Use cases for the Aragon crowdfunding app (Apiary)

Me and the team are thinking for a long time already about making ICOs more useful to the community. While we were thinking about the Vitalik proposed DAICO model and Bancor’s bonding curve, Luke Duncan from Aragon drafted the vision on crowdfunding app / curation market called Apiary. It’s a more seamless combination of those tools and we’re looking to building an Aragon app for that. It will add the next functionality to the initial Aragon entity:

• Founders ability to crowdsale organization tokens, creating a liquidity pool
• Investors ability to control the “tap”, amount of funds taken on regular basis from liquidity pool for org operations
• Investors ability to buy/sell org tokens through the liquidity pool (limited by the bonding curve)
• Investors ability to get access to the audit, voting and special privileges
• Investors ability to liquidate the token pool, if organisation closes

So basically it’s an investor-friendly ICO/Crowdfunding that enables more responsible use of funds. What’s also important, tokens are bought for their immediate (not some future) utility. It may vary case by case, but can be transparently shown to the user by describing the specific permissions granted to token holders.

This article is a request for comment and suggestions on the potential uses cases for such app.

Impact investment funds (like aragon nest)

This is the case where we’d like to do an efficient distribution of several funds and investors to a distributed network. If it’s impractical to deal with a analog registered company and the funds are allocated for a long term, we need a mechanism for keeping the initiatives live and sustainable. So somebody can initialise a purpose-driven initiative (e.g. develop open-source software or maintain the Ethereum documentation) and open funds allocation for the cause.

The initiator in such case may be not the person in charge or most responsible — his role is to describe the need and allow the crowdfunding. As the funds start to concentrate on such DAO account it can attract the executors to step in and do the work.

Creators organization (like patreon)

Patreon is a highly successful service for supporting the creators with $12M monthly payouts for over 100k or creators. With that Patreon has some issues with censorship and high pledge fees. Not saying that it’s easily solved, though there’s a place for similar services, like Stake Tree. So a potential organization with more than 1 creator can do a responsible crowdfunding. It can be a podcast, youtube show, book, research etc.

Communities organizations (e.g. game communities)

Finally the existent communities can understand a need for some of the work needed, e.g. game communities. There could be a request for a community management, pr & growth or something like championship organization.

So the initiator can open up a DAO for maintaining the community and start crowdfunding. And if in any case the leaders are left the work is undertaken by newcomers or it’s liquidated.

If you’re somehow connected to any of those cases — pls share your feedback. Do you see it as a viable idea, which problems are missed or misunderstood?

Do you see it’s value in other use cases? Let me know.

PS: Thanks to Luke Duncan for ideas and comments on the article.

PPS: pictures are taken from the Aragon concepts for providing a better idea ho it can look like.