The Coordination Gap

Coordination compounds human capability

Across cultures and throughout history, humans have developed a wide variety of structures for coordinating people, resources and decision-making, including families, tribes, guilds, religious orders, cooperatives, states and corporations. Each represents a different way of organising ownership, responsibility and trust.

Humans collaborate because coordination can make our collective capability multiplicative rather than merely additive. Division of labour, pooled capital and shared knowledge do more than combine individual contributions. They allow groups to accomplish things that would be impossible for any individual alone.

The power of coordination has been understood for as long as humans have organised themselves. An ancient commentary on this idea appears in the story of the Tower of Babel, appearing in Genesis 11:1–9. As the story goes, humanity shares a common language and purpose and sets out to build something of unprecedented ambition. God observes that, acting together, nothing they plan will be beyond them, and intervenes by dividing their language. The story portrays coordinated human effort as a power significant enough to approach divinity.

Tools that make collaboration easier tend to spread quickly and endure. Storytelling allows ideas and values to persist across generations. Music creates shared emotional experiences. The internet allows ideas, communities and organisations to form and coordinate globally rather than locally.

Crypto is financial coordination technology

Before the invention of bitcoin, transferring value globally depended on networks of trusted institutions and intermediaries. Bitcoin changed this by creating an internet-native ledger: a system for global digital value transfer and settlement without a central operator. This became a huge coordination unlock. Humans could now coordinate financially across borders without requiring a trusted financial intermediary at the protocol level.

But blockchain ownership still has a coordination problem. At the base layer, control of an asset ultimately relies on private keys. Much of the world’s wealth, however, is co-owned, co-secured or co-managed. A single point of control does not map cleanly onto systems in which authority, risk and responsibility are shared. EVM-based ecosystems share the same problem.

Capital needs coordination infrastructure

The industry has developed sophisticated technical and cryptographic approaches to bridge this gap, including multisignature, MPC and policy engines. But the solutions have tended to fall into two imperfect categories: sophisticated systems that exist within closed, walled gardens and reintroduce gatekeepers, or open systems that remain clunky, constrained and difficult to operate.

Sophisticated MPC-based platforms have grown quickly, particularly among professional traders who need shared control, policy and security rather than simple exchange custody. Yet by our estimate, these platforms still secure only around $300B, or roughly one-eighth of the total crypto market. Our thesis is that this gap reflects exclusion rather than a lack of demand. The technology has proved its value, but access to it remains gated.

This creates an odd outcome. Public blockchains made global financial settlement open, but much of the sophisticated infrastructure for coordinating ownership on top of them has become closed again.

The missing coordination layer

What’s missing is openly accessible coordination infrastructure that preserves the capabilities of sophisticated MPC systems without recreating the gatekeeper. It should allow public blockchains to operate as global networks of financial participation, while being programmable enough for humans, organisations and, increasingly, agents to coordinate under shared rules.

As agents lower the cost of sophisticated financial execution, this becomes even more important. Access to intelligence is becoming cheaper and more widely distributed. The infrastructure for controlling capital in an orderly way needs to follow.

We built Salt to fill this coordination gap and return public blockchains to their promise of open participation.

A blockchain-native coordination layer

Salt is an open coordination layer that sits above the open asset issuance layer provided by blockchains.

Every Salt user (human, institution, agent) can participate in distributed key generation and policy-controlled transactions, permissionlessly.

Salt is neither a walled garden, nor a co-signer. It does not decide who can access the infrastructure or what they can build with it. And users are not locked in: they can recover their assets and move elsewhere, independently of Salt.

This follows a principle of financial systems architecture which is open at the base, programmable at the edges, and sovereign at the point of ownership.

The impact of open coordination

Open systems do more than remove a gatekeeper. They change what can be built.

When access is permissionless, more people can participate, more developers can build, and more forms of coordination become possible. New financial workflows can emerge without requiring permission from the infrastructure that supports them.

The same principle that made public blockchains powerful applies to the infrastructure built above them. If financial coordination remains closed, the promise of open financial networks stops at the asset layer. If coordination itself becomes open, the network can extend to how capital is owned, governed and put to work.

And if coordination is what compounds human capability, making that coordination open may be one of the most consequential things we can build.