As 2019 begins, I wanted to pen some thoughts about the past year — how far we’ve come, where we are now, and where we have yet to go. This year, in a word, has been transformative. I want to break down what I think the Cent team has learned internally and how that affects all of you.
We started the year having recently launched the first version of our beta, and being new to the “having a launched app out in the wild” club. People were beginning to use bountying, but we were still posting bounties internally to illustrate all the ways bounties could be used and to stimulate activity. The seeds of a community were beginning to form, but things weren’t yet taking off to the degree we wanted them to — much was missing. We had very few features at that point, and were more accurately at an alpha stage.
What Has Stayed Constant
Nevertheless, the vision of what we were doing was beginning to capture people’s imagination. We started to get an influx of messages from people around the world that shared the passion of what we were doing, and who wanted to be involved. In the beginning of January, we closed our first round of funding, enabling us to begin to grow a small team and dedicate our time exclusively to Cent’s development.
The vision we’ve had from the beginning continues to guide us today. Much of what we now see as employment is quickly being replaced by machines and code. Rather than technological unemployment being something to fear, we see it as something to be celebrated. The worst types of human labor — mindless sequences of predetermined steps — are no longer needed to be performed by humans. This type of repetitive work is an insult the limitless creative potential contained inside ourselves, and being freed from that type of labor is a technological and cultural achievement. Most jobs aren’t jobs, they’re forms of slavery. It’s our duty as the next generation to look honestly at the world and its flaws, and to fix what we can.
Our central thesis as a company is that people do not need jobs, but they do need sources of income. The solution to growing unemployment is not the creation of new places of employment, but the creation of new economic substructures that give people access to funnels of income. Rather than some form of universal basic income being given to everyone regardless of what they do, we see income ideally being correlated with some measure of value creation.
This correlation between value created and value received is important because psychological incentives emerge for people to create valuable things, which benefits everyone. It benefits the creator of the things, because creating unique value feels good, and gives life meaning. It benefits the community because they can utilize the valuable things. In(cent)ives are Cent’s fundamental design leverage point, and are uniquely placed throughout the app to encourage behaviors that simultaneously benefit the individual and the collective.
What We Accomplished
Over the first few months of 2018, we saw our usage steadily increase, and we added features that everyone felt were obviously needed. Notably, we updated our sorting UX to give users pairs of answers to sort, rather than a +3/-3 rating system. This seemed to increase the sorting and the quality of the data, and this is something we continue to iterate on today.
Tipping
We then added the simple ability to tip responses directly that you felt deserved more than they received in the bounty, and launched a search functionality to more easily browse the quickly growing database of past posts.
Variable Recipients
Visually, we updated our brand and added two modes that I now use basically at all times:
(1) Grid Mode, which allows you view all posts on Cent in a Pinterest-inspired, visually-forward layout.
(2) Moon Mode, which gives Cent a darker, more subtle aesthetic. We’ve always prioritized a beautiful, seamless, and emotionally pleasant UX. Based on the constant feedback we get, many of you appreciate that focus.
Filters
After these upgrades, people were able to see many more posts at one time, so we added visual filters by time and type. These have been a user favorite in the UX and greatly ease the browsing experience.
State Channels / Cent Wallet
Soon after this, we realized that the barrier of needing to pay in order to post was, for many, an insurmountable one. We needed to shift from requiring bounties on posts, to making the post itself be able to earn money for the poster. But we didn’t want to initiate a standard tipping system, or bring in potentially-network-destroying advertising incentives.
But before we could launch our content monetization system, we needed a way to make the transactions occurring on the network to have less dependency on interating with the main Ethereum blockchain. We created and launched a user loadable Cent Wallet, which allowed users to deposit to an address, and have their gains and withdrawals come from a state channel enabled faster and more seamless UX. We have yet to find a state-channel implementation that is easier to use than the Cent Wallet.
Seeding & Posting
With our state channel implementation in place, we could now launch our answer to content monetization — seeding. Seeding allows people to give money to content, and have a portion of the money they give go to all the people who gave money to that same content before them. This gives people a financial incentive to support content they thought was valuable, and that they believe other people will also find valuable. It simultaneously plays on two psychological tendencies — altruism (giving to support others) and selfishness (giving to support oneself).
We hypothesized that launching seeding, and thereby making bounties optional, would result in fewer bounties being posted. That seemed obvious to us, but we were completely wrong. In fact, after launching seeding, the reverse happened — bounties increased by 98%!
Why would people suddenly start offering money for responses when they suddenly didn’t have to? Maybe because they could begin earning money for posts, so offering a small bounty seemed like less of a giveaway, and more of an investment. My theory, however, is that the ability to post increased the overall number of posts on Cent substantially, and bountying suddenly became a way to make your post rise in relative importance over the others. It became an organic self-promoting tool for your post or request, and with that contextual incentive, its use really began to take off.
Posting and seeding fundamentally took Cent to the next level, with usage increasing >100% month over month, and new features required for new levels of scale becoming more and more necessary.
#Channels
We next added a “#channel” system where users could tag their posts with a specific channel that they felt most accurately captured its essence. Channels are now regularly used, and over time will become something like Cent’s subreddits — microcommunities financially incentivized to provide value to each other on particular topics.
Colors
To add a little more visual uniqueness, we then launched User Colors, which allowed each user to have a unique color, rather than a profile picture. This emerged from my personal aesthetic tendencies of wanting each user to express their individuality while also being part of a larger spectrum. Every user’s angle of view is an angle of light.
Where we are now
Fast forward to the end of 2018, and we now have a team of six, some full-time, some part-time. The Cent community has ballooned to nearly 10,000 Centians, and we are on pace to become the most (actually-used) dapp in the world next year. We are now raising our second round of financing, and will hopefully have some exciting news to share soon.
Where we’re going
This year, there will be much coming. Early in the year, we will be releasing a handful of obvious features that we want to do in our own way. Things like following users and channels, and being able to support creators in some sort of recurrent, Patreon-like way. We will be partnering with influencers and bigger-name cultural creators to bring more awareness to what Cent is doing. Our goal is to grow out of the obscurity of the crypto world and become more of a mainstream app. We are beginning to make moves on iOS and Android apps, and will be hiring.
PS: I’ve also started working on a writing side-project that fleshes out the Cent vision of the future world in a more thorough way. It’s becoming some sort of small book with the running title “The End of Employment”. I’ll keep you all updated.
