The Matoken
What is Matoken?
When I organised a blockchain and insurance hackathon called #breaktheblock hackathon, I issued a token called #BTBToken.
The idea was to issue ERC20 tokens which were given to only the participants (including judges, volunteers and mentors) of the event, preloaded into ether cards.
You can see the distribution of the card at tokens.breaktheblock.eth
While testing the token, I was playing with LETH mobile wallet. Ugo, the creator of LETH, sent this screenshot naming the BTBToken as “Matoken”. When I showed the screenshot to my colleagues, people started asking me “When can I get Matoken”?
Issuing Matoken as an early community reward.
In the last blog post, I talked about how some speculators started speculating tokens and ICO for BlockParty.
Even though I didn’t have immediate plan to issue any tokens, the more people opposed to it, the more I started thinking … “Why not issue Matoken?”.
I got this inspiration when I was trying out Keymesh, a decentralised address book for Ethereum accounts by Howard. When I first tried out the app, it had a series of on-boarding tasks and I received 1000 tokens when I completed it.
In this case, KeyMesh is giving away tokens just as early community rewards without specifying any of their utility.
The utility of Matoken.
So what can we do with Matoken? I do have a few use cases in mind.
The first use-case is to visualise who are core users of BlockParty. In fact, one of my CodeUp participants Andy P once wrote ScoreTracker which goes through all the past events and counts up who have attended events the most. I want to extend his idea a bit further by integrating with GenesisTokenTracker which I wrote during status.im global hackathon to visualise Status Genesis Token (aka SGT). SGT was give away to the hackathon participants for various contributions (eg: some interesting discussion on slack channel, creating PR for their GitHub issues, and so on) then they later converted to Status Network Token.
The second use case is for various voting which I am currently doing on Twitter. I am keen to find out if there are any differences if I ask same question to anonymous Twittersphere compared to token holders.
The first two use cases are more for organisation governance which I could use off the shelf solutions like Aragon but I can also come up with usages more tied into the service, such as allocating certain early bird slots to token holders or unlocking the features to create their own meetups.
Another use case is to allow participants to deposit Matoken instead of Ether. What’s the point of depositing tokens with no financial values (unless you do ICO) ? This allows active meetup members to invite someone new who have no Ether. Participants still need to own Ether to pay for gas but hopefully people in Ethereum space are generous enough to give such a small amount, or use Jorge Izquierdo’s payment token model (which I covered in the previous blog post) to sign signatures off chain and let ether holders to submit in exchange for fee (using token). Depositing Token instead of Ether is actually part of ideas behind @paulkhls ‘s “Meetup token” model. When I first heard the idea, I asked Paul “What’s the point of depositing with no financial values” but this at least allows existing meetup members to invite only people who are more likely to attend.
Baby steps
I am initially thinking about giving tokens to testnet (rinkeby) address of the participants who attended to BlockParty on both mainnet and testnet. What’s the point of issuing tokens on testnet? The first reason is that I don’t want to pay fee for air dropping to lots of people without knowing if they actually respond to it or not. The second (related) reason is that I can easily trash and reissue tokens with as many minting policy as I like as issuing test tokens have no value. The third (and the most important) reason is to make the intension clear that this does not have financial value (at least for now).
Once I verify that giving tokens to users actually adds some value, then I can later swap testnet tokens with mainnet tokens as Status.im actually did.
Some design thinking for token issuing policy for participants
The easiest way to issue tokens are to issue (or air drop) equal amount to each participant eg: 100 Matoken every time you attend an event. However, if I want to have some weighting to reward early adopters, I could do something like eg: 100 * BlockParty deposit so that people who participated before ETH value appreciated will have more tokens (NOTE: deposit price has changed 1ETH -> 0.05ETH -> 0.02ETH) to make deposit amount between £10-£20.
Not just for participants
In addition to participants, I can also reward meetup volunteers. One of the bottlenecks of organising larger events are to check in large number of participants. I recently created a feature to allow people with white listed addresses to be able to check in participants on behalf of meetup organisers. I can use tokens to incentivise volunteers to check in as many participants as possible.
I can also give Matoken to people who have contributed to various votings as my current twitter polling is not getting lots of participation.
One caveat of Matoken
As the name suggests, Matoken minting power is solely controlled by me and no guarantee that the token utility tied in to BlockParty forever (I may issue another Matoken if I end up doing another project). Also I may abandon it if I find it there are no use or trash and start from scratch if I want to change the minting policy, so please don’t take it too seriously. It’s just an experiment.
Summary
There are lots of interesting Token utility models proposed by various people but none of them haven’t really battle tested yet. Testing tokens on mainnet are hard not only designing right incentive models but also make sure that your utility tokens do not violate regulations. By issuing tokens on testnet, it will be easier to experiment various models while not committing financially. If you have more ideas for token issuing policy and token usage, please feel free to comment.
