The Token Economy of Atlas Protocol
While token economy is very crucial to a crypto project, token economy isn’t anything new, and we can see it happening everyday.
A token economy usually consists of 3 essential parts:
- Token, which is an object or symbol that has no intrinsic value but can be exchanged for material reinforcers, services, or privileges (back-up reinforcers).
- Back-up reinforcers, which act as rewards or incentives for the participants.
- Specified target behaviors, is what this token economy trying to encourage and will reward participants with tokens for doing acting desired behaviors.
An everyday example would be the punch cards from your favorite coffee shop around the corner. A punch card is a token system, punches on it has no intrinsic value, but imply a promise for rewards(back-up reinforcer), which usually be a free cup of coffee, and the target behaviors of course, is for the token holders to buy more coffee from that coffee shop so to collect enough punches or stamps(essentially tokens) for that free coffee.
What does that mean of an incentive based ad token economy like Atlas Protocol is that we need to identify our targeted behaviors first, which are actually the problem we want to solve with our ecosystem.
In Atlas Protocol, we believe that advertising and marketing is a business activities that could benefit everyone, including advertisers, publishers and audiences. However, current ecosystem have several issues: Internet giants(Google and Facebook)’ duopoly makes smaller business vulnerable to manipulations, inaccurate measurement causing trust issues among advertisers and publishers, user data privacy protection is a heated topic.
Hence we define the target behavior in our system to be audiences actively engaging interactive ad campaigns, like clicking on traditional display ads, but in more interactive ways, which could provide real conversion to the marketing effort and provide evidence for measurement.
And as back-up reinforcers, Atlas Protocol enabled interactive ads will pass through part of ad revenue to the audiences as rewards via airdrop like mechanism that we call it SmartDrop, the rewards are distributed in the form of ATP tokens, while having no intrinsic value, it represents the ability to promote merchandise in the Atlas Protocol’s ecosystem, hence resulting in trading value.
Using rewards to attract end users to participate in ad measurement activities is not new in the ad industry, however, there was never a token economy model enabled by Blockchain technology and crypto tokens designed for this purpose. As a result, previous endeavors had their pitfalls which prevent the model from scaling.
Without crypto tokens, anyone who wanted to improve ad measurement and reduce ad fraud could use either free products or fiat currency as rewards for user participation.
However, different free products will be valued differently to different people, hence one can not scale this rewarding system to a large enough scale which could make the data sample size good enough for representing the whole user groups. To attract more people, a better way would be to use some currency, however, the setting up of traditional fiat currency as payment method is more difficult for organizations to implement and also result in a steep curve for ramping up users.
That is why we believe with ATP token and the token economy built around it. Atlas Protocol has a better chance than ever to create a harmonic ecosystem for higher advertising ROIs and better user data usage and privacy protection.
As crypto tokens, ATP are easy to send and receive while also hold a trading value so they could be converted to well accepted crypto currencies. This mechanism will encourage advertisers to price their campaigns wisely with audience rewards in mind and encourage audiences to engage in more sophisticated interactions since people know that their effort will accumulate them rewards that could be of non-trivial value to everyone.
In future, Atlas Protocol will enable users to also contribute their non-sensitive data to help improve the overall ad quality to their own preference and in the meantime, bringing higher engagement rate for the campaign owners.
Atlas Protocol would like to the enabler of this ecosystem, serve as the infrastructure of a better orchestrated economy that improve business efficiency and benefit everyone for bringing the right information to the right audience and improving the overall experience of the ad industry.
If you would like to comment or contribute to our ideas, please feel free to contact: contact@atlasp.io.
Disclaimer
This article SHALL NOT be considered as an invitation to invest into ATP tokens and/or financial advice of any kind.
The crypto market is extremely volatile and one should be aware of the risk before getting into the market. for example, crypto tokens have their intrinsic value but their price on the mass market is determined by the market and COULD go down to zero.
Atlas Protocol is a protocol to utilize ATP token in a token based advertising economy, there is no direct correlation to ANY OTHER crypto currency or fiat currency. and the team SHALL NOT be held responsible for ANY investment loses of anyone from trading ATP tokens on secondary/OTC markets.
Parts of the tech and business ideas expressed in the white paper are still to be implemented and there is NO GUARANTEE that Atlas Protocol’s vision could be executed as originally planned or on time.
