Introducing Protea.io
Tokenizing Ethereum Meetup Communities
This article forms part of the documentation around our early experiments. Our vision has since expanded, and we are now working towards creating a universal, adaptable, and interoperable protocol that provides a diverse set of utility tools centred around the idea of tokenised trust + commitment. With this we aim to build the foundation for an emergence of new co-operative networks, from grassroots communities to global marketplaces. To find out more, read our latest article here.
Hello World!
We’re extremely excited to be giving you a glimpse into what we’re working on at Protea - our Minimum Viable Dapp (MVD)!
Protea is an open-source project that aims to give tangible value to Ethereum meetup communities through a token system that easily enables members to make tokenized claims of proof of attendance.
The primary design goal of our MVD is to deploy a token that has real-world utility. This article serves as an introduction to the Protea MVD.
Protea MVD - The Beginning of a Journey
If you’ve ever attended a blockchain meetup or free event, you may notice that the events can be incredibly oversubscribed. There’s a general fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) that permeates a new frontier technology as impactful as Web3. The result is FOMO, both in markets and events. If you’ve ever organised a meetup then you know that this fear and excitement can make for hard planning. Meetups are usually free, educational events organised by and for the community. Say you’re an organiser and secure an event space that can hold 50 people, requiring a limitation of the attendee numbers. The night before, you excitedly check the turnout and the event has 50 people who have confirmed via RSVP and 120 more on the waitlist. On the night, only 24 people show up. The low turnout can be attributed to a variety of factors (the weather, a hungry cryptokitty at home etc.), but fundamentally boils down to incentives. Not only does the meetup have unused spaces, but also a lot of people on the attendee list that would’ve wished to partake.
Solving the Tragedy of the Commons with Staking
There’s a tragedy of the commons play to this, in that public goods tend to be overutilized. One way to tackle this economic zero sum game is to employ skin in the game mechanisms. Taleb describes these as the balancing of incentives and disincentives. In other words, he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks.
Notably, Makoto’s BlockParty was the first Dapp which aimed to solve this tragedy of the commons with staking.
Mechanisms of the Protea MVD
The Protea MVD is designed as a simple skin in the game application for meetups. An organiser creates an event contract for her meetup and defines the amount of attendees. Community members wishing to attend stake their attendance via a meetup token. During the meetup event the organizer presents a QR code that attendees can scan with their smartphone, triggering a call to the event contract to withdraw their token. Anyone who doesn’t attend loses their stake, which is distributed to all who did attend the event. Participants can thus end up with additional stake after the meetup. In addition, organisers may opt to mint fresh tokens for members who attended to reward attendance.
The focus for our first milestone is to deploy a Dapp, which enables attendees to easily deposit and withdraw their tokens. The token dynamics and mechanism design are explored in a future post to answer the important question as to how the token attains value to enable the skin in the game incentives. We quickly discarded the idea of a traditional token sale or ICO and are exploring continuous token issuance and community curation models based on attention. The majority of tokens will be distributed freely based on existing reputation of meetup members and organizers. One thing is certain, the value should come from proof of utility, or in our case contribution.
Our MVD consists of 3 core components
The events contract deployment and withdraw functions (back-end)
The user interface and experience, managed via uPort (front-end)
The ERC223 contract (the skin in the game)
A Typical Meetup on Protea
Before the Event
- Alex organizes a local Ethereum meetup in Berlin. He creates an event contract for the next meetup, which can hold 20 spots and notifies his meetup group of this event after deploying the event contract. Over the next few hours 18 spots are reserved.
- Anna sees the event and stakes her attendance by depositing meetup tokens into the event. 19 spots are now reserved. Rudi does the same. The event is now fully booked. Inge would also love to attend the event, and places herself on the waiting list.
- Two nights prior to the meetup event, Rudi realizes he needs to take care of his friends cryptokitty on the night of the event. He unstakes his attendance. Inge sees the free spot and stakes in her attendance instead.
At the Event
- At the event, Alex, the event organizer, displays a QR code, allowing all attendees to confirm their attendance in the event contract. 18 out of the 20 who RSVP’d actually came to the event, Anna and Inge are part of those. They receive proof of attendance by scanning the QR code with their uPort mobile app.
- Once the event has concluded, Alex marks the event as complete. The event contract then distributes all locked tokens to attendees, this includes the unclaimed tokens of the 2 who did not make it. Anna and Inge together with the other 16 who also attended leave the event with an additional 10% of tokens each.
Final Thoughts
With this MVD it is our primary design goal to deploy a token that actually gets used and that has some real-world utility.
We’ll soon be releasing our MVD alpha, with many Ethereum meetup communities already signed up. Get in touch to find out how your community can also be part of this journey.
For us, this MVD is just the beginning. A successful implementation of a decentralised solution for this use case would give us a stable base from where we could explore potential solutions for more complex issues in the ecosystem, with the ultimate vision of providing communities with a tangible representation of their value that will help them drive and grow their ecosystem.
We’d love for you to join our journey!
