infrastructure, co-produced knowledge, and internal objects whose scarcity is designed. Each layer is classified on its own. A conclusion that says “this is a commons” without saying which parts are not is incomplete.

The actors and their interdependencies. Who has access, who uses, who provides, who validates, who can exclude others, and who can change the rules? Three roles are easily confused: the appropriator, who withdraws units. The provider, who organizes and finances the system. And the producer, who builds and maintains it. A single actor may fill all three roles, or none. The decisive question is whether those who produce a layer’s value are the same actors who appropriate it.

The rights. Map the full bundle, actor by actor: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation. What defines a system’s character is not who uses it, but who holds management and exclusion rights. And a right another actor can revoke unilaterally, without process or appeal, is not a right. It is permission. Writing “permission” where the label said “right” often changes the entire picture.

The rules, written and effective. Formal rules and rules-in-use do not always coincide. When they differ, the rules people actually use are the ones that count. A rule implemented in code is not automatically a rule participants built and uphold. It may satisfy the letter of a principle without its underlying mechanism.

Authority, claims, and proof. Where does authority come from? Who delegates it, and who can revoke it? What can each actor claim? Who is authorized to attest to a fact about the world, and what can truly be proved as opposed to merely asserted?

Infrastructure and its limits. Which parts of coordination still require a trusted third party? Which can be verified in a distributed way? What technical, legal, and organizational limits remain?

The regime is derived from this map. It is not declared. If the map of rights contradicts the label a system gives itself, the map prevails, and the contradiction becomes part of the finding.

6. Pokémon GO as a Throughline

Let us return to the plaza. It is five o’clock on an ordinary Thursday afternoon. People who do not know one another begin gathering at three corners marked by someone in another country. They walk while looking at their phones, greet one another with a brief gesture, and wait. Neither the municipality nor the neighborhood called them there. A game did. That is the whole scene: a public plaza used by a system that does not own it, a community brought together by that system, and an operator far away deciding what counts and what does not.

At five ten, some are looking for a shiny creature. It does not appear. Others found one at the same corner yesterday. The difference is not effort or local knowledge. It is a number the operator sets: how many shinies there are, when they appear, and for whom. The scarcity that shapes behavior does not come from the world. It comes from a line of code. Someone writes it and can rewrite it. Most events, spawns, and windows of opportunity work the same way. The game moves people through public space without holding any rights over that space. The municipality and neighbors maintain it. The operator places coordinates, and the crowd moves.

At five thirty, two friends speak quietly. One needs a particular creature for a quest, and the other has it. They would like to do something simple: lend it for a tournament or campaign, get it back afterward, and let the lender receive something in return, such as economic value, recognition, prestige, or simply a thank-you that counts in the system. They cannot. When trading exists, it is final and limited. Temporary lending with a return and compensation is not available. The relationship falls short precisely where it could become cooperative.

A little farther on, someone with a handheld console does something everyone knows. They connect their device so dozens of people can join a quest that requires that connection. They do not charge and receive nothing from the system. People thank them and move on. That person sustains part of the collective experience with their time and device, while the system records it as an anecdote, not a contribution. Feeling good about helping is not enough to sustain that effort. Without a rule that recognizes it, what is generosity today may not be there tomorrow.

As they walk, they leave something else behind. Every route, every stop, every map correction adds to valuable local knowledge. Some of it stays in community chats and wikis, where the community decides. Some stays on the operator’s servers, where those who walked have nothing more than permission that someone else can revoke. The people who produce this layer are not the ones who can manage its rules. On foot, the asymmetry is easy to see: some provide the territory, while others decide how it is used.

At six thirty, everyone knows it, even if no one says it aloud. The game lives on centralized servers. If the company decides to shut it down, none of what players accumulated belongs to them in a way that survives that decision. They do not have custody of their creatures, history, or relationships. They play a lot, but own very little.

And yet that same afternoon leaves a benefit that never passes through the server. People went outside, walked more than usual, spoke with strangers, and experienced a social life that would not have happened at home. That life outside the home improves health, creates social ties, and leaves the city a little more inhabited. The operator does not provide it, but it exists because of the encounters the game makes possible.

Read this way, the case needs no jargon. In RUC-D terms, it shows scarcity decided by whoever writes the code, incomplete rights to lend and steward, a contribution with no counterpart, co-produced knowledge concentrated in someone else’s hands, and a system whose continuity depends on one operator. Layer by layer, public space is the only thing that resembles a common-pool resource in the strict sense. Creatures are club goods with programmed scarcity. The framework does not hide that difference. It records it.

A caution: none of the above is a verdict about the game as it exists today. It describes how RUC-D reads a system with this structure. Any claim about current operation would have to be checked against current sources before being stated as fact. What follows is something else and should not be confused with it. It is a normative prototype, an image of what such a system might look like if it distributed more rights and coordination, valuable only as a contrast with the present.

A Pokémon GO closer to RUC-D would allow someone to lend a creature for a quest and return it afterward, with meaningful recognition, whether economic, social, or symbolic. It would let the community organize its own outings and battles, and local players care for and manage nearby points. It would make the actual rarity of the most sought-after creatures transparent instead of keeping it a mystery. It would record contributions, including that of the person who connects their console for hundreds of others, as contributions with a counterpart. And it would offer more direct exchanges between players. The company could keep its intellectual property and all the legitimate functions it performs. RUC-D does not ask the operator to disappear. It asks which layers could distribute rights and coordination, and what would be gained if they did.

The observed system, the framework’s interpretation, and the desired prototype thus remain on three separate planes. They are kept separate deliberately. When they collapse into one another, a proposal begins to look like evidence.

