In certain ways, we live in a golden age of science. We have never known so much, and the speed of discovery just seems to be increasing. It is helpful, however, to step back sometimes and re-examine the forest for the trees. It is my observation that there are several major issues that need to be addressed.

The first is that science has become a huge self-perpetuating echo chamber, reinforced by scientific cliques and the fact that big industry (pharma, food, chemical, etc) heavily influence what studies are published and what subjects are funded. Studies that focus on complex systems (nutrition, the relationships between microbiomes and ecosystem health, and the role of biodiversity in food production to name just three) are actively suppressed in favor of reductionist studies that offer the hope of discovering a individual chemicals that might be patented and marketed for a profit. The result is that we end up with mono-crop farms that require tons of chemicals that end up poisoning our oceans and confused consumers who buy billions of dollars worth of useless vitamins when just eating a healthy diet can give them the health benefits they so desperately seek.

The other issue is that scientific papers are written in ways that the average person cannot hope to understand. They must be translated, often by journalists who don’t understand the subject matter as well as the scientists, and often by corporations who cherry pick stats to benefit their bottom lines.

What PubSci DAO would be is an organization that incentivizes scientific studies which benefit the public good, written in ways that the average human can understand.

To succeed, it would require three things:

Studies that meet the approval of the scientific community

Studies that regular people can understand

Money

Money will be generated by regular consumers who are interested in public goods science and want to buy a membership. Based on the millions of books sold like How Not to Die and Anti-Cancer, and all of the money that pours into self-help nutrition magazines and the like, there are obviously plenty of people who are eager to pay for help sifting through the mountains of contradictory evidence pointing them in all different directions. Having a science-based journal that hashes these points out, away from the influence of big corporations, will be a breath of fresh air to many people.

We will start out with a group of peer reviewers who have already published and reviewed in the top science journals and who have an interest in this kind of science. These scientists exist (Colin Campbell comes to mind). These scientists can expand their pool of peer reviewers to include new scientists by a ⅔ vote. Peer reviewers typically don’t get paid, but this is a bridge we could cross later if necessary.

Any scientist may submit a study to be considered by PubSci DAO for publishing. DAO members will each receive monthly tokens to dole out coordinape-style based on the studies they decide are the most impactful and understandable. Membership funds will be doled out to the authors who wrote the studies based on these token allocations by members. Any article which receives the approval of 3 peer reviewers on the PubSci panel will have their compensation boosted quadratically. In this way, a writer is greatly rewarded for A) writing a study that average readers can understand, B) conducting the study in a scientifically-sound manner, and C) writing a study that the public believes it can benefit from.

As someone who, due to a close family member with cancer, has read mountains of scientific studies and books and talked to leading scientists and integrative oncologists, I know these are major problems that need addressing. PubSci DAO is one solution that I think could make a dent.

In this world, communities exist on a continuum between those forced on us and those we opt into. Forced communities (like the town you were raised in) are beneficial in that they teach us how to interact with people we may not agree with, but they can also be stifling.

To find communities of like-minded people, we used to have to move to cities, but now the internet has allowed us access to so many more people. We can search for subreddits that interest us and meet like-minded people there. We can do something similar by following the people we like on Twitter and interacting with those the algorithm presents to us.

However, I believe there is a more straight-forward, a more intentional way to find people like us. We aren’t monolithic in our interests. Meeting people who are into aerial arts is great, but how should I go about meeting people who are into aerial arts AND crypto AND permaculture AND boogie woogie? How do I meet People Like Me?

Two things I’ve learned from my time in crypto are:

people with disparate interests like mine do actually exist, and

working on a project brings people together much quicker than chatting on Twitter does.

My proposal is actually very simple. It’s a mix between Reddit, Discord, a dating website, and DAOs.

It is to make a website where people can do two things:

create a DAO (based around a variety of interests).

Search for a DAO (based on a variety of interests).

Here are two examples for illustration.

Let’s say I am looking for a group of Ethereum fanatics in my area that are interested in throwing a party for the Merge (true story). I would go to the website, select to “Start a DAO”, and input “North Carolina,” “South Carolina,” “Ethereum,” and “parties” in the “interests” list. Then I’ll be guided as to how to start a Colony and a discord server, and I’ll decide how big of a membership fee (if any) is required to join (these fees will become the DAO treasury.) As people join, we’ll start making plans for the Merge party and moving funds appropriately. Before we know it, we are a complete and functioning DAO that is set to throw more parties as people think them up.

A more complex example would be someone who starts a DAO built around the following interests: nutrition, bartending, jaw harp music, farming, and bats. A user looking for a group to join might be interested in 4 of these things and therefore find this DAO based on their inputs on the People Like Me Website. This DAO may offer free membership but have tiered levels based on amount contributed. The members may decide to use their money to meet IRL and who knows, they may decide to buy some land in the mountains to throw craft cocktail parties in a bat cave to the thrumming sound of the jaw harp.

The People Like Me website itself would not need to be run as a DAO, but it could. It should be pretty straightforward and easy to maintain. It is simply an editable and searchable database of people’s interests and DAOs that exist. Colony could even do this. It could be a free service but charges for technical help on Colony and Discord formation, or it could sell prominent placement for certain DAOs that want to grow quickly. Or it could charge $20 to list each new DAO. The important point is that once a DAO is formed, it is no longer formally tied to People Like Me. PLM just facilitates all of this. I’ve lived my life having separate groups of friends based on the different interests I have. With the world at our fingertips, it’s time we really meet people like us and use these relationships to change that world in our own small (or large) ways.

(Light Paper)

The university system in the United States is screwed. The costs are astronomical, and depending on your choice of career, your education may not prepare you for it at all, meaning employers are paying large amounts for on-the-job training. Every generation is saddled with more student debt than the last, and at some point this system will have to break. The internet gave us a novel option — the online degree. But the average ONLINE college degree still costs over $40,000 and also doesn’t offer that “on-campus experience,” which many will say, myself included, is just as important as the classroom education.

What if we turn the internet’s solution on its head? What if we could use Web3 tooling to offer the in-real-life college experience and let education be an emergent property of that environment?

I propose starting CollegeDAO for the purpose of buying and running a boarding house for students. These students can choose whatever education they want, whether that’s enrolling in community college courses, paying for an online degree, using Khan Academy or Crypto Zombies, or working directly on projects with recruiters, which I believe will flock to us in droves. This concept will initially probably appeal to Web3 students and recruiters, because never has there been an industry for which diplomas matter so little and community matters so much. But as the concept begins proving itself, the hope is to be a home for students with many kinds of career paths (so long as those paths don’t require use of expensive laboratories or close relationships with mentors).

We won’t hold a monopoly over our students’ lives and educational content like most universities do. “We” will be the students. We could charge a company like Polygon to come to campus and assemble a team of students to work on a project. The students receive an amazing experience/education, and Polygon gets some cheap help and to try out some potential candidates they may want to hire (and they won’t need to wait until graduation because neither we nor they care about diplomas.) Imagine a study hall where you have different teams each working together on a project. Some are working with established groups like Polygon or Aave, and others are working on unique projects and ideas, grown organically from their collaboration at CollegeDAO — what will essentially be a four-year hackathon for everyone involved.

