Work Hard Finance: Liquid Stock Options for the Web 3 Contributor

Fair Work > Fair Launch. Work is the fairest of them all.

Cutshamache Pennacook

Published in

Work Hard Finance

5 min readMay 11, 2021

All work and no play makes Jack (and his family) degenerate

What is Work Hard Finance?

Work Hard Finance (WHF) empowers contributors with the choice to be compensated now, in stablecoins, or in the future via liquid stock options. We introduce a novel “Commit Mining” framework for organizations to fairly compensate its contributors by tokenizing any revenue stream. It’s a collision of recent innovations in programmable money, open source development, and decentralized governance to reimagine an alternate future of work. Built by Degens, it features:

A Job Board for keeping track of and rewarding proposals
A Stable Reserve which compensates work with stablecoins
A fair compensation mechanism that allows holders to control the extent to which they align themselves with the vision of the project by giving long-term holders access to pools and voting rights
A no-code platform for each Web 3 community to tailor their own liquidity mining, pools, and applications

The Grand Vision explained by yours truly 🐱

Work Hard Finance, at its core, has a stablecoin $COMMIT and a liquid stock option token $VISION. The core revenue streams for WHF are:

Job Posters post jobs on the Job Board and compensate contributors using $COMMIT
(TBA) Some portion of NFTs issued and sold by the community
(TBA) Any organization can fork our Commit Mining Framework (no programming experience required) and share its emission with WHF

80% of the revenue is swapped for $DAI or any stablecoin and is stored in a Stable Reserve in order to pay contributors. The other 20% is allocated to Workers ($VISION holders who stake & lock in the Dividend Pool) who gain exposure to 20% of all revenue streams of WHF.

Work Hard presents contributors who hold $COMMIT with two choices:

Immediately redeem $COMMIT for stablecoins
Burn-to-stake $COMMIT—contributor presents a Proof-of-Burn to liquidity mine newly emitted $VISION

Contributors have the autonomy to select the more profitable choice depending on market conditions and the amount of insight she may have into a project. Getting compensated for your wage right away may be the safest bet on some occasions. For some who are less risk averse, taking a chance to believe in the project’s long-term vision may be the way forward.

$VISION holders can:

Provide liquidity at the Vision Mining Pool and liquidity mine $VISION
Stake & lock $VISON to get $RIGHT ($RIGHT is voting escrow $VISION)

$RIGHT tokens are non-transferable, gives voting rights in the Workers’ Union, and claim rewards from the Dividend Pool.

We have built Work Hard Finance to be a minimally viable fair compensation experiment where we can harness the power of creative work to bring about positive change by rewarding labor over investments. $COMMIT is easiest to earn, easier to buy, and hard to farm. $VISION, on the other hand, can be bought off market but cannot be converted back to $COMMIT.

What happens at launch?

Work Hard allocates 4.76% of the emission supply to the Founding Team to provide early liquidity for $VISION and/or stake & lock to get $RIGHTs. Tokens are distributed in the spirit of fair work to all other participants in the Work Hard economy — contributors, token holders, partner DAOs, callers — who can receive compensation that’s equal to or higher than the market price.

We are working closely with one organization which will use Work Hard Finance within a month of launch. We aim to strategically deploy our Work Boosters to various partner DAOs as distributing resources to contributors is a problem all DAOs face and we believe WHF can assist in that task.

All updates to Work Hard happen entirely on-chain through community voting ensured by a time-lock governance contract. The principles of progressive decentralization apply here. At launch, the governance is owned by the Developer Multisig and the Workers’ Union. 4 weeks after launch the Developer Multisig will relinquish its control over the execution of proposals. From that point onwards, the Workers’ Union voting contract and the community exercises sole ownership and control over Work Hard Finance.

The only way to get $COMMIT at launch is by working on proposals or buying $COMMIT at a minimum of 2x the market price this will ensure that the price of $COMMIT stays within the $1-$2 range.

$VISION will have zero value at launch. After deployment, it’s up to $COMMIT and $VISION holders to determine its value and future development.

What’s the future of Work Hard Finance?

To the community of $COMMIT and $VISION holders, the future belongs in your hands. Our $VISION only holds as much value as the work done through Work Hard Finance. Whatever value these tokens accrues is entirely dependent on the coordination of the community that takes control. $VISION holders can determine and update the functionality of Work Hard, including the emission rate, distribution weight, job approval, grant approval, inflation, incentive design, Treasury, and more. While the Treasury starts small, any future capital allocation can ultimately be controlled by $VISION holders, as can any yield it may generate. An effective Treasury, properly governed by the $VISION holders, adds robustness and security to Work Hard Finance.

Who built this?

0xMayflower, Jean Calvin, zzorum, Cutshamache Pennacook and their labor of ️❤️ made Work Hard possible. Work Hard is a codified manifestation of doubts we hold about shareholder capitalism and an experiment to usher in a brighter post-capitalism world.