Curation tokens in crypto
Curation tokens in crypto
Why curation tokens need attention & future plans of $JAMM
JammSession is a newsletter about the latest trends and stories of crypto & gaming. Each week, I jam on the latest trends and happenings of how the story of mainstream adoption is unfolding.
I’m currently reading Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal (highly recommend to anyone working in crypto) One main theme of the book is comparing open source developers to creators on social media platforms. I’m only a few chapters in the book, but the point Nadia makes is that open source communities have an abundance of low touch commitments so there’s a need for curation in these communities.
Crypto is at a similar point. New token communities and platforms are launching daily and decentralized exchanges have been catching up to centralized exchanges because they give users access to the noise. We’re at a point now where there’s too much volume and we need a way to start curating our interfaces. For example, we must answer questions like “Who decides to whitelist new tokens for liquidity mining in Balancer? Who decides which tokens should be tradeable on Dharma’s new Uniswap exchange?” For the most part, it’s the team that built the platform, but this creates a major bottleneck.
The need for curation markets
One way to look at it is that there will always be demand for new curation because the number of potential new valuable networks is infinite.
TheGraph is one of the first types of curation markets launching this year. TheGraph has already run into the curation problem: there are too many subgraphs for each network and it’s difficult for a developer to know which subgraphs are worth using. Curators will help solve the problem of identifying quality subgraphs.
The other type of curation is for rivalrous goods. Curators have an incentive to bring new items into the registry but only if it increases net volume flowing into the registry.
An example of this could be something like SuperRare. A new artist can be voted into the registry if they will increase the quality of that registry and make the registry more valuable in the eyes of purchasers. But if the artist does not provide any value to the registry, the proposal for the artist to enter would be rejected.
SuperRare could follow a similar model to COMP and have a fixed amount of tokens be distributed over a certain period. Artists would earn governance tokens in proportion with the fees they are generating. This would align with SuperRare since they are taking fees as the registry grows.
As soon as one marketplace figures out curation for rivalrous goods, more marketplaces can follow a similar template (Zora, Foundation, etc.) New governance tokens for consumer-facing applications would swarm the market and potentially outpace the number of DeFi governance tokens.
We could even see more consumer-facing crypto applications like Matcha and Dharma implement curation governance tokens to include more tokens to trade while simultaneously limiting the amount of scam tokens on the market.
What does the end-game of curation look like?
When marketplaces start to implement governance mechanisms for curators, we’ll start to see the rise of super users campaigning for delegates and platforms like Boardroom aggregating governance decisions across various protocols. This would be an interesting experiment - now we’ll have to read our 20 daily newsletters and vote on our daily proposals.
At this point, if consumers start to own dozens of governance tokens that can make an impact in a network, we’ll need more information about these markets to make decisions. This is where I could see something like Predictions.Exchange being valuable. Imagine if you could have an aggregated feed similar to hacker news that pulls in information about markets (the amount of liquidity, 24hr volume, the way the markets are about to turn out). This will eventually be the highest signal place to get news. No more need for dozens of newsletters to curate for you!
$JAMM update and future plans
Last week, I announced $JAMM, supplied the initial liquidity on Uniswap, and invited subscribers to join the exclusive telegram group with 1000 JAMM. If you want to join a highly engaged group of crypto-natives talking about the ideas presented in these JammSession newsletters, grab at least 1000 JAMM from here and use this link to join the group.
My plan with JammSession was to never just create a newsletter, but to be on the forefront of new crypto innovations that can help thousands of creators more efficiently monetize their creations.
I’m excited about tinkering with price discovery subscriptions to reward early subscribers and build a more loyal audience. I believe when you own a piece of a creation you’re more likely to become evangelists and even find ways to make that newsletter more successful.
While I’m exploring several avenues for this at the moment, the ideal state is to have a contract that uses $JAMM as collateral and locks it up to acquire a token specifically for my newsletter. The only way subscribers would be able to access Jamm Session is by having a web3 wallet with the subscription token to access a WordPress site. While I understand this will dramatically reduce the number of readers for the newsletter, I believe this could potentially lead to more newsletter writers following the same path.
If this works, we could potentially use the newsletter token as a bundle for other newsletters in the crypto ecosystem. I encourage Jamm Session readers to join the Jamm Session group (with 1000 $JAMM) to discuss this more.