To raise the initial funds to buy the building, we will sell x NFTs where x = the number of beds we will have. Owning an NFT and paying the semi-annual room-and-board fees (which start increasing after a student’s 5th year to encourage turnover) are the two requirements for becoming a resident. Since CollegeDAO will thrive or die along with the reputation of its students, there need to be long-term incentives to make sure serious students are attracted and retained. One such will be a future income for each student based on certain parameters. When Polygon paid in the previous paragraph for access to our students (companies currently spend $6,000 on college recruitment per new hire), a portion of that money will go to past students based on 3 criteria: 1) Time spent as a resident; 2) Their performance while at the school; and (3) THE PERFORMANCE OF THEIR SUCCESSOR [(2) and (3) being based on anonymous Coordinape-style voting among students each semester]. Since we are a DAO, a centralized applications committee would be tricky, so each “student” will be responsible for selecting who they want to sell their NFT to, knowing that selling it at a discount to a high-quality student may greatly increase their future income.

Running the DAO (including maintaining the building) will fall to DAO members. Colony will be used for this. I won’t rehash here how a Colony would handle HVAC repair bounties and how decisions will become more efficient over time as certain people settle into their roles and gain reputation, but I will note that native tokens earned by a student in the course of helping maintain the DAO will offset room-and-board fees for their following semester at a 1 token = $1 rate. This way, if it is already your last semester, there’s no incentive for you to help, so the batons of responsibility can be passed to the next leaders while the previous leaders are still around for 6 months to answer questions.

As far as the students are concerned, the concept should sell itself. It’s a school completely run by its students. As far as the companies are concerned, if we can foster an environment for talent to thrive, we’ll start growing in renown. This renown (and a track record of safety) is what will bring parents onboard.

I have a 4 year old and I’d rather buy him a home than pay for a university degree that only half-serves him. I personally bought two expensive degrees and didn’t use either one of them. I was in debt for years. It’s time to get out of this trap, and doing it as a DAO seems more efficient, more fun, and more preparative. Let’s take back control of our education.

The challenge is structuring this so that investors are paid back and the project isn’t taken advantage of by people who just want to take the money and run. If the structure of the organization is decentralized/nonhierarchical, and if the investments/loans are not collateralized, what incentives can we put in place to ensure that investors are made whole?

This paper attempts to answer this question.

Investors:

Investors will contribute funds in the form of stablecoins into the “LP treasury” and receive an equivalent number of LP tokens in return. For example, 1 dai deposited in the LP treasury results in 1 LP token deposited into the contributor’s wallet. At any time, an investor may exchange their LP tokens back for stablecoins, effectively exiting their position. Notably, this can only happen if there are enough stablecoins currently in the treasury to cover the exit request. If there are not enough (because they are being loaned to Ukrainian farmers), investor exit requests will enter a queue and be settled in order of when the requests were made.

Farmers will pay a flat yearly interest rate of 7% on the loans they receive from the DAO. To break this 7% down; 4% will go into the LP Treasury, 2% will go to “U token” holders, and 1% will go to the DAO treasury. Of the 4% that goes to the LP Treasury, 75% of that will trigger new LP tokens to be issued to investors. The remaining 25% will just build up the LP treasury over time so that exiting an LP position doesn’t require waiting as long in the queue (this cushion also provides extra insurance against delinquent loans).

As an example, let’s assume an investor deposits 100 dai into the LP treasury. She receives 100 LP tokens in return as “I-owe-you’s.” She can turn around and immediately exchange the LP tokens for her 100 dai, but if there is a queue she will be put at the back of the line and have to wait until there is enough money in the LP treasury (which will come from both new investors and payments from farmers) to cover all of the exit requests that came before hers. (Farmers waiting on loans will have their own queue that is active only when there is no investor exit queue. In other words, investors get first dibs when requesting their money back.)

When our investor enters the queue to exit her position, her daily LP rewards will still accrue but at 1/2 the rate. This is to discourage a scenario in which investors always immediately enter the withdrawal queue after depositing, only to reinvest when they receive their money (in order to have constant quick access to their funds), which is a scenario that would lead to farmers rarely getting loans (as their requests only trigger when there are no investors in the withdrawal queue). The goal is to have investors put money into the pot and leave it there until they actually want to exit the project.

To continue…if she doesn’t immediately withdraw her funds, she will automatically begin earning interest payments in the form of LP tokens. If there are 10,000 LP tokens in total at a given time, issued to all investors, her share of 100 LP tokens will equal 1% of the pool. If the farmers make $300 worth of payments the next day, and $5 of these happen to be interest payments (meaning $295 is paying down initial principal), the investor will receive a pro rata share of 3/7 of those interest payments. Since interest payments were $5, $5 * 3. / 7 = 2.143 LP tokens will be issued to investors. Since our investor holds 1% of outstanding LP tokens, she receives 0.02143 LP tokens (with a corresponding value of $0.02143).

To complete the picture, even though these won’t be discussed until later in the paper, here is the breakdown of what happens to the full $300 in farmer payments for the day:

$295 in original principal payments goes into the LP treasury

4/7 of the interest payments ($2.857) also goes into the LP Treasury

1/7 of the interest payments ($0.714) goes into the DAO Treasury

2/7 of the interest payments ($1.429) goes to clusters holding a “U” token (something a cluster gets when every farmer in his cluster has been paid off). This will accrue in a 12/22 multisig belonging to all 22 members of the cluster. In other words, the cluster of farmers, being members of the same community, will get together and vote on how to use this money to benefit themselves or the community.

And as mentioned before, LP tokens are generated for 3/7 of the interest payments (2.143 LP tokens worth $2.143), which are distributed automatically to current LP token holders based on the number of LP tokens they currently hold in their wallets compared to the total LP tokens outstanding.

As an incentive to kickstart the project, investors who contribute at least $100 to the protocol will receive an NFT. We could do tiers where $1,000 gets a different type and $10,000 is the most elite. Since the project is supporting a good cause, these could be coveted and really get things rolling.

The loan side of things:

Since there is no centralized entity, there is no viable way to store kyc information long term (though we may rely on limited kyc info that we already have access to in order to onboard the first farmers, as discussed later). As a decentralized DAO with fluid membership, there is no clean way to hire an HR department charged with securing this information. Further, it is our hope that our model can be used in the future to help other groups of people in other countries, as needs arise. Creating a system that does not rely on kyc requirements will allow us to respond much more quickly to crises.

Without kyc, it follows that we will have no way to secure collateral for these loans with any real-world assets. In defi, loans are collateralized by cryptocurrency, but the point of this project is to help farmers who may not have money to buy crypto. (If they owned crypto, they could just use a defi lending platform like Aave and wouldn’t need a project like ours.)

Further, in traditional finance, loans are backed by a legal system that helps ensure they are repaid. Without kyc or any of the long, complicated contracts we hope to avoid in the interest of speed and corruption resistance, we will not have access to this legal safety net either.

