Exploring the Possibilities: adChain + district0x

Written by Hunter Gebron

Through the creation of the district0x platform developed by Joe Urgo and Matus Lestan, we foresee the potential for an explosion of decentralized marketplaces and thriving communities yet to be built.

District0x is an open source Ethereum based project comprised of smart contracts and front end libraries known as d0xINFRA.

“d0xINFRA provides districts with the core functionalities required to operate an online market or community. Namely, the ability for users to post listings, filter and search through listings, rank peers and amass reputation, and send invoices and collect payments. The d0xINFRA framework is designed to be open and extendable, allowing districts to be customized and granted additional functionality through the use of auxiliary modules.” — district0x White Paper

Given the collaborative spirit ingrained in Ethereum and our general excitement around the district0x project, we couldn’t help but think about ways in which adChain could work in conjunction with district0x to enable adToken (ADT) holders to coordinate their ideas and strengthen the overall network effect of the adChain protocol.

The following brief article will take a look at two potential use cases for adChain district’s built on district0x. The first is modeled in the form of a Curation Market and the second is modeled after Ethlance’s job sponsorships.

Disclaimer: Both the adChain Curation Market district and the adChain Registry Sponsorship district mentioned in this article are purely speculative in nature. They are theoretical examples of two potential use cases for an adChain district built on district0x to demonstrate the potential with this approach.

A look at an adChain Curation Market on district0x

Curation Markets, proposed by Simon de la Rouviere, “provide a model that allows groups to more effectively coordinate & earn value they co-create around shared goals.”

Effective coordination and community participation of shared goals amongst adToken holders will form the crux of the adChain Global Registry. Traditional online meeting places like Reddit and Slack provide users with a place to hold discussions around a wide array of topics. Curation Markets take this one step further. By staking tokens to a Reddit style post in a Curation Market, participants are forced to put skin-in-the-game. In an environment where posting and upvoting costs dollars and cents (in the form of tokens) there are real world consequences. This “skin-in-the-game” approach has the potential to reduce static noise while incentivizing participants to create posts that provide quantifiable value to the community.

In an adChain Curation Market built on district0x, any individual whose post accumulates upvotes will have the opportunity to profit from those upvotes. Take the following as an example:

A developer with a new idea for an adChain Dapp can post his/her idea to the adChain Curation Market’s community message board in district0x. Upon the posts’s creation, the developer will stake 1 adToken to the post in the form of an upvote (this can be likened to how one upvote auto-generates upon the creation of a post in Reddit.) If a second community member upvotes the post, they must now stake 2 adToken, similarly if a third community member wishes to upvote they must now stake 3 adToken, and so on and so forth. Each additional upvote costs slightly more than the previous one.

At this point in the example there are now a total of 6 adToken in the pool linked to the original post, and a total of three upvoters. If the original poster would like to claim a profit for his/her efforts for posting such a great topic. They can unstake the 1 adToken used to originate the post, and since that adToken is part of a larger pool, they are eligible to claim ⅓ of the total pool (⅓ because 3 members upvoted), in this case, they would receive 2 adToken back, 6/3=2. In this example, the original poster has created a meaningful topic and in the process doubled the amount of adToken they initially staked, thus earning a profit.

Curation Markets are still in their infancy, but we expect in due time their implementation and adoption will mature.

The adChain Registry Sponsorship district (ARS)

In our second example, we will discuss the possibility of an adChain Registry Sponsorship district. Borrowing conceptual ideas from Ethlance’s job sponsorships, we can create a district whereby publisher domains may solicit the adToken community for entry into the adChain Global Registry via sponsorships.

The roadmap for the adChain Registry as outlined in our white paper details full-scale decentralization taking place in February of 2019. In the fully decentralized version, adToken holders will have control over votable parameters within the Registry. A key part of these votable parameters is the ‘application amount’ required for a new publisher to gain entry into the Registry. While presently we do not know the ‘application amount’ adToken holders will decide is optimal, we can foresee a scenario where the ‘application amount’ is quite high. In this situation, smaller publisher domains may struggle to gain entry into the Registry due to financial constraints. This would be unfortunate since there are many small scale (low-volume traffic) publisher domains with non-fraudulent and high-quality traffic that advertisers would want to serve ads to.

In an adChain Sponsorship district built on district0x, publisher domains without the financial means to acquire the full ‘application amount’ to gain entry to the adChain Registry could list their domain and seek sponsors who are willing to put up some portion or the total amount of adToken required for the ‘application amount’ on their behalf.

Since the ‘application amount’ is returned to a publisher domain if they are successfully added to the Registry following the ‘Challenge Period,’ sponsors have the opportunity to recoup their full investment plus a premium for their backing if the domain they sponsor is added to the Registry. This sort of non-linear secondary market effect for populating the adChain Registry could provide access to a host of premium publisher domains with low-volume, high-quality traffic.

We are excited about the potential to collaborate with other projects building applications on Ethereum. We look forward to a future when clever coordination amongst Ethereum applications and protocols leads to a rich ecosystem of diverse opportunity for all participants in the decentralized effort. We feel that district0x offers a lot of promise and we are excited to see its development roadmap unfold.

Written by Hunter Gebron