Calibrating new horizons
Realising the value of a modular community-centric protocol
“What this could be!” is what I think to myself these days. It hasn’t always been like that. Protea began as an experiment, only as we went deeper we began to realise the value…
This article is a reflection on our journey to this point and a documentation on the vision we are following from here on out.
Protea began as an experiment, as we went deeper we realised the value…
Protea was born in late 2017. Our team and product have evolved and grown immensely since those humble experimental beginnings. All along there’s been one constant — an aspiration to create a community-centric framework that embraces communities in their diversity and uplifts them at their very core. This aspiration has now manifested into a concrete path.
🌱 Our beginnings
Protea started out as the Meetup Token for meetup communities in August 2017. The idea was simple — issue tokens at meetups as a means to educate attendees about token functionality and to achieve wider adoption.
https://etherscan.io/token/0x99eda543b6a82d2a94d1bc2e044434321352174f
Over the coming months we thought more deeply about communities, the challenges they face, and how tokenised ecosystems could resolve those. Led by Andy Tudhope, who now is an advisor for Protea, we drew up an internal manifesto that documented our aspirations for Protea.
The following are two excerpts of key ideas from that manifesto, which still impact our vision to date.
Community-owned networks
Community-owned networks incentivise meaningful and constructive contributions from otherwise disparate groups of individuals. However, building such networks at scale has always proven difficult {…} Tokens provide the opportunity to implement more scalable community-owned networks where incentives are more closely aligned, because they have their roots in a consensus protocol which removes central points of trust (and the possibility of systemic corruption) {…}
Intangibility of community value & attention
Communities flow with the attention of their members, creating a collective awareness. Thus, not only can we say that a community’s value is hard to quantify as it is comprised of various parts, it also becomes difficult to quantify the value of the attention of that community as a whole.
Back then we knew we wanted to leverage token engineering principles to empower community-owned networks. Yet this ambition was vague and vast, so we had to narrow our action plan down to get started.
A seed is planted
In particular, we focussed on the tragedy of commons problems faced by free meetup communities. Having run our own free ETH meetups for over 2 years with Linum Labs, we knew that RSVPs & no-shows, funding of meetups, community value representation and sustainable engagement were prominent challenges.
In April 2018 we decided to focus on building a tokenised skin-in-the-game solution for RSVPs & no-shows, as this seemed the least complex challenge to tackle, where we could quickly iterate on our solution. Inspired by BlockParty we built an attendance mechanism for events built around an ERC223 token which integrated with the Digital Identity uPort.
Branching out
We always kept the bigger picture in mind and since September 2018 have been thinking more holistically about communities. At CryptoLife we developed our first iteration of Bonded Communities, and began integrating our knowledge of crypto economic primitives, such as Curation Markets, into our product vision.
Towards the end of 2018 we realised that while communities are inherently unique — to flourish they all require a shared sense of trust and commitment. And we realised that tokenised skin-in-the-game mechanisms can serve as the foundation of trust and commitment in many different communities at scale.
🌅 Calibrating new horizons
Fundamentally, when we think of communities, we think of any collective that unites around a shared purpose.
Going forward, we are building a community-centric protocol that enables all kinds of communities to flourish— ones that exist and others still to be imagined — rooted in tokenised trust and commitment. We call it Protea [x]. The principle of skin-in-the-game brings utility to this protocol.
Three contracts form the backbone of Protea [x].
- The Community Factory
- The Community Bonding Curve
- The Community Commitment Manager
These provide the foundation of any community ecosystem, and interact with a potentially limitless number of utilities centered around the notion of skin-in-the-game, which in turn shape interactions within a community ecosystem.
The Protocol Layer
Community Factory
The primary function of the community factory is the deployment of new communities. The factory takes in parameters and uniquely calibrates communities based on those.
A core principle of our architecture is modularity — all contracts (both on the protocol & application layer) are versioned. Thus, in a secondary function, the factory is also able to migrate existing communities to different contract structures. This is important, as it enables early adopter communities to update their contract structure as the protocol matures.
Finally, the factory acts as an aggregate of on-chain data — which provides valuable insights into communities.
Community Bonding Curve
Token bonding curves, an important subset of Curation Markets, are a versatile crypto economic primitive.
In its simplest form, a token bonding curve acts as an automated market maker that can trade almost anything. The contract accepts collateral and issues its native token in return and vice versa. For more background information, check out this breakdown from Paul Kohlhaas
On Protea, communities will be represented by bonding curves — which provide a high-level commitment signal and act as an access portal to interactions within a community utility ecosystem.
To join any community and interact with it — you need to commit value. Value that isn’t passed on to the community, but bonded in your name within that community. At any time can you un-commit your value.