So we must have another way to identify loan recipients and make sure they are incentivized to uphold the terms of the loan.

We propose two mechanisms to achieve this, which combine monetary incentive and, to put it bluntly, peer pressure from neighbors.

Mechanism #1:

In order to secure a loan in the very beginning, farmers will need to create a profile on the platform, which will operate much like a social media platform. The profile will be connected to a decentralized ID from something like Proof of Humanity or BrightID, which will help ensure that people aren’t applying for multiple loans.

Each farmer will be required to create a video of themselves explaining what they intend to buy with the loan and where it will go. Loans will only be issued for purposes that can be reasonably verified. For example, it is easy to see a video of a location without a structure, and then a video two months later of the same place with one (more on this later).

The video will also tie them to a particular “Community,” or a preset geographic region roughly 500 km2 (the size of a town and surrounding area). We can use geolocation services for this, but we need a way to obfuscate it so that the platform reveals what Community someone lives in without revealing their exact location (for privacy purposes). We will also need to make sure that people live sufficiently far from each other (>1km) so that multiple members of the same family don’t belong to the same cluster.

Finally, they will need to connect with a cluster of 20 other farmers from the same community. This cluster will act as a unit in multiple ways and members will be incentivized to encourage and help each other pay back their loans.

Any farmer can start a cluster. In order for another farmer to join the cluster, they must request entrance and one farmer in the cluster must approve the request. Then there will be a 7-day period in which any other cluster member can deny entry to the new member. Once the seven days passes and the new farmer joins, they can opt to exit the cluster at any time as long as they haven’t already received funding. Alternatively, a cluster can kick someone out by majority vote as long as that person has not yet received funding.

Once a full cluster is formed with 21 farmers, the cluster’s status will change from “forming” to “pending” and is now considered a Level 1 cluster. Only one Level 1 cluster may be active in any Community at any given time. When there is enough money in the LP Treasury to justify activating a new cluster ({# of unfunded loans in active clusters} / 4), the DAO can select a new cluster to become “active,” meaning their farmers can start requesting loans. This will be done by vote of everyone in the DAO. Votes will be weighted based on reputation (more on reputation later) and will last for 3 days. No quorum is needed, and the cluster with the most votes by the end of the week wins. Winners will probably be the clusters who market themselves the best with videos and photos, provide the most evidence that they are all in the same community (group photo maybe?) and not members of the same family, and convince investors that they are trustworthy and will pay down their loans.

Spinning up a profile will be permissionless, but we do have a small ace in the hole to kick start the process. Backcountrydrifer (BCD) already has kyc information (including credit history) on many Ukrainian farmers. BCD will contact those farmers with high credit scores and encourage them to set up profiles in the beginning. This will start us down a less risky pathway initially. BCD will not share this information with anyone else in the dao.

To continue, the order in which farmers get loans will be selected at random by the system. Each loan will be for $5,000. Only one farmer will get a loan at first. In order for a second farmer to get a loan, three things must take place:

The first farmer (we’ll call her “Farmer 0”) must pay off 25% of her principal (creating a “healthy cluster”)

Farmer 0 must submit a video showing the structure she intended to build with the money, based on her first video (this is to ensure the loans are going towards what they were intended for as opposed to being used for a ponzi-type scenario to steal funds from the LP treasury).

Someone with reputation in the DAO must propose a motion to release the funds to the next farmer, and this motion must not be opposed. Then the farmer must finalize the acceptance of the money. This step will be game-ified and explained in more detail later.

If the above 3 conditions are met, two more farmers will receive their loans. These two farmers will be in the “Farmer 1” tier.

The next tier (the Farmer 2 tier) will contain 4 farmers (see diagram below), and will receive loans in the same way as the Farmer 2 tier did, except that both Farmers 1 must have paid off 25% of their loans and Farmer 0 must have paid off 50% of her loan (if these percentages are met, we would say the cluster is “healthy.) This trend continues, with every farmer on a tier receiving a loan as long as the cluster is “healthy.” A healthy cluster is relative to the farmer wanting to open the loan, and is defined as follows:

4 or more levels above: 100% principal paid off

3 levels above: 75% principal paid off

2 levels above: 50% principal paid off

1 level above: 25% principal paid off.

(See diagram below for a visualization of this.)

By the time it’s all said and done, 21 farmers will have received loans. Just to reiterate, the health of the whole cluster is required for any new loans to be given out, so that if even one farmer hasn’t met his required %, no new farmer in the cluster can receive a loan. In this way, if there is one farmer holding up a community from receiving more loans, there will be an incentive for the community to come together and help that farmer pay down their debt. No new clusters in a geographic Community can receive any funding until the active cluster has paid off its principal.

A “cluster” is defined as the group of loanees starting with Farmer 0 and going all the way through Farmer8 (the entire diagram shown above).

What if someone in the cluster no longer wants a loan by the time their turn rolls around? What if someone dies in this interim? This is why the farmer must sign a transaction finalizing their acceptance of the money. If the money has been released, the farmer will have one month to accept it. If they don’t, the money goes back into the LP Treasury and the farmer moves to the end of the queue among the farmers in the cluster. Once it becomes their turn again, the process will repeat, and if they also miss that window, they will be kicked out of the cluster.

To elaborate a point, clusters existing in geographic Communities serves several purposes. First, it incentivises farmers to pay off their loans in order to help improve the welfare of their neighbors. If several neighbors are in need of capital but they can only get it if you keep your loan healthy, you’re likely to feel social pressure to do so. This only works if you know your neighbors, and if you are the only thing standing in their way of gaining access to this capital. If a farmer from another cluster (another community) is able to approve your neighbor for a loan, this takes the pressure off of you to pay your debt.

Also, this helps ensure that the farmers know each other well enough to make judgment calls on who they believe are credit-worthy when forming their cluster in the beginning.

Mechanism #2:

Any cluster which repays all its loans in full will receive a “U” token. This token will entitle a treasury, controlled by the cluster, to receive a portion of the overall interest repayments from the protocol. As noted above, 2/7 of all interest payments will be paid to “U” token holders in the form of stablecoins. As mentioned above, this treasury will take the form of a 11/21 multisig consisting of every farmer in the cluster.

Added incentive: if a cluster pays off all its loans within 3 years of Farmer 0 taking out the first loan, the cluster will receive an extra .5 U tokens (a 1.5x booster). These U tokens will reside in the cluster’s treasury and may be sold just like any other token, along with all future rewards.

NOTE: anyone can pay down anyone else’s loan. If a cluster is losing out on their U token due to one farmer who isn’t paying off his loan, neighbors can help that farmer out for the benefit of the group if they so choose. Other deals could obviously be negotiated outside of the DAO as well, etc.

In the Weeds:

As mentioned before, loans are intended to fund certain predetermined projects specified in video format by the farmer requesting the funds. The projects must be reasonably provable (like building an immovable structure). This is to discourage a farmer taking the funds to buy a tractor, then taking a video of a neighbor’s tractor as their proof, and using the loan funds to keep the cluster healthy until the point at which a colluding cluster could steal the maximum amount from the DAO (which happens to be $37,500). At the end of the day, it will be up to the DAO members to decide if everything is above board.

