Ghost Protocols: On-Chain Immortality and Off-Chain Abandonment

What happens when a protocol's smart contracts keep running long after everyone has left?

We're entering an era where code persists indefinitely on-chain while the teams, communities, and context that created it fade away. These "ghost protocols" raise uncomfortable questions about permanence, responsibility, and what it means for software to outlive its creators.

The contracts don't care that the Discord is dead. They don't know the founder moved on to a new project. They just keep executing, holding funds, processing transactions—sometimes for years after the last commit.

This isn't a bug. It's a feature of immutable systems. But it forces us to reckon with a new kind of digital archaeology: understanding systems through their behavior alone, without documentation, without institutional memory, without anyone to ask.

The implications extend beyond crypto. As more of our infrastructure becomes autonomous and persistent, we need frameworks for inheriting, maintaining, and eventually sunsetting systems we didn't create and may not fully understand.