There are two main incentives for individuals to bond against a community’s curve.
- To signal support and attention towards that community
- To access a utility ecosystem unique to that community
A note on curve collateral
We firmly believe that all community curves need a stable backing. Stability and familiarity are two fundamental properties of any well designed system that seeks to create human connections. We believe that the on-boarding of potential users, both to blockchain as a whole and to Protea specifically requires a middle ground to comfort users into newer paradigms.
MakerDAO’s Dai provides the perfect fit as collateral for all community curves on Protea.
Community Commitment Manager
When you join a community, you bond value against it’s curve, which is then stored in the commitment manager in reference to you.
The commitment manager acts as bridge between the community curve and utility contracts. A bridge between the protocol and application layer. In other words, the commitment manager allows you to put value you bonded against a community on the line, as you interact with skin-in-the-game utilities that enrich your community’s ecosystem.
The Application Layer
Just as communities are diverse by nature, so can commitment be expressed in different ways. Use cases built and utilities plugged into Protea [x] will be on a wide spectrum. Though, they can be grouped into conceptual categories. While there will be others, so far we have identified two broad categories of community interactions, where tokenised skin-in-the-game mechanisms introduce real value:
- Free interactions based on the tragedy of the commons
- Paid interactions based on collective buying power
Interactions based on the tragedy of the commons
Any community interaction that does not require financial payment falls in this category. Examples include free meetup events or communities that operate on a voluntary basis. Free interactions risk falling into the tragedy of the commons trap. On Protea this is mitigated with skin-in-the-game commitment mechanisms. The exact nature of these will vary from use case to use case, but the underlying principle is:
It’s free → commit some of your value to interact with it → regain your value by acting as expected and benefit from others breach of commitment
Interactions based on collective buying power
Any community interaction that requires a financial payment and would benefit from collective buying powers falls in this category. Examples include paid meetup events, collective payment of a co-working space, a community crowdfunding campaign, gym memberships, collective purchase of a fungible product, Stokvel communities… the list goes on.
Tokenised collective buying power driven by skin-in-the-game principles lay the foundation for novel rebate and discount models that haven’t been feasible before. The underlying principle is:
It’s paid → commit value→ through collective buying power receive transparent benefits in rebates and discounts
Where to from here
We are gearing up for a mainnet beta launch of our protocol together with it’s first use case. This first use case will be an iteration of our early alpha experiments in meetup communities, we now call it Protea Gather.
At the same time, we are actively exploring a diverse set of use cases, for now within the conceptual bounds of the tragedy of the commons and collective buying powers.
Our first use case: Protea Gather
Protea Gather is a tokenised ecosystem that incentivises growth and promotes sustainable engagement in physical and online communities.
In this first version, anyone will be able to create a community that can host events (think tokenised Meetup.com). Members join a community by committing value to it’s bonding curve. Whenever members RSVP to events, they put some of their committed value on the line, once at the event they independently will be able to proof their attendance by simply scanning a QR code.
For community organisers…
- Tangibly visualise the social capital of your community and find out who is really committed, use this information to improve your community + attract more sponsorship and members
- Incentivise event participation
- Opt to fund common goals & initiatives using bonding curve taxation
For community members…
- Show tangible support to communities you really believe in
- Commit value to your community once, and interact freely
- Get on-chain proof of your community interactions
Final Thoughts
Many projects in the crypto space spend countless hours grooming and perfecting their contracts, in an attempt to deploy bullet-proof code that takes care of all eventualities. Everyone knows, once it’s deployed it can’t easily be changed. An approach like this goes against everything agile development has taught us, and makes it rather impossible to quickly iterate on market feedback. This at times where lean experiments and quick iterations are desperately needed. How else are we going to move from 1000s to millions of users?
With Protea, we are taking a different approach to the design of our architecture. While we are making sure that contracts deployed are bullet-proof, we do not worry about all eventualities. This is perfectly fine, thanks to the flexibility that comes with our modular code.
This first version of Protea Gather, for instance, is exactly that. A first version. Meetup communities will be able to test it, and based on feedback we (and soon open source contributors) can easily make amendments and publish another version. Then, communities could simply migrate their commitment manager to the new contract or add a link to the new contract.
This setup allows for a highly diverse product offering, quick product iterations, and means that Protea Gather has a real potential of providing more nuanced functions of Meetup.com, Eventbrite, TicketFly and others in addition to not yet explored tokenised incentive & benefit structures.
Our vision doesn’t stop there. We see many more utilities being build on the Protea [x].
The more utilities are built on Protea, the more valuable the overall network becomes. This is further amplified by synergies between sets of utilities. An example could be a co-working community that both processes member contributions & hosts events via Protea.
“What this could be!” is what I think to myself these days.