Once the funds are released, the farmer will use the funds as intended and post a second video showing evidence of the completed project. This could be a video of the new structure, or even a picture of a receipt for seeds and a video showing the seeds being cast in the field.

Once this has been done, if the cluster is healthy, the next farmer will be up for their loan. Someone with “reputation” in the DAO (explained later) must make an on-chain proposal to release the funds to the next farmer. The proposal will sit for a week, during which time anyone in the DAO can oppose it. If no one opposes it, the motion passes by “lazy consensus” and the next farmer receives their loan.

Note: the person who proposes the release of funds will receive $40 of the loan (and another $40 of the loan will go to the Public Goods Fund, discussed later) so the farmer will actually get $4920 instead of the full $5000. This is how we game-ify efficiency in payments to farmers. Anyone with reputation in the DAO will be able to earn $40 if they are the first to propose a valid release of payment to a farmer. They must do their due diligence, however. We will be using Colony for this, so in order to make a release-of-funds proposal, the proposer must stake $40 of their own money. If they are hasty and the previous farmer clearly hasn’t provided enough evidence that they’ve used the loan for its intended purpose, someone else with reputation will have grounds to oppose releasing the funds (and 7 days to do it). To do so, they must stake $40 of their own money. Then it will go to a vote, open to anyone with reputation in the DAO. After the voting period, whoever loses the vote will lose their staked $40. The winner gets their stake back as well as a portion of the loser’s stake, which they will also share with those who voted. Note that voting ONLY HAPPENS when there is a disagreement over whether the funds should be released. If we rarely have actual votes, it reduces the risk of voter fatigue among DAO members.

The loans themselves:

The loans will accrue interest continually. It is completely up to the farmer when he wants to make payments on the loan. If he decides to never pay, the interest will simply continue to grow. However, this will effectively put an end to DAO investment in this community until the loan is paid down to beneath the levels shown in the diagram above. That extra 1% worth of interest that flows into the LP Treasury without triggering the issuance of LP tokens (explained above) will hopefully offset the delinquent debts that will inevitably happen. If a neighborhood (cluster) wants to re-enter the program, neighbors will have to figure out a way to make the cluster healthy again.

The Skeleton Crew and reputation:

There will need to be a skeleton crew to set the DAO in motion. These will be the members with the most “reputation.” Reputation, in Colony, is accrued as a DAO’s native tokens are doled out to members. For example, if the DAO pays someone 1 native token, that person also gets 1 reputation point. Our native tokens will not hold value and cannot be traded. They will simply be locked in recipients’ wallets, and their only purpose will be to allocate reputation.

Reputation is needed to make proposals, and the amount of reputation someone has directly influences the amount of weight their vote holds when a vote occurs. Reputation degrades over time, with a half-life of 90 days, so that as the active members of the DAO change, the allocation of reputation can move to reflect the current state of things.

Tokens (and thus reputation) will be doled out once per month. 10,000 tokens per month will be issued: 5,000 to investors; 4,500 to the Skeleton Crew; and 500 to U Token holders.

Investor’s tokens will be doled out automatically based on the amount each investor has supplied to the LP Treasury as a % of the total number of LP tokens in existence. Since the investors supply the funds, it makes sense that they have a say over whether or not these funds are released to the specific farmers they are investing in.

The 500 native tokens issued to U Token holders is to give them the reputation they need to propose the release of funds (explained before), which allows them to take part in another potential revenue stream and also to get more involved in the DAO. They will simply be divided evenly among all farmers who belong to a cluster that is totally paid off.

The 4,500 split among the Skeleton Crew are to ensure that a group of people can always exist to keep the gears of the DAO turning and the values intact. These folks will originally be the group who brings the DAO into existence, so they will naturally be aligned with the values of the project from the beginning. Over time, as new people emerge who want to participate, this monthly token allocation will allow the decision-making power to shift like a slow-moving amoeba blob to the people who are currently adding the most value. Hopefully, many of these new members will be Ukrainian farmers who have benefited from and believe in the project.

These 4,500 tokens will be split up along all of the Skeleton Crew using Coordinape. Basically, everyone in the group will receive 100 votes each month. By the end of the month, everyone is encouraged to have given out each vote to other members based on the value they believe these other members brought to the group. (No one can vote for themselves.) 4,500 tokens will be distributed based on the percentage of total votes each person received. In order to bring a new person into the Coordinape voting round (and therefore into the Skeleton Crew), 3 current Skeleton Crew members must vouch for them. In practice, if someone is spending a lot of time adding value to the group (going around meeting farmers to educate them on the program, spending time in discord answering questions, etc), then Skeleton Crew members will probably take notice. If three of them decide this person should be eligible to receive voting power, they will nominate him and then the rest of the Skeleton Crew will have the ability to give him Coordinape votes (and therefore reputation).

The idea is that influence moves slowly and intentionally from the people who have it to new people who have been vetted by the group and proven themselves aligned with the values of the project. Also, it’s an ongoing process, so as long as half of the skeleton crew is honest and values-aligned, decision-making power will be taken away from toxic members as their true character is discovered by the rest of the group. Confrontations don’t even need to happen — it can all happen in a very fluid way.

The “DAO treasury” exists partly to compensate these Skeleton Crew members, especially important if working for the DAO becomes a full time job for someone. This treasury will also be for potential lawyer fees or anything else that comes up, and allocation of these funds in whatever direction will be entirely up to DAO members with reputation. The duties of this group will arise as they arise. Maybe it’s going out into the field to investigate some potential fraud (as in one cluster decides to stop making payments and tries to secure new loans from a cluster outside of their community by defeating the location mechanism). Maybe it’s spending time answering questions on Discord. Keeping up the website, fixing bugs in smart contracts…all this stuff will be under the purview of the Skeleton Crew.

Social Media-style UI

The app will have somewhat of a social media vibe. After all, we are asking people who could invest in over-collateralized defi to instead invest in totally uncollateralized quasi-anonymous individuals in a war-torn country. We are asking people to take on more risk, and part of their reward is the knowledge that they are A) helping to stabilize the world (not easy to observe in real time) and B) helping real people who desperately need that help (very easy to observe via social media posts).

Farmers will be encouraged to write about themselves, post photos and videos, the usual social media stuff. The better they market themselves, the more they stand to benefit from the project.

People’s profiles will include certain symbols and numbers that represent their progress as a loanee, and thus serve as makeshift credit scores.

. -A percentage which represents how much of their current loan is paid off

. -A $ amount showing how much interest has accrued

. -A percentage that shows how much of their cluster’s overall original principal is paid off

. -A $ amount showing how much interest their overall cluster has accrued

. -A happy symbol if the cluster is “healthy”

. -A number 1–21 showing how many farmers are in the cluster currently

. -A number showing the level of the cluster level (a factor of how many times the cluster

has paid off all of its debts)

-A number showing how many loans they have personally paid off (a personal profile

rank, as opposed to the cluster rank)

. -A “U Token” symbol if this cluster has earned a U Token (and an extra fancy symbol for

clusters who receive a .5 U Token boost)

.

