Curation Clubs: Tokenizing & Incentivizing Public Funding With Curation Markets.
Amongst the whole tokenomics space, there’s a lot interesting intersections to tackle. I’ve personally started off and subsequently went down the rabbit hole by trying to help creators earn a living. Niran Babalola, a colleague, however have mainly tried to build incentive systems that aims to incentivize and foster public goods funding. He was worked on Benefactory and has explored various permutations of rethinking organisations that are built towards fostering the public good. It’s an important area of thinking that could not only help to kickstart a new era of cross-jurisdictional, socially driven organisations, but also be the key in avoiding a tragedy of the commons of funding and maintaining public networks (such as Ethereum itself).
He recently shared a new iteration of an idea with me involving clubs and it triggered a few thoughts. I want to propose a similar concept derived and inspired heavily from it.
I’m mashing it together and calling these Curation Clubs.
This system would allow participants to
- effectively donate to public funding more easily (through decreasing cost of choice), and
- also earn from incentivizing people to do so (through earning from curating these flows of money effectively).
A quick example before delving into details:
I could pay into an Ethereum Curation Club, say $10, upon which this curation club would automatically split the funds accordingly to, say: $6 to the Foundation, $2 to Truffle, $1 to MyEtherWallet and the curation club earning $1. Using the underlying curation market, these participants were continuously curated using the staked tokens minted from it.
Curation Markets, broadly, are tokenized markets that attempt to curate certain information within them using their tokens to stake towards specific information. These tokens are created by the market itself (with no 3rd party involved). ETH is deposited into a communal deposit, allowing new participants to buy in and existing token holders to leave by selling to the curation market. More details can be found here, including a whitepaper and early code.
The goal of this specific curation market is thus to take in a payment and effectively split/branch and forward the funds onwards that foster the agreed goals of this curation club. Like a normal curation market, effective curation leads to the curators earning from it. The minted tokens can be burned in the future to take a portion of its communal deposit. Above and beyond the normal curation market, it also incentivizes this market to find participants to let money flow through it, because it can charge a fee for its curation abilities. This fee goes then directly into the communal deposit.
In other words: you are broadly creating a system that incentivizes and rewards the curation of cashflow towards a shared goal.
This is primarily useful in scenarios where it is not necessarily obvious where funds should be directed. For example, if I want to spend towards fostering education above and beyond my taxpayer money (which is arguably NOT being well curated in South Africa), I can pay into a “Education in South Africa” curation club that effectively helps to send the funds to organisations that need it.
Because curation clubs earn from curating cashflow, it is also then beneficial for multiple curation clubs to spawn and compete against each other. This thus creates a market for curation of public funding, hopefully leading to very effective allocation of resources.
These are some early thoughts, inspired by Niran. I would love to hear more. Perhaps there are holes in our thinking.
Should the club earn from the curation? Perhaps it feels more altruistic if they do not?
Can this be re-used? Feel free to share ideas!
Thanks Niel de la Rouviere & Niran Babalola for feedback.