The Permissionless Premium: How Open Systems Create Exponential Value
Author
Denelle Dixon
Publishing date
In April 2021, Franklin Templeton, a 75-year-old asset manager with $1.5 trillion under management, did something that shocked the crypto industry.
They launched the first registered money market fund on an open source blockchain.
What surprised everyone was how fast they moved, outpacing fintech firms and blockchain startups chasing similar goals.
So, how did a 75-year-old legacy financial institution outmaneuver the competition?
They didn't ask permission.
While peers pitched big picture proposals or governance frameworks to their boards, Franklin Templeton was already researching, experimenting, and ultimately deploying on the Stellar blockchain, gaining valuable insight throughout the entire process.
They would go on to leverage this experience to integrate six additional blockchains over the span of just two years while the competition was still in planning mode.
The firm discovered the varied and often unexpected rewards that come naturally with building on open systems: faster learning cycles, access to regulatory solutions built by others, technical innovations they didn't fund, and adoption pathways that emerged without any sales strategy.
In other words, they'd discovered what I call the “permissionless premium”: the ability to test, learn, and build with open technology without waiting for anyone's approval.
The Permissionless Premium, Defined
The "permissionless premium" isn't just one advantage—it's a compound effect.
It's simultaneously the ability to:
- Experiment and learn privately without approval
- Benefit from innovations you didn't conceive of or build
- Move faster than committees can meet
- Capture value through pathways you never planned or even predicted
These advantages don’t just stack up. Each serves as a multiplier for the others.
Throughout this article, we'll explore how open systems deliver each of these premiums, starting with the first one Franklin Templeton enjoyed: the ability to experiment privately without approval.
Building in Stealth: Experimenting Without Exposure
The 2021 money market fund launch wasn't a starting point; it was a finish line. The first clues had emerged two years earlier in 2019, when Franklin Templeton filed their first SEC registration for blockchain-based fund operations.
In 2019, institutional tokenization was barely on anyone's radar, and it would have been risky for a legacy financial institution’s reputation to tell the market they were betting on blockchain infrastructure when even crypto-native firms were still convincing regulators this wasn't just speculation.
In this case, open infrastructure enabled something critical: Franklin Templeton could test privately without anyone's permission.
No vendor to convince. No partnership terms to negotiate. No public commitment needed.
By the time they announced in 2021, they weren't pioneering untested technology. They had validated in private, learned what worked, and only went public once they had years of evidence behind them.
This is the first permissionless premium in action: the freedom to experiment without risking your reputation.
Test quietly. Learn privately. Deploy publicly only when ready.
While Franklin Templeton tested in stealth, an even more valuable ecosystem development brewed in the background—something they never anticipated.
The Innovation Nobody Planned
In 2020, a fintech company called Securrency was working with securities issuers on blockchain infrastructure and—wanting an open, permissionless option—chose Stellar to build on.
While developing their solution, Securrency identified a critical gap in the market: regulators would never approve tokenized securities without the ability to recover or freeze assets in cases of fraud, regulatory compliance, or legal requirements.
Traditional securities have "clawback" functionality. Blockchain assets didn't. So Securrency proposed a protocol enhancement, specifically a Stellar Ecosystem Proposal: add clawback capability to the Stellar network.
They submitted the technical specification, built the implementation, and opened it for community review. The network adopted it, and it became a native compliance tool on the Stellar network.
Securrency and Franklin Templeton never coordinated. They weren't partners. They probably didn't even know the other was building on the same infrastructure.
Yet when Franklin Templeton approached the SEC for approval in 2021 and was questioned about how they complied with securities regulations that required asset recovery, the answer was clawback functionality.
Built by someone else. Available to everyone. Exactly what regulators needed to see.
Without that feature—developed by a company Franklin Templeton had never worked with—regulatory approval wouldn’t have happened. The institutional tokenization use case would have stalled.
This is another example of the “permissionless premium” and a prime example of what open infrastructure enables: independent actors solving adjacent problems without coordination, creating compounding value that no partnership committee could have planned.
Unexpected Pathways to Adoption
The story doesn't end there.
Securrency was eventually acquired by DTCC—the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which processes over $2 quadrillion in securities settlements annually.
Nadine Chakar, who ran Securrency, now leads DTCC's digital assets division, bringing institutional blockchain expertise into one of the world's most important financial infrastructure companies.
DTCC is now piloting blockchain settlement infrastructure, led by someone who understands the technology from experience in its ecosystem.
The point isn’t that blockchain is handling quadrillions yet—it’s that the world’s largest settlement organization is testing it because ecosystem experience matters.
Open infrastructure creates adoption pathways you could never predict:
- Ecosystem company solves regulatory problem (clawback)
- Ecosystem company enables institutional adoption (Franklin Templeton)
- Ecosystem company acquired by infrastructure giant (DTCC)
- Executive brings blockchain expertise to legacy institution
- Institution pilots technology
These aren't sales cycles. They're ecosystem pathways—adoption routes that emerge through permissionless building rather than partnership planning.
The Gatekeeper's Dilemma
I don’t mean to imply that gatekeeping is somehow malicious—it’s not. It’s rational risk management.
Partnership committees ensure strategic alignment. Security reviews catch vulnerabilities. These gates exist for good reasons.
But here’s what matters: gatekeepers change over time, and so do their interests.
Consider Linus Torvalds and Linux. Yes, he makes decisions about what goes into the kernel. But he doesn’t control Linux—the community does. If Linus ever became unreasonable, the community could fork the project and ship from a different branch. The power ultimately rests with the builders, not the gatekeeper.
Corporate blockchains work differently. When an infrastructure layer is built by and for a specific corporation, that corporation won’t relinquish control—because doing so undermines their business model. The architecture itself prevents the community from routing around decisions they disagree with.
And the switching costs compound over time. Abandoning a liquidity pool? Annoying, but possible. Migrating a protocol to a different blockchain? Increasingly painful as network effects strengthen. Moving billions in tokenized assets to different infrastructure? Nearly impossible once compliance frameworks, custody solutions, and institutional workflows have all optimized around a specific architecture.
This is why flexibility matters even if you don’t need it today.
You might in five years when your “partner” blockchain decides to change its fee structure, deprecate features you depend on, or prioritize use cases that conflict with yours. By then, migration costs could be prohibitive.
When you require approval before building, you’re not just evaluating credentials—you’re embedding a structural dependency that becomes harder to escape with every transaction.
The Infrastructure Choice
Here's the thing: nobody cares about "openness" as an abstract principle. What matters is whether your infrastructure lets the unexpected happen—and whether you can capture the value when it does.
The question isn't whether permissionless systems provide better onboarding than corporate alternatives. The question is: what happens when your highest-value opportunity comes from a builder who wouldn't pass your approval process, solving a problem you didn't foresee, moving faster than your committee cycle allows?
Corporate platforms optimize for known use cases with predictable requirements. But the asymmetric returns come from builders you could never hire solving problems you never anticipated.
We're early enough that architecture choices still matter. But when infrastructure decisions calcify—when billions in assets lock into specific chains, when compliance frameworks optimize for particular architectures—switching costs compound.
If you're choosing infrastructure in 2025, ask:
- Can we build independently, or do we need partnership approval?
- Does this architecture enable experiments we can't predict today?
- Can ecosystem participants solve problems we don't know we'll need solved?
- Will our velocity compound, or will we wait for vendor roadmaps?
- Are adoption pathways limited to our sales team, or can they emerge through ecosystem evolution?
Asymmetric returns come from the unexpected. Let's build infrastructure that supports the unexpected.
Let's build open.