Curation Markets Update: 28 February 2018

Curation Markets is a protocol that reduces information asymmetry through:

1. using tokenized signals to curate information &
2. exploring ways to mint/spawn these tokenized, curatorial markets (eg continuous token models & bonding curves).

Curation Markets is a broad concept that will ultimately allow more groups to coordinate globally around shared goals.

Introducing Curation Markets: Trade Popularity of Memes & Information (with code)!

Many of you want to help, and I’m incredibly thankful for that! Curation Markets *is* about enabling many more communities to work together and earn from the value they co-create. I will thus be doing an update every ~4 weeks on what’s happening, what’s transpiring, and what’s next!

Bumper Month!

I’m so amazed at the innovation that’s started to happen rapidly. Curved Bonding & sister projects like Token-Curated Registries are getting a lot of attention from developers & analysts in the space. I’m excited & happy! Keen to see it grow.

New Articles:

I posted an article related to usage of curved bonding & token-curated registries to make it profitable to have a reputation for protecting the commons. This means we can hopefully more easily coordinate around protecting commons when it’s hard to coordinate in doing so.

Saving The Planet: Making It Profitable To Protect The Commons.

Mentions On a16z Crypto Canon!

Thanks to a16z for including a bunch of articles related to Curation Markets on the Crypto Canon post.

https://a16z.com/2018/02/10/crypto-readings-resources/

Curved Bonding Updates!

Big updates on the development front.

Slava Balasan & Billy Rennekamp have been on implementing curved bonding using the math/formulas used by Bancor. This improves gas costs substantially depending. The curve is dependent on the reserve ratio chosen.

Here’s a blog post from before ETHDenver.

How to Make Bonding Curves for Continuous Token Models

Then: this is what they worked on during ETHDenver, writing curved bonding for use in Relavant.

Relevant Bonding Curve

Additionally, and awesomely, they created a React component for a bonding curve that can be found here: usable currently on Rinkeby.

https://bondingcurves.relevant.community/

I’m excited to see this actually working and it being gas cost efficient. I would like the community to extract this code out into a separate repo that only contains the curved bonding implementations along with a set of tests & audits. This will mean we can rapidly roll out more curved bonding implementations with less security risk!

Excited!

Ocean’s Proofed Curation Markets

Ocean Protocol Technical Whitepaper

Ocean Protocol release their long-awaited technical whitepaper detailing the usage of curation markets in a feedback loop to reward predicted & actual popularity of the data being shared/exchanged.

Pool.ac

The Pool team took part in the Linum Labs Ethereum hackathon in Cape Town: making a simple way to use curved bonding for funding. They have an optional extra component which is a subscription: buying a set amount of tokens on the curve at certain intervals and then choosing a donation option towards the pool’s beneficiary.

The code is open source, however there are some caveats that have to be ironed out still.

Have a look!

okwme/pool_contracts

evvvritt/pool

Love the aesthetic of the app! :)

Re-Fungibles?

Additionally, love the further exploration here from Billy Rennekamp: wondering what happens if a non-fungible asset is backed by a bonded curve?

Re-Fungible Token (RFT)

It ties into the exploration I did around the usage of curved bonding to solve for price discovery of non-rivalrous goods.

Solving Price Discovery Of Non-Rivalrous Goods (with Curved Bonding)

The idea from Billy is particularly interesting because it means that the act of price discovery (buying to listen and the reselling of the privilege) nets the artist/creator a revenue stream. It’s as if every time a CD was bought/sold they would earn from it.

These components can be mixed and matched in so many ways. Excited for this experimentation!

Forecasted Elastic Allocation Token

Proposing the Forecasted Elastic Allocation Token

Will Payne and Kyle Tut proposes an interesting mechanism where the bonding curve is attached to proposals that are completed: which starts to experiment with more conditional inflation. Interesting ideas!

Fred’s Tweetstorm

Thanks to Fred’s tweetstorm, February has turned into a bumper month. Gotten a lot of inbound interest! Thanks Fred! :)

Thoughts on Naming?

Something I’ve been thinking about is perhaps going with the trend of naming all projects that are using tokenized economic games to curate information as Curation Markets, rather than the specific implementation (which is currently mostly just the usage of curved bonding).

Thus Curation Markets would mean (with full jargon parlance):

“Curation Markets” serve to reduce information asymmetry in the market through the usage of novel, skin-in-the-game signals generated through the use of tokenized cryptoeconomic incentive games.

This would include curved bonding & token-curated registries as primitives in this burgeoning area.

Currently people are referring to curation markets both as the broader idea/concept & the specific implementation (usage of curved bonding). I would like to avoid ambiguity but it might be hard to get out of the different framing/naming.

Curation Markets Gitter!

We’re up to 172 people now! Exciting stuff. Lots of discussions are happening. Recently we’ve been talking extensively about the value of macro & micro tokens in TCRs & curved bonding.

https://gitter.im/Curation-Markets/Lobby

Missed something?

These updates are getting bigger & bigger now, so I’m bound to miss something. Please send me a DM or find me on the Curation Markets Gitter if I missed something for the month of Feb. I have a feeling I did.

As it is growing, I’m wondering how to best to manage this… Maybe a curation market on the curating of curation markets news? #yodawg

Till next time!