What do creators really need?
Hi, I’m Aggre from the Dev Protocol team.
This is a summary of my thoughts on the value of the Dev Protocol and the thought-provoking idea of “Retroactive Public Goods Funding” proposed by Optimism and Vitalik.
All for the sustainability of the challengers
Open assets and public goods, such as OSS, have had a huge impact on society in their short history. OSS is only about 40 years old, but it is now an integral part of every tech company. Without OSS, there wouldn’t have been all digital gadgets, and economic activity costs would have skyrocketed. However, compared to the economic impact of OSS, the work of their contributors is under-appreciated. Even the best-known projects struggle to raise enough money, and just two or three core maintainers support many. This is even for socially critical projects.
OSS has made a huge impact in its short history, but its sustainability is a challenge, and the gap between social needs and development structures is often a flashpoint. If someone can solve the sustainability of OSS, it will bring more contributors and more challengers. And more challengers will lead to more innovation.
For this to happen, many options need to be open to the challengers.
Retroactive Public Goods Funding creates a kind of predictive market by allocating some fee pools to the market making of project tokens, such as OSS, in proportions determined by an outcome measurement method called the Results Oracle. The project owner raises funds by selling their tokens. The scheme is modeled on equity finance for start-ups. OSS’s problem with equity finance schemes is that there are no intrinsic means of value capturing value in OSS. Retroactive Public Goods Funding is an excellent way to capture quasi-value by allocating fees in an ecosystem to projects in a credible way. It could be an excellent alternative to donations for OSS developers.
What we do
Dev Protocol allows supporters and developers to earn rewards by depositing (staking) DEV tokens into property tokens (project tokens) issued for each OSS. This is not a donation or an investment, but staking.
Dev Protocol will reward owners of property tokens according to their percentage of ownership. If you have 10% of the property tokens, you will get 10% of the rewards from those property tokens.
Property tokens are also ERC20 tokens and may be traded on Uniswap or used as allocations for the Retroactive Public Goods Funding. Property tokens in Dev Protocol are linked to a GitHub repository so that the Results Oracle may trust the project more easily. ( Remember, not everyone knows the specifics😌 )
Dev Protocol can provide OSS developers with a comprehensive infrastructure that includes funding and project governance and fan communities by having two tokens.
Equity isn’t salary
If you think of property tokens as equity, you can incentivize by distributing a portion of your property tokens to core contributors. You could also use property tokens for project governance. That’s a DAO!
But OSS doesn’t have salaries, so core contributors don’t earn anything just by having equity. If a contributor doesn’t fix a profit, a contributor doesn’t make money. If they sell their equity, they also lose their governance power.
Dev Protocol’s property tokens allocate staking rewards to everyone who has them, so contributors are incentivized while holding their equity and governance power.
Staking rewards are distributed as DEV tokens, but the gDEV tokens under discussion will separate Dev Protocol governance from staking rewards, allowing for a healthy balance between Dev Protocol security and incentives.
Tokens for delegator
It is possible to provide separate governance and incentives for property tokens holders as equity and delegators as contributors. This is the idea discussed as sTokens.
Staking users may want to bring revenue opportunities to the property tokens holders but leave the core governance of the project to the contributors. However, it would be unfair for them to have no say, so sTokens, which are only available to staking users, can be used to enforce governance for staking users.
This means that you can restrict property tokens to contributors, foundations, etc., still project staking users’ views into the governance. Remember, of course, that the use of property tokens is up to the owner, so it is possible to allocate property tokens to any investors.
Perks
As a use case, we are building Perks, a generic Dapps SDK that rewards staking users.
The ability to offer rewards to staking users rather than property tokens as equity works to separate governance from the fan community. It is important to note that fans and organizational management have essentially different goals.
A project can also apply it to allocating Property tokens to early staking users to help boost seed funding.
The difficulty of positive indicators
The difficulty of measuring the “performance” of OSS and public goods is a perennial challenge. It requires many variables, and the weighting of those variables varies widely depending on the nature of the project. Therefore, in Results Oracle, this is determined by a trusted council of 20–50 people.
Dev Protocol tried to measure it on-chain, but quantitative numbers are easy to hack, and the 4th DIP made it obsolete.
Nowadays, negative indicator mechanisms and community voting are discussed. A negative indicator is a verification by an oracle, DAO, or a council that a project is inactive, confiscating the staking and thus encouraging staking to active projects in development.
It is impossible to reach a 100% consensus on what is right for a positive indicators, as Google’s Page Rank reminds us that it does well and has problems. But I now think that negative indicators are a better option in a democratic measurement flow, as they are easier to create clear criteria for.
Decentralized infrastructure for creatives
Dev Protocol aims to “maximizing creativity” by providing creators with a comprehensive infrastructure that is not limited to fundraising.
Property tokens, staking, built-in incentives, governance, and Perks can be combined or used as parts. It is built on a simple specification to maintain composability, and if the Retroactive Public Goods Funding does not constrain property tokens, it will be possible to use them.
Dev Protocol builds a lacking economy for open asset creators and provides a foundation and toolset to ease the burden of running an organization. And the community loves hacker culture! Fun hacking with the exciting protocol.