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Level 2 Clusters

When a full cluster pays off all of its debt, the cluster graduates to Level 2. This opens them up to more funding at better terms. Here’s how it would work:

Any farmer in the cluster who wants another loan can apply through their profile by clicking a button, stating how much they want, explaining what the loan will be for, and getting at least 5 other farmers from the cluster to vouch for them (this is a mechanism to weed out the riskier cluster members). Large loans here could be very dangerous for investors to agree to, because the larger the loan, the greater the incentive the farmer has not to pay it off. Any loan over a certain amount ($10,000?) will have a warning sign at the top of the page explaining that large loans equal higher risk.

This farmer is requesting a loan not from the LP Treasury like Level 1’s do, but rather directly from investors, so the more appealing his request is, the more likely someone will want to invest. The fact that the farmer has already paid off one loan should give investors more confidence and earn the farmer an opportunity at better terms. However, the fact that the risk of default is not spread across the whole LP Treasury makes the loan more risky. Therefore, these loans will both be more lucrative for investors and less expensive for farmers. The loan will carry an interest rate of 5% (or 6%) instead of 7%, broken down as follows:

. 4% to investors

. 1% to the DAO Treasury

1% to the Public Goods Fund (this is toggled to 0% if the farmer posts at least 1 video

per month updating the investors on their progress)

To illustrate, let’s assume that a farmer has asks for a $6,000 loan. A potential investor filters the app for Level 2 investment opportunities and finds this farmer’s profile. The farmer has put up a video showing his farm and all of the impressive work he has done so far. There is demand for the farmer’s produce, but in order to scale to the next level he’ll need this $6,000 loan. The investor is convinced and puts $1,000 in stablecoins down on his loan. This $1,000 sits there as if in escrow (maybe we can improve on this so it’s generating a yield, but for now let’s assume it just sits there.) The investor may pull it out at any time up until the point that other investors fill the loan request all the way to $6,000. When the $6,000 mark is hit, the money goes to the farmer and the interest charges begin.

Since the Level 2 model involves a much more direct funding relationship between investor and farmer, we can lean into this dynamic to potentially secure more funding for farmers. If an investor feels a human connection to a farmer through their profile, the investor is more likely to invest. Farmers in Level 2 clusters will have a high incentive to post videos and market themselves up until the point in time that they get a loan, but an investor will be very interested in how their investment ends up helping the farmer after the loan goes out. Therefore, the protocol will offer a 1% discount on the loan interest rate each month that the farmer posts at least one 2-minute video showing how they are, their progress, etc. These videos can receive likes from the community and farmers can make themselves more visible this way (a “trending” farmer could potentially attract more money). The farmers can also accept small payments from viewers that go toward paying off their principal. A highly charismatic farmer could get her whole loan paid off in this way just by making good videos and being popular.

(A quick note: While charismatic farmers stand to reap more benefits from this model, we are not blind to the fact that charisma neither increases the likelihood of loan repayment nor is a fair metric to choose farmers who need help. We have tried to create a system that works for everyone, but have chosen to lean into the tools at our disposal to attract attention and money from investors. Since investing in this project will likely be less lucrative than other defi investments on a risk-adjusted basis, creating online relationships and stories is one way to raise more money to help more people.)

Similar to a new cluster, once this farmer pays off 25% of his loan, another 2 farmers may request a Level 2 loan in the same way as the first one did. Actually, all of the farmers can request one, but only the next two that attract full funding will actually get a loan. Then, once these first 3 farmers have healthy loans, 4 more may be approved, as so on until either the whole cluster fills again or all of the open loans are paid off and the process starts over.

Another difference here is that in Level 2 clusters, farmers may join together to kick out a member. If >50% of the farmers in a cluster vote to kick someone out, they will be removed from the cluster and the whole platform itself. This mechanism allows clusters to self-police and weed out any high risk loanees. As an example, let’s say one farmer in the Level 1 cluster ended up being a deadbeat loanee. They took the loan and made no attempt to pay any of it back. The rest of the farmers really wanted the benefits that come from the cluster paying off its entire debt (a U token, access to Level 2 loans, and other perks on the social media portion of the app), so they pooled money to pay off that farmer’s loan for him. They don’t want to have to do this again, and the DAO doesn’t want that kind of person taking out any more loans, so the farmers have the ability to give him the boot.

An active Level 2 cluster will have as many as the original 22 farmers or as few 1 farmer with open loans. It all depends on how many of the farmers are in need of a loan at a given time. Once every farmer with an outstanding Level 2 debt has paid it down, we are back to square one. If any farmer wants a loan, they just make a request through their profile and if it’s funded, they become the new Farmer 0. And on it goes.

Note: if a farmer pays off his Level 2 loan and the cluster is healthy, he can jump back in for another loan right away. The more loans someone takes on and pays off, the higher their personal profile ranking goes and the more attractive they will be for investors to invest in. It is our hope that these people who prove a high level of responsibility may also be attractive to potential partners who can reach out on our platform and secure business deals totally unrelated to our project. Also, this ranking can be part of a decentralized credit score that other projects can use when offering uncollateralized loans to people. A pseudonymous, blank slate credit score for the world.

These farmers will have the ability to market themselves in any way on the DAO’s platform, whether that’s marketing their goods locally or globally, reaching out for a more traditional partnership unrelated to the DAO, or anything else they can think of. When a farmer brings in more income, it improves their ability to pay back investors. When anyone succeeds, everyone benefits. The social media aspect will benefit Level 2 clusters more than Level 1s, so Level 2 farmers will probably put it to more use. This in itself offers an incentive for a farmer to make it to Level 2 by paying off their original loans.

The Public Goods Fund:

This treasury will simply grow in order to be deployed to help in global crises. It will be controlled by DAO members with reputation. The idea is that it continues to grow forever, like a college endowment, and a portion of that growth will be used to help people in much the same way the Red Cross does.

Things to maybe revisit:

Might be helpful to have a fluctuating interest rate (fixed once a loan is locked, but variable based on how much risk the market wants to tolerate).

As of now, the governance token has no use case other than issuing reputation. If we give it utility, we could potentially use it to offset bad debts similar to Reflexer.

I actually really love the idea of releasing the loans in stages as more pictures are taken of what the money is used for. I took it out in the effort to widen the potential uses for the loans, but I think we should maybe put it back in.

I also may want to change it so someone has the option of choosing the amount they want to borrow (in Level 1) from $1000 to $5000 (in multiples of $1000, which would be what each installment is.

We can keep the DAO treasury and the Public Goods treasury in BTC and Eth and anything the DAO decides. This maybe gets your marriage of BTC and ETH community buyin.

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The purpose of this DAO is to try to create our own best piece of the world, both online and on-land. It is to care for the land and to set an example doing so. It is to create a community of like-minded people from around the world who can come together online and share ideas and influence something tangible. It is also to create an in-person, localized community of people who are bolstered by both the pocketbooks and the knowledge well of the larger global community. It is to give the opportunity to all involved to enjoy the land, work the land, and even potentially to live on the land. It is a way to co-opt the tools currently being used to create the metaverse, but use them to create something in the real world. The big difference here is that instead of working only within the parameters of code, we are working within the parameters of nature.

