Explaining the BotChain Network — Introducing BotCoin

This is part of a series on the BotChain, a network for intelligent autonomous agent management. You can read more about it starting here.

The key objective of the BotChain network is value creation. How do you bring together decentralized, independent actors to build the BotChain network that provides value to all actors in the ecosystem?

Introducing …. BotCoin.

BotCoin is a utility token based on the ERC20 standard of Ethereum. BotCoin, or BOTC, will serve as the internal cryptocurrency that brings together all participants in the ecosystem and drive them towards achieving common network goals. BotCoin will serve as the oil that powers the BotChain engine by instigating and shaping the key forces that drive the network to create value.

BotCoin Enables Network Governance

BotCoin plays various roles — as a value exchange and as an incentivization engine to drive the creation of an internal network economy. The creation of such an internal economy is arguably one of the most important outcomes for the network, and one that must be sustained over time with help of an agile governance framework.

We discussed earlier in a blog post our high level ideas for a Governance model. The key to a good Governance model is to have good rules on how to earn and spend BotCoins in the network. In addition to the Governance board we also introduce two new actors — the Token Vault, and the Curation Council — who would play key roles in the day to day execution of the rules set up by the Governance Board.

Token Vault

Token Vault is essentially a multisignature contract designed to store all BotCoins related to the incentivization of useful actions within the system. For all transactions where the network charges a fee, the balance is deposited in the appropriate section of the vault. Conversely, for all actions where work is done by members of the network, rewards are emitted from the vault. The functions that determine the frequency and rate of all fees and rewards are voted on by the Governance Board. As part of the token generation event, a predetermined allotment of BotCoins will be issued to the Token Vault.

Curation Council

If the Governance Board members are thought of as the rule makers of the system, the Council can be considered the enforcers of the provided rules. The curation council is responsible for vetting the authenticity of registrations when they are initially submitted, as well as participating in the active maintenance of the registry. They are rewarded with BotCoins for the actions that they take in curating and maintaining the network.

Governance Board

The Governance Board is best thought of as the group in the system that creates or modifies the rules for all other actors to adhere to. The Board can set parameters that specify how many Council members must vote, the period of time for the vote, and the total BotCoin reward distributed to the voters who participated. They can also take actions to upgrade the set of rules the network operates on. In this way, the Board has the ability to influence the internal mechanisms of the system, but does not directly participate in the maintenance of the network.

BotCoin Drives Network Growth

BotCoin enables creation of a robust transactional economy that rewards actors in exchange for the work that they provide for the Network.

How does this economy function?

Users interact with applications built on top of the BotChain network. These applications likely solve use cases such as Identity, Audit & Compliance that directly enrich the value for these users. Users pay to access these applications. The BotChain nodes that provide these services will in turn earn BotCoin for its usage. BotChain Core, which runs on the blockchain, provides an immutable data storage layer and in turn earns BotCoins for providing this function. In essence, BotCoin acts as a binding agent to bring all of these decentralized actors together with the right incentives and value that benefits each and every individual participant in the network.

BotCoin incentivizes all participants to contribute to the network. The ecosystem is expected to mature such that BotChain and third party service providers will provide applications and services in exchange for BotCoin.

BotCoin Incentivizes Network Adoption

Building a network is not easy. In order to build a valuable network, there needs to be specific linkage between user behavior and the resulting effects of the user behavior on the overall value of the network. Having early adopter incentives to bootstrap user activity is fundamental to the adoption of the network.

During the early phases of network building, BotChain will incentivize early bot and autonomous agent developers who register with BotChain. As described earlier, the Curation Council will vote on whether a developer can be registered in BotChain or not. Once successfully registered, the user will be rewarded with BotCoins. The Curation Council will be rewarded irrespective of the developer registration outcomes. The incentives will be set by the Governance board and executed by the Curation Council by means of the Token Vault.

The Vault Contract will be created with two separate accounts, one for the voter subsidies and one for the developer registration subsidies. For each account there will be a function that acts as a faucet for either voting or an accepted registration. Both functions will require a function that specifies the amount of Botcoin issued for each call. The function should be asymptotic, meaning that it should decline towards zero on each subsequent call.

BotCoin Empowers Network Innovation

The sustained growth of the BotChain network is dependent on creating applications that enrich and create value for end users. Building network incentives that reward creation of new experiences or addition of new ecosystem data or curation of existing data that help grow the network is critical to the long term success of the network.

Token Driven Curation

Token Driven Curation is one that of the examples that highlights the role of BotCoin as an incentive mechanism to curate the BotChain registry.

Registry Challenge

At any time a developer or an external actor has the ability to challenge the reputation of any Service, Developer, Bot, or Instance. An entity’s reputation is maintained for the duration of its existence. At any point in time a developer or a infosec company can challenge the reputation of an entity by raising an offer in BotCoins. A vote is then raised to the Curation Council, who will decide whether the entity should be delisted. If the vote successfully delists an entity the bounty is issued to the challenger.

Curator Voting

When a reputation challenge is raised to the curation council it begins a voting phase that lasts for [a period of time]. During this period, each member of the council has the ability to place a vote on whether they believe the entity to be a good or bad actor. After the duration of the voting period the side with the largest total voting power wins and collects a reward from the pot that is proportional to their initial bid.

Governance Board Veto

At any point during a reputation challenge voting period the board has the ability to veto a challenge by a two-thirds vote.

Summary

Botchain is one of the earliest enterprise focused blockchain projects. As an enterprise project that is driven by a network of members rather than any single company, we have spent a lot of time thinking through the system and making sure the right incentives are in place to encourage good behavior. We welcome feedback on the model, and are always looking for new ideas to improve the Botchain network.

If you are new to BotChain, and want to dig in, start here.