Sunsten

In emerging tech (the blockchain space of 2019–2020 being a prime example), conversations get noisy fast. The “facts” are unstable. The social incentives muddy the waters. And the cost of being wrong is usually paid later, in architecture, tech debt, and potential reputational drag.

Working fact-based and data-driven, Sunsten tried to be a small beacon of transparency and neutrality in the fog of hype that tends to surround emerging technology waves.

The recurring failure mode in those strategy conversations wasn’t that the people in the room were incapable of understanding the material. It was that they didn’t have a shared map of the territory. Without one, strategy collapses into a few attractor basins:

Sunsten‘s core move was simple: turn the territory into something you can navigate.

We took methods we had developed for the Aeternity Education Platform (making complex systems explainable) and pushed them one layer deeper: not “teach the concept,” but “show the landscape the concept lives in.” This is basically Cognitive Cartography applied to strategy — orientation before recommendation.

What we offered wasn’t “the answer.” It was a set of tools and workshop formats that made it harder to lie to yourself — because the structure was visible, debatable, and revisable.

At the center was the “actors map”: a visual starting point for exploring a domain. The goal wasn’t to declare winners, but to make the shape of a space visible — clusters, adjacency, outliers, and suspiciously central nodes. It’s the thing you can point at together: not a conclusion, but an orientation point.

We treated the map as hypothesis space — something to argue with, revise, and re-run as assumptions change. And we kept the inputs deliberately conservative to avoid false precision: early iterations leaned on a small set of sources (a database of web3 projects combined with crunchbase), and we focused initial mapping passes on specific domains like the energy sector so the map stayed tethered to concrete constraints.

Alongside the maps, we explored a supporting layer of profiles (companies/projects/technologies) that could anchor research: a place where an executive could quickly get the high-level picture, and where deeper material could exist when needed: a knowledge base (a dictionary of terms and mechanisms, so the map doesn’t devolve into jargon), and expert insights (short audits that focus on a specific axis — security, scalability, interoperability, governance — to counterbalance pure “activity metrics”).

Once you have an orientation point, the real question isn’t “is blockchain good?” or “should we decentralize?” It’s how to navigate trade-offs without pretending they don’t exist. We kept returning to Vlad Zamfir’s triangle of compromises as a practical reminder that you don’t get “decentralized,” “scalable,” and “secure” for free at the same time; you get a configuration with a bill attached. That lens turns “decentralization” from a hyped belief into granular design questions: which components of a system benefit from being decentralized, and what becomes more centralized as a consequence?

This is where the workshops mattered most: taking what the map suggests, pulling it back down into the client’s constraints, and forcing the trade-offs into the open — so “interesting” can become “relevant” (or be discarded).

Benchmarking meant comparing candidate configurations and actors with a clear trade-off frame — enough structure to make decisions legible, without reducing everything to a single score. The output was usually some form of matrix: what you gain, what you pay, what breaks first, and what the hidden dependencies are (governance, integration cost, operational risk).

When the decision needed more than paper confidence, we worked with Ape Unit, our development partner who had developed the backbone of the Aeternity Blockchain to run pilots, demos, or narrowly scoped prototypes. The goal wasn’t production delivery — it was to make the “what would it take?” question concrete.

Operating from 2019 to 2021, Sunsten worked with organizations like Volkswagen and H&M, helping them assess opportunities and risks across emerging technology landscapes. We provided landscape mapping and strategic assessments — translating complex technical possibilities into more concrete decision frameworks.

Sometimes, the most valuable outcome was clarity not to pursue a hyped technology; in at least one case, our analysis led a client to decide against implementing a blockchain solution that didn’t fit their actual needs.

The consultancy itself was relatively short-lived, but adapting educational tooling into strategic navigation taught us a lot. Maps are persuasive. That’s both their power and their danger. In practice, we ran into hard problems that aren’t simply solved by clustering a bit of text:

Sunsten grew out of the work on the Aeternity Education Platform (where the educational methods were forged), borrowed spatial intuition from Metasphere (map-like navigation for complex territories), and later fed into Tweetscape (where clustering and network navigation moved from “tech landscapes” into social discourse).