To put it more plainly, this project aspires to use the global reach of the internet and the speculative nature of crypto to generate funds and add value to the project. We also plan to use blockchain-based governance to facilitate the coordination of finances among such a disparate group of people from around the world. Finally, and most grandly, our purpose is to embark on a great experiment that can hopefully be copied and pasted (quite literally) to other parts of the world. If this works the way we hope, it is not a stretch to foresee a network of communities that are connected perhaps by reciprocal privileges but different enough that they can learn from one another, conduct experiments of their own, and adapt to their specific localities.

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Land

When we buy the land, we plan on putting it in a conservation land trust so that it can never be developed in ways that a detrimental to the environment. We will structure it so that the land can never be used in environmentally-extractive ways (required % of forested land, no strip mining allowed, etc). If the restrictions are sufficiently environmentally-friendly in nature, it should save us in property taxes and also be an added level of protection against any hostile takeovers of the project. And this way, even if our fantastic DAO doesn’t survive, the worst case scenario is that the land will become something like a national park and never developed.

We will decide where to buy our plot of land as a group. It might be anywhere in the world, but a major determining factor will be where people are willing to live. We figure we will need at least 5 residents to start the community, so joining the group early may help secure a spot in your neck of the woods. Just know that we will structure funding in a way that always sets aside 10% of revenue for future projects (the Pay-It-Forward Treasury), so if you have your heart set on a location but don’t have enough people to start the in-real-life community now, there should be opportunities down the road.

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Vision of a Global Network

The Pay-It-Forward Treasury will be continuously funded with 10% of any money we raise. Allocation of this treasury will be determined by the DAO, but the purpose of it will be buying NFT’s from sister projects. A requirement for obtaining funds from this treasury is that the receiving project must also have a similar Pay-It-Forward Treasury. This is how we sprout a network of these worldwide at an ever increasing speed.

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While each project will obviously determine the price of its own NFTs, a stipulation of being part of this network is that all NFTs bought in this way must cost the same amount: $500. This helps level the playing field a bit for all projects regardless of the socioeconomic situation they find themselves in. In other words, a rich group in California may be able to charge a premium for their NFTs and thus end up with a large P-I-F treasury. A less-wealthy group in Panama (selling their NFTs for only $200 and therefore with a smaller P-I-F treasury) who wants to buy one of the California group’s NFTs may not be able to afford them. The $500 peg allows the California group to give extra help to the Panama group ($300 more per NFT) and allows the Panama group to more easily afford the California group’s NFTs.

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NFTs bought in this way must be locked forever in a smart contract so they can be used but never sold. The whole point is to use the P-I-F treasury to financially support other groups and to strengthen ties by giving members access to each others’ communities. If a community can just buy the NFTs with their P-I-F Treasury and turn around to sell them on the open market, it negates both of these objectives.

Our view is that newer projects that are eligible for these funds will be projects based (at least loosely) on our design, with their own native token and their own NFTs for sale that grant access to their community. When we speak of our vision of a network of these communities around the world, we envision each of these as being their own DAO. Our hope is that our model will be used as an example so that new projects don’t have to reinvent any wheels. They can essentially copy and paste our project and make whatever tweaks they desire based on their own idiosyncrasies. If our DAO helps to bootstrap one of these by buying some NFTs, our DAO members would be able to use these NFTs to visit the new project, which would allow us to earn that project’s native tokens, which would effectively intertwine the members of the two projects. This is what we mean when we speak of forming a network of these internationally. This is why our logo is a spider web of nodes that spirals up from a central node. There is no hierarchy. Only a decentralized upwards flywheel of connected DAOs.

Funding

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Funding will primarily come from the sale of two types of NFTs:

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-Event NFT: At first, we will sell these for 100 DAI apiece. After the first 100 are sold, they can be alternatively bought for either 100 DAI ~or~ 100 NTENT tokens (more on NTENT tokens later).

-Mycorrhizal Fun Guy NFTs:

These will be sold in tiers so that they are more expensive over time.

~The first 500 sold will include 50 NTENT tokens.~

1–50 for 200 DAI (to reward early community members and incentivize early investment)

50–100 for 400 DAI

100–200 for 500 DAI

300–500 for 600 DAI

500–1000 for 800 DAI ~or~ 800 NTENT

1000–2000 for 1,000 DAI ~or~ 1,000 NTENT

These NFTs will be the main source of our funding. We will have a mechanism for selling NTENT tokens, but more as a pressure-release valve meant to keep the NTENT value within a reasonable range, which we will want in order to keep our incentive structures working properly. More on this later.

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NTENT Tokenomics

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We will start out with a 20,000 NTENT token airdrop (we may alter this depending on the size of our early community), which we’ll dole out to early contributors. This will happen before we start selling the NFTs.

After that, we’ll have an inflation rate of 75 NTENT per day (27,375 per year). This inflation will be split the following way:

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-25 for the DAO to split up among members at regular intervals via a Coordinape method. We can allocate a certain amount per day for people who go to the breathing bar for example (our meditation room in Discord), or for people who work to maintain the website, etc. (Remember, land residents will be members of the DAO, so they’ll likely get a share of this allocation as well as their resident’s allocation.) These tokens will come with reputation.

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-25 to put in the DAO treasury to be used however (primarily for non-land stuff, but can be anything). In contrast to the 25 NTENT split among the DAO members at regular intervals, this treasury can be allowed to accumulate over time to be used for big payouts to members who offer developer or legal services for example.

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-12.5 to be distributed to the residents. These tokens will be deposited into a treasury in Colony controlled by the “Resident sub-DAO”. The residents will have control over the specific allocation of the tokens, but a typical distribution might be equal allocation among all residents.

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-12.5 to put into a wallet controlled by the “Level 4 sub-DAO” within Colony. As the name implies, this group will be composed of any member who’s role is a Level 4 (which will include all residents). This wallet is specifically intended to fund bounties related to the land (incentivizing labor for large projects). Non-residents Level 4's are meant to be passive members of this sub-DAO, so that residents alone decide how to use the tokens. The rule here is that residents must not allocate these tokens to themselves. The reason that non-resident Level 4's are included in this sub-DAO is to ensure this rule is followed. If a resident makes a proposal to allocate these tokens to themselves or a fellow resident, a Level 4 should oppose this proposal. If the residents overpower the opposer and vote to uphold the self-allocation, the opposer may (and should) appeal this decision to the parent DAO (the IntentionalDAO colony). With the combined weight of all DAO members, there should be enough reputation to defeat the proposal.

The reason for this check on the residents in the last paragraph is that if the residents chose to allocate this 12 daily token inflation to themselves, this, combined with the 13 daily tokens already allocated to them, could give the residents an almost absolute hold on governance decisions. We want the residents to have a large say in all matters of the DAO, but no group should be able to dictate everything.