7. Governance, authority, and optional economics

RUC-D asks who governs a resource or flow, which rights each actor holds, and who appropriates the value. An analysis of verifiable authority asks a different question: who is authorized to make each claim, what evidence supports it, and who can check it. The questions are related, but neither answers the other.

A record can show that someone made a claim or that certain data were recorded. By itself, it does not prove that the claimed event occurred. Supporting a real-world claim requires an authorized observer and a method suited to the case. Verification does not require making all data public: a property can be checked without disclosing sensitive information. People and institutions are actors. A cryptographic address is not a person and does not by itself reveal how many people control it.

Capabilities and authorities should be named by actor: who may propose, approve, attest, issue, verify, execute, or change a rule. Infrastructure comes later, based on institutional requirements. A useful test asks what participants would retain if the operator disappeared: their rights, relationships, permissions, and history. If all of these depended on that operator, continuity would remain unresolved.

An institution can authorize a more direct handoff while retaining ownership, rules, and authority over the resource. A verifiable record can show that the handoff took place under the defined mechanism. It does not change who holds each right. Coordination and evidence are separate questions.

A hypothetical recording-verification design could combine a witness during transmission, a digital fingerprint and metadata, multiple signatures, and a final notarial acknowledgment. Each layer would support a specific claim. It would be a proof of concept, not a guarantee of legal validity, unchallengeability, or freedom from manipulation. Adding layers documents responsibilities. It does not make a hypothesis true.

A token is optional. If a case includes credentials or flows of value, several dimensions must be distinguished:

• a credential’s symbolic value and what it signals
• the technical ability to verify its authenticity
• any possible economic value
• the system’s liquidity and cash-flow problems
• the rights and risks of credential holders
• the governance and regulation of the arrangement.

None of these dimensions proves the others. A blockchain tool that verifies a credential demonstrates a limited technical capability. By itself, it does not demonstrate institutional decentralization, regulatory validity, liquidity, governance rights, or that the case is an RUC-D. Each question requires its own research.

DeFi-related mechanisms should be examined for the specific problem they might solve:

• a tokenized credential or NFT raises questions about uniqueness, provenance, and verifiability
• a smart contract executes a condition: something happens only if something else is true
• staking temporarily commits a resource or right under a set of rules
• liquidity responds to a possible gap between money owed and money available
• yield farming helps compare incentives. It does not promise returns
• a governance token may represent rights, but does not by itself prove legitimate participation.

When an economic problem warrants it, tokenomics is the design of issuance, allocation, incentives, restrictions, uses, benefits, and risks. It does not mean “launching a cryptocurrency.” It comes last: after defining the institutional relationship, resource or flow, actors, rights, and rules, and clarifying what can be proved and by whom.

8. DAOs as Study Cases

DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, are not evidence for RUC-D. They are among the best available objects for studying one specific question: what happens when collective-choice rules are written explicitly in code?

In an alpine pasture, whether users can truly change the rules has to be inferred. In a DAO, the voting rule is visible. This makes DAOs a natural place to test whether a rule in code is a rule-in-use, and to examine the relationship between the formal right to vote and effective control.

The central question RUC-D would ask of any of them is:

When do programmed voting rules grant effective management rights, and when do they create only the formal appearance of participation?

Over a declared time window, the study would examine:

• who sets the agenda and who can propose
• how many distinct voters there are, how many recur, and how voting power is distributed
• which coalitions actually prevail and how concentrated treasury recipients are
• the relationships among proposers, dominant voters, and recipients
• the actual ability to execute, veto, and change the rules
• the divergence between formal voting and effective management.

From there, RUC-D can operationalize states such as plutocracy, agenda centralization, execution centralization, distributive centralization, formal decentralization, effective decentralization, and captured governance. None of these labels applies to a DAO as a whole. Each applies to a layer, along one dimension, during a specific time window. Polkadot, Mantle, PizzaDAO, and VitaDAO are the kinds of candidates the program might study, each separately, not as one homogeneous category with a shared verdict.

9. Limits

An essay defending RUC-D without saying where it stops would be selling something. The cautions belong inside the argument. They are gathered here only because the text is ending.

A prototype is not evidence. A working proof of concept shows that something can be built. It does not show that it works at scale, will be adopted, or will produce the institutional effects its designers expect. In a hypothetical design, a layered composition could be documented. That would establish nothing about judicial outcomes.

A vote is not power. A formal right to vote can coexist with no effective right to manage anything. Whether governance is real depends on who can execute, veto, and rewrite the rules, not on whether a ballot exists.

Blockchain does not guarantee decentralization. Running governance on-chain proves that a transaction occurred, not that authority is distributed. A system can put all its rules in code and remain governed unilaterally by whoever can change that code.

A claim is not a truth. Co-production is not common ownership. And designed scarcity is not material scarcity. These are places where an intuitive reading and a careful one diverge, and RUC-D exists in part to keep them separate.

A label does not describe a system. “Community-owned,” “public,” and “decentralized” do not survive contact with the map of rights if that map says otherwise.

10. Closing

Something is being built that does not yet have a fixed shape. It has a foundational framework, a body of cases that are coded and partly coded, and a set of questions precise enough for a case to fail them. What it does not have are results, and an honest version of this essay says so.

What RUC-D offers readers today is not an answer but a way of looking. Applied to a system in which several actors share a resource or a flow, it requires us to name the layers, map rights actor by actor, distinguish written rules from the rules that operate, and ask who provides what and who takes what. Sometimes the answer will be that the framework does not apply. That is allowed, and useful.

The invitation, then, is to imagine new cases and, as we imagine them, to maintain the discipline the framework demands: a proposal is not evidence, a design is not a finding, and the moment a case becomes interesting is often the moment to test it against something real. The work of turning years of shared thought into a science is just beginning. If it happens, it will happen one coded case at a time.