Introducing a New Paradigm in DeFi: Autonomous Capital Coordination

$TRIB

Contribute is an innovative DeFi protocol that automates the latest advancements in DeFi lending into one simple token.

To date, the crypto space has largely been an uneven playing field .

While there is frequent talk about crypto banking the unbanked, democratising finance, and levelling the rules - unfortunately the talk hasn’t matched the reality. The current crypto reality is that founders, team members and VCs get excessive amounts of tokens for dirt cheap or even free, giving them an unfair advantage over the average joe investor.

Even worse, many times these aforementioned large holders dump their tokens on the retail public. The founders and their friends get rich while the average joe investor gets REKT.

This type of token allocation is unfair, unethical, and quite frankly stinks. Contribute was created with the intention of tipping the scale back in favour to the little guy.

With Contribute, there will be no ICO, no pre-mine, no pre-minting, and no pre-allocation of tokens. Nobody will be ever dumping tokens they received for free.

• Overview

Contribute was conceptualised with one major goal in mind: to capture value.

Game changing smart contract capabilities coupled with breakthrough DeFi advances have enabled Contribute to formulate an incentive system that pushes the boundaries of what’s capable in DeFi. Contribute automates the interest generating capabilities of DeFi into one simple token, while at the same time cutting out all of the unfortunate token schemes which have plagued many DeFi projects to date.

Contribute is a decentralised capital coordination tool that incentivises the creation of a perpetual interest-generating pool through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

Contributed funds are exchanged for TRIB tokens, that are issued through a bonding curve model. All TRIB tokens are backed by mUSD. The funds deposited in the pool are sent to a lending protocol that continuously generates interest. This interest can be claimed by any TRIB token holder as long as they sell the same dollar amount of TRIB back to the contract.

If you hold TRIB, your holdings are automatically generating interest in the lending protocol.

Through transacting with the protocol, every one contributes to it. A 10% fee is applied to anyone entering or exiting the pool (selling or buying TRIB). The fee is used to buy and burn TRIB tokens, permanently locking value in the lending protocol. This allows for a constant stream of interest to be generated forever, benefiting every TRIB token holder for years to come.

Holders of TRIB are rewarded for simply holding.

Contribute is a hack on the legacy financial system which is only possible because of the advent of Decentralised Finance (DeFi) on the Ethereum blockchain. It uses crypto economic incentives to bootstrap an automated interest-generating pool of funds.

• Tokenomics

Contribute is a decentralised capital coordination tool that incentivises the creation of a perpetual interest-generating pool through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

The tokenomics of TRIB are quite ingenious, everything in the protocol is designed from the ground up to organically increase the value of TRIB over time.

Even selling TRIB tokens adds value to the protocol, by burning some TRIB tokens and raising every holder’s price floor.

• Perpetual Interest

The funds contributed to the protocol in exchange for TRIB tokens get sent to lending protocols to perpetually generate interest.This pooled interest can be claimed by TRIB token holders.

Holders of TRIB can sell the dollar amount of TRIB that is equal to the dollar value of the interest they are claiming, back to the protocol to cash out the generated interest (to claim $500 of interest, one would have to sell $500 dollars worth of TRIB to the contract).

• Taxes

A 10% tax is applied to every purchase and sale of TRIB tokens via the smart contract. The fee is used to buy and burn TRIB tokens — thus rewarding TRIB holders. The mUSD value that backs taxed tokens is permanently generating interest in the mStable protocol.

mStable unites stablecoins and other tokenised assets into more useful and higher yielding instruments.

The tokens are permanently inaccessible after they are sent to the burn address and even though these tokens are still part of the TRIB total supply, they can no longer be redeemed back to the underlying asset used to purchase them.

This feature locks interest generating capital into the protocol FOREVER.

• Price Floor

The price floor increases with every taxation event. This is the lowest possible price the contract will exchange TRIB for mUSD. The mUSD is sent to mStable’s saving contract where it continuously generates interest. As more and more sellers and buyers transact with the protocol, the price floor perpetually moves up. As long as there is buying and selling to the contract, it is impossible for the price floor not to go up over time. While many tokens out there can (and probably will) go to zero, that will be impossible with TRIB — it will have interest bearing capital permanently locked into the protocol.

• Infinite liquidity

The Contribute protocol is an automatic market maker. This means that it will always offer liquidity to buy back TRIB tokens from the market.

It uses the bonding curve formula to calculate the price of TRIB at the time of the trade. There is no maximum supply of TRIB. They will be minted by a bonding curve contract in exchange for mUSD tokens.

Isn’t unlimited token supply bad for a store-of-value token? NO, not in the case of a bonding curve. Capped supply is irrelevant with a bonding curve. Read about bonding curves here.

The more TRIB that is minted, the more expensive they get relative to mUSD via the bonding curve. This function allows tokens to have a very special property — infinite liquidity.

$TRIB

• Investing

In order to participate, users need to swap mUSD for TRIB tokens.

After an amount of mUSD is deposited into the smart contract a 10% tax is applied and used to buy and burn TRIB tokens according to the bonding curve model. The remaining 90% is exchanged to TRIB tokens and then sent to the investor.

The total mUSD received is then sent to mStable’s saving contract and the underlying asset is offered to borrowers in different lending protocols supported by mStable.

• Interest Claiming

The Claim function allows any TRIB token holder to withdraw the accumulated interest generated by the different lending protocols.

In order to do so, the token holder must sell the dollar amount of TRIB that is equal to the dollar amount of the pooled interest that they are claiming, back to the contract. The contract will then return the interest plus the mUSD amount from the sale after applying the 10% tax.

