Economy3
Stories that sell.
Started in Jaipur, 2018.
Flat pricing
Scott Frankum was in Jaipur in 2018, working with textile producers. Prices were flat. Hand-knotted rugs sold for the same price as imitations.
Buyers couldn't verify claims. Artisans couldn't prove work. Intermediaries captured the premium.
Brands pay in risk and distrust. Economy3 makes provenance self-evident.
Provenance Thesis
Compliance emerged across EU, US, and Australia. AI began structured discovery.
Thesis: Signed JSON-LD data at value creation wins. It scales compliance, agentic commerce, and fair economics.
Economic Backing
Catalini, Cremer, and Tucker formalized the Provenance Premium.
Paper confirmed: In synthetic production, verified provenance is the scarcity anchor. Owners sign. Makers win.
Ship
Heritage recipes ship. Lot-based signing for farms and mills. ESPR ready.
The Shopify app connects the artisan chain to commerce. Install it, and every product in your catalog is automatically enriched by two AI agents — one that extracts origin and supply chain context, one that generates the complete EU Digital Product Passport. When an order ships, a custody record is written and the provenance chain closes at the moment of sale.
Every signed record is machine-readable and queryable by AI agents directly — no platform intermediary, no API key. The record is the interface.
Economy3 aligns with the ValueFlows economic vocabulary — used by hREA and FEP-0837 federated marketplaces. A signed Economy3 record is readable by all of them without translation. The interoperability is not aspirational — it is in the JSON-LD and it is tested.
In infinite synthetic production, the signed record is the scarce one.
Economy3 thesis · formalized in Catalini, Cremer, Tucker (2025) §6.1.2
Theory of change
The Spiral Theory of Change
Economy3 is not trying to change the market by convincing people. It is changing the market by making the infrastructure so easy to use that it becomes the default. Five spirals, each one enabling the next.
Tools
Makers sign work. Zero cost. Zero friction.
Adoption
Cooperatives adopt tools. Records accumulate.
Structure
Every action generates a cryptographic hash. Records link together across independent nodes.
Advantage
AI agents query the linked hashes. Makers sell more products.
Parity
Same infrastructure. Same rights. No gatekeepers.
What Economy3 is not
The builder
Scott Frankum
Founder. Writer. Strategist. Technologist. Deep expertise in JSON-LD, Holochain, EU supply chain policy, and Global South production economics. Founder of Economy3, author of the weave3.org writing, designer of the chain3.org technology.
scott@economy3.org →Consulting
Caroline Rothwell-Gerstein
Strategy and consulting partner. ESPR compliance advisory, brand positioning, and sustainability officer engagement.
Caro@Caro.Consulting →