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All of these NTENT tokens should be paid to people who share the ethos of IntentionalDAO, as these payments will come with reputation points in Colony. The reputation points will be used in making (and voting on) proposals. In other words, reputation equals governance power. When the DAO pays people in NTENT tokens, it is basically signaling that these people deserve to play a more major role in DAO governance. Reputation points will degrade over time, which ensures that the people who have been contributing the most — and most recently — are in control of the DAO. In this way, one can envision power as a slow-moving amoeba blob that intentionally moves towards the most active (and valued) members. Thus, no one can take the project over by buying our tokens. They must be given control gradually by existing members as they put in more work and prove their value and value-alignment to the DAO.

In contrast, payments to “outside people” (contract workers), should be paid in dollars from our treasury (stablecoins ideally), so as not to assign reputation where it should not go.

SIDE NOTE: This inflation model of 75 new tokens per day (akin to how Bitcoin grew into existence as opposed to a big airdrop or ICO) is preferable because it allows us to grow at a slower, more measured pace and reward people reputation as they come into the fold of IDAO. There’s no temptation to throw a huge chunk of tokens to anyone which could skew the balance of reputation or affect the value of the tokens in unforeseen ways. This way, we can feel our way through this process as we go.

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Mechanisms to Control NTENT Token Value

As stated before, we will have a small distribution of NTENT to initial community members, some given to early NFT buyers, and then we will have daily inflation. To counteract the ever-increasing supply, we will have burn mechanisms in two places: (A) people who mint our NFTs with NTENT will be burning most of those tokens (discussed below); and (B) people who stay on the land will pay 20 NTENT per day which will be burned (unless forgiven by residents — more on this later).

There is obviously a balance that we want to strike here. We don’t want NTENT tokens to be too expensive or people may not want to (or be able to afford to) come to the land. We also don’t want them to be too cheap because then they’re worthless as motivation to entice people to participate in the DAO and on the land. This section will talk about how these two extremes are mitigated.

As noted in the table above, the first 500 MFG (Myccoryzal Fun Guy) NFTs will be sold only for DAI (to go into the DAO treasury for purposes of land purchase and all the initial stuff we’ll need to pay for). After that, we will sell them for either DAI (to fill our treasury) or NTENT (which we’ll burn). The option will be up to the buyer, and will naturally hinge on whether DAI or NTENT tokens are more valuable at the time, because the value of 1 NTENT, when it comes to buying NFTs, will always equal 1 DAI. In other words, a $500 NFT can be purchased with either 500 DAI or 500 NTENT tokens, regardless of the value of NTENT.

The benefit of burning NTENT tokens is to make them more valuable (because they become more scarce). Making NTENT more valuable makes it worth the grind for people to try to earn them, meaning more labor/participation for the DAO. If NTENT drops in value (say 1 NTENT = 50 cents), people who want an NFT will buy NTENT from the open market and use them to buy their NFT at half price, which burns those NTENT tokens and thus drives up its value. When NTENT value exceeds $1, it is more cost effective for people to buy the NFT with DAI, which adds money to our treasury and takes the foot off the gas if the value of NTENT is becoming too high.

To continue, let’s say the value of NTENT drops too low and it is almost worthless. Two things will prop it back up.

1. As just discussed, people who are interested in our project can buy NTENT on the market and mint our NFTs at a discount. 90% of those NTENT are burned, reducing supply and thus increasing NTENT value. (The other 10% will go in the Pay-It-Forward Treasury).

2. Residents may decide to throw a huge party, attracting a lot of visitors who are each paying (and burning) 20 NTENT to stay on the land. A party with 50 people lasting 3 nights will burn 3000 tokens, which equals 40 days of issuance, not to mention all the potential NTENT burned from new people having to mint their NFTs in order to come to the party. (Residents can also choose to return these 20 tokens to visitors, but more on that later). Residents will have an incentive to throw an event like this because they are getting paid daily in NTENT tokens. If they can burn a lot of them by attracting visitors, NTENT gets burned which puts upwards pressure on the token’s value and increases the value of the residents’ tokens.

In addition to all of this, the fact that the value of INTENT is not actually pegged to anything and can fluctuate will motivate people to buy low and keep a stash of it on hand just in case they want to come to the land in the future. With a vibrant community, there should be pretty strong demand for it.

Speaking of potentially strong demand, what if the token becomes too scarce? If 1 NTENT is worth $10, people would have to stake/pay $505 worth of tokens just to stay one night on the land (50 NTENT and 5 DAI is required — more on this later). No one would do that, so we need a way to put an upward bound on the token, and ideally this mechanism would allow the project to benefit from the upside in value as opposed to speculators.

In this high-token-price scenario…First of all, as mentioned before, no one would buy new NFTs with NTENT tokens because using DAI would be much cheaper. So no NTENT is getting burned there, and inflation is still happening all the while. Also, since less people are willing to pay that price to stay on the land, less NTENT is getting burned from visitors. For the people who do come and hang out, residents always have the ability to forgive the 20-NTENT-per-day visitor fee if they choose to do so. More on this later, but with a highly valued NTENT token, visitors will be very incentivized to perform chores on the land so that the residents will refund this fee. In this way, the land benefits from more labor, hopefully creating a community that is more attractive for people to visit, and this cycle will continue until inflation causes the NTENT value to drop and the residents are incentivized to burn more visitor fees instead of forgiving them to prop the value back up.

Also, remember that the residents have their own NTENT treasury that grows at a rate of 12.5 NTENT per day. With a highly valued NTENT price, they can use this to bribe visitors to get all kinds of great stuff accomplished, which sends more NTENT into circulation, diluting the market and putting downward pressure on the token price.

But even still, what if demand outpaces inflation and there isn’t enough NTENT to go around? What if the price skyrockets? What if we throw a huge party and tons of people need tokens, but there aren’t enough to go around?

This is why we will have one more pressure-release valve, in the form of a token issuance curve. We will use Coin Machine on Colony and just set the floor price around whatever we want the maximum NTENT value to be. Let’s say 3 DAI for the sake of this example. If the value of NTENT is lower than $3, no one will buy it from the Coin Machine (because they can get it for less on the market). If the market value rises above $3, people will start arbitraging it by buying it from Coin Machine and selling it on the market, earning an instant profit and putting downward pressure on the value of NTENT.

But because Coin Machine issues tokens on a curve that’s based on demand, the more that is bought, the higher the price will go. In other words, as people buy NTENT from the Coin Machine at 3 DAI and turn around and sell them on the market for, say, 10 DAI, this puts downward pressure on the market price and upward pressure on the Coin Machine price (because of its algorithm.) The result will be an eventual equilibrium with an NTENT market value closer to $3 and potentially a lot more money in the DAO treasury from the Coin Machine purchases. This curve basically ensures that the magnitude of the arbitrage opportunity doesn’t completely go to the arbitrageur. The DAO gets some of that upside cheddar as well.

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One more thing to note here. A high token price is obviously good for the project for all the reasons just outlined. A major contributing factor to an increased token price is the desire for token holders to hold onto their tokens. If the token price can never rise above $3, what incentive do NTENT holders have in holding onto their bags? The incentive is that every Coin Machine sale will split the revenue in half: half going to the DAO treasury and half going to DAO members proportionate to how many tokens they have staked. We can get fancy here and base this allocation on how long someone’s tokens have been staked to further encourage long-term holding, but that’s a discussion we can have later.