Anyone is able to claim the accumulated interest as long as they sell the same dollar value amount of TRIB tokens back to the contract. The higher the price of TRIB tokens the less tokens are needed in order to redeem the accumulated interest.

A 10% tax is applied on every interest claimed event, permanently raising the price floor of TRIB with each transaction.

• Uncorrelated to Bitcoin and Ether

Another unique aspect of Contribute is that TRIB price is not correlated to the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum (we know most alt coins tank when BTC tanks). TRIB can only be acquired in exchange for mUSD.

Since mUSD is a basket of stable assets, broader crypto market volatility will have less of an impact on TRIB price. There will be no ETH or BTC trading pair to drop the TRIB price when Bitcoin tumbles.

Contribute will have real capital locked into the protocol. This is a huge differentiator from most crypto tokens — which are purely speculative instruments with no intrinsic value.

What has been impossible until now, it has become a reality thanks to DeFi.

• Genesis Mint Event

The Genesis Mint Event (GME) will last 72 hours and will bootstrap liquidity and allow for fair participation in the system.

Anyone wishing to participate can use mUSD to do so, and the Smart Contract will keep track of claimable TRIB tokens relative to each individual’s contribution. Getting in on the Genesis event puts you at the bottom of the bonding curve.

TRIB’s price at the GME will start at 0.000001 mUSD per TRIB, and the TRIB price will increase by the same amount as the initial price (0.000001 mUSD) for each subsequent TRIB minting.

The bonding curve rewards early adoption by giving genesis investors a generous sum of TRIB per dollar invested. As stated, this means that if you purchase TRIB at the genesis event, the only possible way it can decrease in value is from the taxes or from people selling at a loss. There is no team, market makers, or exchanges to dump on you!

Assuming the protocol works as intended, as more TRIB gets burned, the price floor will move up and could presumably lock early TRIB holders into positive positions, with no possibility of it going lower than a set price point. This could eventually be like owning BTC that couldn’t go under 8K! Pretty cool!

The formula for distribution will be the following:

INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION / TOTAL mUSD CONTRIBUTIONS * TRIB SUPPLY

• Genesis Mint Event Example

Contributors Alice, Bob and Charlie send 50K, 30K and 20K mUSD to the Genesis contract respectively. Each one of them is credited with shares of the same value as their contribution.

After the 72 hour contribution period, 100K mUSD is sent to the Contribute contract from the Genesis contract. A 10% tax will be applied (10K mUSD in this particular scenario) to the total amount before minting TRIB tokens.

The entire contribution (100K mUSD in this hypothetical scenario) is then allocated to different interest-bearing protocols to start accumulating interest that will be made available to any TRIB token holder.

Based on the initial parameters of the Bonding Curve, 100K mUSD will mint 447,213.5954 TRIB at a last price of 0.4472 mUSD per token.

After the 10% tax is applied and used to buy and burn TRIB tokens the remaining 305,792.2392 are then sent to the Genesis contract where they can be redeemed by each participant.

Using the aforementioned formula to calculate each individual’s share:

• Alice will have 152,896.1196 TRIB allocated (50,000 / 100,000 * 305,792.2392).
• Bob will have 91,737.6717 TRIB allocated (30,000 / 100,000 * 305,792.2392).
• Charlie will have 61,158.44784 TRIB allocated (20,000 / 100,000 * 305,792.2392).

All contributors to the GME would have acquired TRIB tokens at an average price of 0.3270 mUSD, even though the TRIB price is currently at 0.4472 mUSD in the contract.

At this stage, a contributor can decide to send their TRIB back to the Contribute contract for a profit and redeem them at the current contract price of 0.4472 mUSD, or they can wait for the contract to start accumulating interest, and claim some of that interest with their tokens.

The starting TRIB supply is therefore derived from the amount raised in the GME.

• Team

There is no formal team associated with Contribute.

No persons or organisation owns Contribute.
No VCs back Contribute.

Similar to Bitcoin, Contribute was created by highly skilled developers who are choosing to remain anonymous. The consensus is that the code speaks for itself and that the project can stand on its own merit without the need for someone to claim credit for creating it.

The creators of Contribute will be participating in the genesis event at the same price as everyone else. In addition, the creators contributed their own time and skills to building the protocol, with no compensation from outside parties.

This is in stark contrast to what other projects are doing in DeFi:

Compound - 4 million plus tokens allocated to stakeholders. ($656m at current market prices.)

Balancer - 35 million tokens allocated for team and stakeholders. ($350m)

Aave - 300 million tokens ($100m) allocated for team.

The list goes on and on...

• Risks

The smart contract integrates with mStable for its functionality. The risks in this protocol can carry over to Contribute.

The interest from the lending protocol is not guaranteed and it is purely a function of supply and demand. If there is no demand for the underlying assets in the lending market, the interests could be negligible or even null.

Like Bitcoin was in its infancy, Contribute is a new experiment in blockchain DeFi, and with any new experiment comes new risks. It is advisable to participate with small amounts of money. Assume the possibility of loss of all funds. Only invest what you can afford to lose. DYOR.

• In Conclusion

Contribute is an idea that was birthed out of disdain for ICOs, IEOs, exchanges, “foundations”, VCs, and influencers. It melds core principles of Bitcoin with new capabilities from Ethereum and DeFi. Contribute encapsulates many of the recent innovations in the DeFi space into one single token. It cuts out all of the unfair token allocations that enrich founders and hurt the general public. It is created by the builders of the space for the builders of the space.

While there is an abundance of takers in today’s crypto-verse: to truly move the DeFi space forward; to honestly create fair opportunities for everyone; and to carefully legitimise an increasingly exploited new technology; it’s time to stop taking and to start contributing.

For more information on Contribute visit: Tribtoken.org