Thousand Ether Homepage: Age of the 👑Magistrate

When we launched the Thousand Ether Homepage in August 2017, our tagline was “Own a piece of blockchain history!”

In September of 2021, we made that ownership more powerful by enabling ad owners to wrap plots in an NFT and trade them on secondary markets like OpenSea.

In November, we will make that ownership mean even more by giving a lucky plot holder the opportunity to own the royalties of OpenSea sales for a term. We’re doing something that (as far as we know) no crypto project has done before: It’s not a DAO, it’s Sortition.

What is Sortition?

Sortition is an ancient electoral system that selects political officials at random from a qualified pool of candidates.

What does Sortition mean for the Thousand Ether Homepage mean?

During the age of the 👑Magistrate, 100% of sales royalties will be routed to the community.

Here’s how it will work:

1. When the Sortition begins, the OpenSea royalties address will be set to the KetherSortition contract.
2. Owners of ThousandEtherHomepage ads will be able to nominate their plots to become the 👑Magistrate through the KetherSorititon contract.
3. Every term (6 weeks), a new 👑Magistrate is chosen by random from the pool of nominated plots, weighted by their pixel count.
4. During the term period, whoever owns the elected plot is the
   👑Magistrate and will be able to withdraw the earned royalties from the KetherSortition contract.

If I become the 👑Magistrate, what am I expected to do?

This is your chance to do the marketing you’ve always wished the project would do. You have six weeks to have an impact on OpenSea sales and withdraw the royalties paid out.

You can do your best to promote the project and drive adoption, and reap the rewards during your term.

Or you can do nothing, it’s up to you. You get what you put into it.

What if I don’t think I can do a good job promoting the project?

If you hold the winning plot, you’re welcome to sell or trade your plot to someone else which will make them the 👑Magistrate for remaining term.

How much is the royalty again?

5% of sales on OpenSea, paid out in ETH every 2–4 weeks. We don’t control OpenSea’s payout schedule, so the term is a generous 6 weeks to cover these edge cases.

What can you expect from the developers?

1. Our mandate is to empower the community and the 👑Magistrate towards autonomy.
2. We will not be giving up control of core infrastructure (the thousandetherhomepage.com domain, the OpenSea listing, etc). We considered this but there is too much risk for griefing.
3. The 👑Magistrate is not setting the project’s core roadmap, but they are welcome to independently fund or develop whatever features they think are best as part of the ecosystem.
4. If OpenSea or a government agency tells us to shut this down, then we will. In that case, future elections will be paused and the royalties address will be reset.

What do the developers control?

1. KetherSortition is a non-custodial contract. We can’t control the nominees and we can’t control the election results. Randomness is provided by Chainlink’s VRF.
2. We do control the OpenSea royalties address. This address is visible through the OpenSea API, so you can monitor it to verify royalties are still being sent to it.
3. If we need to respond to unforeseen circumstances, the contract is designed to allow us to pause the next election but it will not interrupt the current 👑Magistrate term.
4. We can withdraw ERC20 balances of the contract. This is primarily to rescue remaining LINK tokens that are used to pay for the randomness needed to operate the election fairly. OpenSea royalty payments are ETH, not an ERC20, and are only withdrawable by the 👑Magistrate.

Why isn’t this a DAO?

DAOs are at their best when they’re bottom-up grassroots community efforts rather than top-down performative organizations. We didn’t want to create a DAO from above, but to instead create the kind of environment that will empowers and encourages cooperation of independent groups.

We hope that a Sortition can be a forcing function for the creation of DAOs. A collective of plot owners can come together under a DAO and have a much greater chance of winning the next election as a group.

This experiment may be a first of its kind in the space, and we hope it will influence our culture for years to come.

Long live the 👑Magistrate.