Introducing Murmur: The monetization layer for alpha

TL;DR

• Untapped information is valuable but challenging to access due to trust issues.
• Murmur transforms informal trust networks into a time-based positive-sum game around topics, allowing participants to influence information propagation velocity.
• Alpha hunters are incentivized to post first on Murmur to build their reputation and be paid for it.
• Queue members are empowered to pay to keep valuable information secret until it’s irrelevant for them to keep it for themselves.
• In essence, Murmur facilitates the controlled sharing of untapped information, offering a competitive advantage to those who act on it strategically.

Harnessing Untapped Information

Information that hasn’t yet been widely disseminated can offer the most valuable opportunities in a market. However, accessing such opportunities can be challenging, as one needs to know the right people to be exposed to them. This creates a double coincidence of wants problem and a trust issue, especially in a world where online interaction is becoming the norm.

Untapped information is precisely valuable because it hasn’t yet hit the mainstream. At Freatic, we recognize that the value of non-mainstream information decreases the more it is propagated to an audience. We believe that to extract value from such information, it is essential to control its transition from its untapped state to the public space.

Freatic’s new product Murmur is designed to help individuals leverage opportunities to their advantage before anyone else. By transforming traditional informal trust networks into an expansive and positive-sum protocol. This means that the protocol allows participants to influence the flow of information, potentially accessing valuable opportunities before they become widely known. This could involve early access to market trends, investment opportunities, or other types of information that can offer a competitive advantage. The key aspect is that the system is designed not just for exclusive benefit but in a way that all participants can find advantageous opportunities, thereby creating a positive-sum scenario.

In other words, Murmur empowers participants to influence the flow of information. It decelerates the transition of valuable opportunities, while they are still in their untapped state, allowing those who can use them to their advantage to do so before they become public knowledge. Now, we’ll go into the technical aspects of the protocol.

The 3 key participants

1. Hunter: Individuals who possess valuable information to share against direct payment. They face two primary challenges: finding the right audience for their information and establishing trustworthiness.

2. Queue member: These individuals seek tailored, valuable information for a specific field. They are willing to pay for access because they possess both expertise and resources to leverage the opportunity presented by untapped information for their interests.

3. Public: This group may find the information intriguing, even if they can’t benefit from it as much as queue members because they lack the capability or capacity to leverage untapped information.

Understanding the mechanics

1. Participants are brought together around topics. Each topic represents a precise field connecting information hunters who can securely submit untapped information related to the field, and queue members who can pay to receive these opportunities. Topics can be anything from new startups in a specific market to unbroken news stories that may impact a business to crypto-related topics like on-chain opportunities and airdrop rumours.
2. Anyone can become a hunter. However, only verified hunters will be paid for sharing a piece of info. Still, unverified hunters will need to gain a reputation by posting multiple times on the topic until queue members decide (by voting) to verify them. Before being verified, each new post needs to burn a coupon to be published. This mechanism ensures the curation of relevant hunters by queue members on a specific topic.
3. Queue members are in constant competition to hunt for new opportunities. The piece of information posted by a verified hunter will start being propagated sequentially through the topic’s queue. Becoming a queue member requires you to secure one coupon and choose a spot in the queue, meaning you agree to pay a maximum amount of ETH per post to ensure you receive the opportunity before others.
4. Queue members can decide to keep an opportunity for themselves as long as they want. Once it is your turn to receive a post, you can choose to read it by paying the fee you agreed to bid. If you want to keep this opportunity for yourself longer because you want to act on it you can slow down the propagation of this piece of information to the next queue member for as long as you’d like.
5. Revealing posts = Issuing new coupons. When a post has finished propagating throughout the queue there’s one last step before the secret information goes public. Anyone can compete using their computation power to break open a cryptographic scheme called Time-Lock Puzzles to make a post public. The successful challenger receives a unique coupon that can be used to perform actions for the topic it was minted from.
6. Coupons are the engine’s fuel. First, coupons let members join a topic by booking their spot in the queue. Then, they also allow unverified hunters to build their reputations. They also can be bought, sold, and gifted between participants.

What are you waiting for? Try it now on Base: https://app.murmurprotocol.com