Why Does Mokens Have An Increasing Mint Price?

Note: The mokens.io website can be used to design and mint mokens.

The Mokens contract was designed to help people create useful and desirable cryptocollectibles. Desirability can be attained by usefulness and scarcity. Something that is useful and scarce is desirable.

The increasing mint price is intended to make mokens scarce.

When the mint price is low, people can easily create new mokens. Over time, as people mint more and more mokens the price gets higher and higher. For some people the price to mint new mokens will get too high. It makes sense for them to buy existing mokens at lower prices that were minted when mint prices were lower.

Users can take advantage of non-fungible token exchanges such as OpenSea and RareBits to buy and sell their mokens.

Note: Users will be able to change the image, description, and tags of mokens they buy, but not the moken id or name or era. This enables people to buy a moken and then “upgrade” it.

When/if all the cheap mokens have been gobbled up from the various exchanges, scarcity has been achieved indeed.

But scarcity hurts usefulness.

If it is too hard or expensive to get mokens then they are less useful. If a game required the use of a moken to play, but it was too expensive to get any moken then people wouldn’t want to play the game. Mokens would not be useful in the game because people couldn’t/wouldn’t play.

So all mokens can’t be so scarce that people can’t get them to use.

So if the minting price is low, mint a moken. If it is high then find an exchange and buy an existing moken at a lower price.

Luckily the minting price does not increase forever. One of the main purposes of an “era” is to reduce the minting price. A moken era is sort of like a CryptoKitties generation. A moken era is a one word theme that applies to all mokens that are created in a period of time. For example, there could be a “roman” era and during that time all mokens created are roman era mokens. When that era ends another starts and then new mokens minted are of the new era.

Eras add scarcity to a set of mokens within the set of all mokens. For example a roman era could start and 35 mokens could be created during that era. That means that there will only ever be 35 roman era mokens. The era is stored with each moken in the Mokens contract and can be queried in the contract for each moken. Some mokens will be more desirable because of their era.

When a new era starts, the minting price and the mint increase can change. For example an era could start and people create mokens. The price climbs. At some point the era ends and a new era starts resulting in the minting price to drop significantly.

There are three levels of scarcity built into Mokens.

1. There is the scarcity caused by an increasing mint price, which affects all mokens.
2. There is the scarcity caused by the limited number of mokens in each era, which affects subsets of mokens.
3. And there is the scarcity caused by the enforced uniqueness of each moken which affects each moken specifically. Each moken is scarce because each one is unique and what each one is about is unique, and this is enforced by the forgery system and by the Mokens contract enforcing unique names.

These three levels of scarcity create different levels of desirableness and usefulness among mokens. This is good because different Ethereum games and systems require different levels of desirability, scarcity, and usefulness. Maybe for one game it is really useful to use a lot of really inexpensive mokens, and maybe in another system it is really nice to show off very desirable and expensive mokens.

So when does a new era start? And what will be the theme of a new era? And, how does the minting price and mint increase amount get determined?

These things are determined with the help of the moken community, the moken holders.

I plan to create Ethereum contracts and setup user interfaces that moken holders use to vote on these things.

What can you do now?

1. Join the moken discussion. Your feedback and help drives the project.
2. Mint a moken.
3. Join the email list to get updates about mokens.

Edited by Haley Summers.

Special thanks to dafky2000 from nonfungible.com who inspired me write this blog post after asking me why mokens has an increasing mint price and discussing scarcity.

Thanks to Brian Flynn, dafky2000, Haley Summers and Devin Finzer for reading drafts of this.