Request for Project - Social Reward Claiming #8
Description
If you're interested in the below, I highly recommend you launch the project open source, with a token, on Z Combinator. Please reach out to me on Telegram or Discord if you want to chat more. My @ on both is handsdiff. If you want to take the idea and not use Z Combinator at all, that's fine too. For what it's worth, I would consider that an optimization of first order, rather than long term, value creation and accrual.
Motivation
As a dev who wants to use tokens to incentivize network growth, or at the very least speed up the rate of failure and learning towards actually building something people want, its clear that its quite difficult to actually reward people. Most of the time you need to do the cumbersome process of reaching out to someone on the platform you're interacting on with them, wait for their response, ask for their wallet, transfer them tokens somehow, then if you want to go even further, ensure the transaction is publicized for transparency and trust that rewards for valuable contributions will continue.
There is a lot to unpack here. Is rewarding random people as you see fit an incorrect path to be going down at all? How do decision markets and futarchy improve this scenario [1]? How do you transition from using tokens to reward feedback towards using tokens to reward actual value creation?
Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana all have an extremely standardized, and ultimately extremely positive ROI, emission methods. Teams that use points programs ensure (more accurately, do their best to ensure) that their tokens are positive ROI by hiding their emissions until after they've received value from the market. Again, can we do better?
If you want to learn more about these questions and discuss, my contact on Telegram and Discord is @handsdiff.
Solution
One possible friction reduction that is worth putting out there is building an two sided interface. For developers, they can send tokens to an escrow wallet that is only claimable by a social account of their choosing (X, Discord, or Telegram). For users, they can sign in with socials to have the escrow wallet send their rewarded tokens to a wallet of their choosing, eliminating the need for connecting or doxxing wallets on the user side of the equation.
Future
Owning the UI by which users claim reward tokens, in a world where users receive micro payments in native tokens for doing a variety of tasks across multiple (open source projects), is extremely valuable. One way to describe it is the frontend for the future of work. It's hard to estimate at this stage the possibilities that emerge from this, but I'm sure anyone reading this might be able to come up with some good ideas.
For what it's worth, the percent markets team and I would use this from day one.
[1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy
[1.1] Huge shoutout to https://x.com/percentmarkets for finally implementing the research done years ago by Vitalik at the Ethereum Foundation and Dan White at Paradigm, among others. We are excited to integrate them to scale emissions towards goods and services that the market itself indicates are highly positive ROI.