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Land Access Mechanics

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DAO members will complete quests to gain roles (we will have 4 levels), and these roles will come with different privileges.

In order to come to the land, a visitor has to have an NFT, be at least a Level 1, and have at least 5 DAI and 50 NTENT tokens (only 30 if they are Level 4 because the 20 NTENT visitor fee is waved) staked into a smart contract.

30 of these 50 staked NTENT tokens are collateral in case the visitor leaves a mess that has to be cleaned up by someone else. After a visitor leaves, a resident can choose to commandeer these 30 tokens (meaning they are added to the resident treasury). If they are not commandeered, the tokens will be automatically unlocked to return to the visitor’s wallet 24 hours after the visitor leaves. If the tokens are commandeered, the idea is that the resident can clean up the mess and keep the tokens, or the residents can farm out the task to another

visitor and pay them. It’s up to the residents to decide what to do with their treasury.

So the way it works in action is: the visitor will stake however many tokens they choose (but a minimum of 5 DAI and 50 NTENT) and then click “Access Land” on the app, which locks up 5 DAI and 50 NTENT out of what they have staked. If the visitor leaves the land before 8 hours, they click “Leaving Land,” and all 55 tokens are unlocked the next day. (Caveat: if they leave the land and return within 24 hours from their initial “Land Access” activation, the “Leaving Land” click is simply disregarded and it’s like they never left.) So less than 8 hours of hanging out costs nothing.

After 8 hours of being on the land, the 5 DAI is moved to the residents’ multisig in order to keep toilet paper stocked and replenish anything else that the visitors use. In practice, the residents can do whatever they want with this as they control the wallet, but the intention behind it is to keep things stocked and make sure visitors have a good experience and want to come back.

Now let’s say the visitor is staying for more than a day. After 24 hours of being on the land, 20 of the 50 locked NTENT tokens (the visitor fee, briefly explained above) are burned forever. This 20 NTENT is the price of staying on the land.

By 24 hours, if the visitor plans to continue hanging out on the land, they have to re-up their staked tokens (or just make sure they have enough staked to begin with) as every 24 hours 5 more DAI and 20 more NTENT are locked up and the above process repeats. If they don’t have the required funds staked, their (decentralized) ID shows up on a “visitor has left” list and everyone knows they shouldn’t still be there.

The catch with this 20 NTENT visitor fee, as explained before, is that a resident can unlock it and effectively refund the visitor if they so choose. Maybe the residents have a chore list, and if a visitor completes a chore, they get their 20 NTENT tokens back. It’s like day-to-day work trade. In this way, as long as the residents need the help, a motivated visitor can stay as long as they want for only 5 DAI per day.

An important thing to point out here is that all of this is in the hands of the residents. The residents can opt out completely and never even utter a greeting to the visitors, in which case it will cost each visitor 20 NTENT and 5 DAI per day to stay. Residents might opt for this if they’re tired of playing host, thereby increasing the cost for visitors to stay and probably reducing the number of visitors on the land. In fact, the more NTENT tokens visitors are forced to burn, the more scarce they will become on a macro level, making it even more expensive to stay every day.

But there is a balance here. If this goes on too long, visitors will stop coming around, the residents will stop having access to help, and the whole place could go to pot. But in the meantime, the residents will have been growing their stash of NTENT token reserves (they get 25 per day remember), which are getting more scarce on the market because of the burn from the visitors, so they could decide to throw a big work party and dole out a lot of tokens to get things going again. If residents use their tokens to improve the community, more people will want to come, creating an upward flywheel effect.

It’s important to note that the 20 NTENT tokens do not go directly to the residents. If they did, this could create a misalignment of incentives between the residents and visitors. The residents would be more likely to force visitors to pay as opposed to using their fee-forgiveness ability to procure help on the land. Paying the visitor fee directly to the residents would only benefit the residents, whereas burning NTENT benefits everyone who holds NTENT, as does incentivizing labor to make the IRL community a better place to be. By burning the tokens that aren’t forgiven, the most impactful way for residents to benefit from this fee is to get motivated to put the visitors to work.

But on the other hand, if a visitor has a bunch of tokens and doesn’t want to work, that’s fine too. They don’t have to. Their 20 NTENT/per day will just get burned and increase the value of everyone else’s tokens, rewarding past contributors who hold NTENT and also making it more lucrative to contribute to the community in the future.

Exception: Level 4 DAO members are exempt from the 20 NTENT per day requirement to stay on the land. These people are basically the core group of the DAO, have demonstrated a large commitment to the project, and have put in a lot of work. They should be able to enjoy the land without having to cater so much to the residents. However, they will still be required to stake 30 tokens as collateral and pay their 5 DAI per day in order to not be leaches on the community.

Attaining a level 4 role basically means someone has the full approval and trust of the DAO, and are cleared to petition the current residents to become a full resident themselves.

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There is one more mechanic that is baked into the system for residents to earn money. 10% of all proceeds from selling NFTs (after the land is purchased and initial structures are built) will go to the resident multisig to do with what they will. This encourages residents to help create a welcoming environment and an awesome experience for visitors so that more people want to join.

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Land Access as it Relates to Roles and NFTs

Event NFT: Even with an Event NFT, someone must have attained a Level 1 role to come to the land. At this level, at least we can know that they understand the thrust of who we are and what we expect of members/visitors. It will also mean they’ll have their decentralized ID in the system so we can identify them (important for residents doling out rewards or commandeering collateral, or even banning people if need be.) Event NFTs are for people who are testing the waters to see if they fit, or for people to have the ability to more easily earn NTENT in order to buy a MFG NFT later. If they resell their Event NFT on the open market, 10% of the proceeds will be redirected to the DAO treasury.

MFG NFT — Level 1: Have the same access rights to the land as Event NFTs holders. Part of attaining Level 1 is connecting your web3 profile (Proof of Humanity, BrightID, etc) to your NFT. This will be essential in determining who has land access rights at any given time.

MFG NFT — Level 2: Can come to the land at any time, but no cabin access.

MFG NFT — Level 3: Same as level 2 plus the ability to reserve cabin use for any shared cabins that we build. Can also vouch for two Level 1 guests to join them during their stay (they still have to pay their rates and put up their collateral.)

MFG NFT — Level 4: same as level 3, but don’t have to pay the 20 NTENT per day. Can also vouch for up to 4 guests at any level (including Event NFT people). Can apply to be a resident.

Once you attain level 4, you can blow your NFT up if you want (meaning it becomes no longer usable in the DAO — maybe the image turns into a burnt-up mushroom or something) and 400 NTENT tokens fall out and are deposited into your wallet. You’ve put in a lot of work to get to level 4, so this is our way to say: “We appreciate your contribution. If you no longer want to be involved, here’s a parting thank-you gift.” Depending on the value of NTENT, people can actually make money doing this, especially if they buy their NFT early, with the result being we get a lot of participation out of people in the process as they level up.