Behind our first $STREAM airdrop

As a reminder, the $STREAM token has no inherent financial value. Rather, the token functions primarily as a key to on-chain governance for our most active contributors and supporters, especially with respect to how we use our community treasury resources to fund future research and editorial projects.

Beyond time-weighting, there was also the question of what specific metrics in our Discord server best represented a concrete value-add in the context of our community. We wanted to avoid purely one-dimensional measures of engagement, such as merely rewarding the chattiest people in our server without measuring the extent of their direct interactio... See more

The core concept behind $STREAM as laid out in our original Hello World post remains true: $STREAM is a “research token” that represents high-quality, tangible contributions to our larger project of collaborative research, knowledge-sharing and community-building in music and tech.

In the words of Other Internet, "founders who desire a welcoming and wholesome community are personally responsible for embodying that culture" within said community. In the context of Web3 onboarding, this means that no one, not even core team members, is "above" providing core customer support tasks like setting up crypto wallets and going over g... See more

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Ultimately, we decided on a custom blended weighting system that took into account the following four metrics for each Discord member:

Hence we executed both stages of our retro $STREAM airdrop via a push approach, using the CSV bulk transaction tool from our Gnosis safe. This approach ended up costing us around 0.9 ETH in gas. While we were comfortable fronting this cost as a business, it would clearly be more financially sustainable for us to move to a pull approach for future a... See more

In the process of generating our list of qualifying members for our airdrop, we ran into a frustrating but eye-opening problem of trying to reconcile member identities across both our Patreon and Memberful databases (which was a necessary step for us in determining active members’ lifetime contribution history). While simple on the surface, this bu... See more

Like any other token, you can view $STREAM's entire distribution and ownership history on-chain. Unlike many other tokens, however, no part of the incentive design or reward mechanics for $STREAM is currently automated; instead, core Water & Music team members (and, down the line, our core supporters and contributors) determine who earns $STREAM ba... See more

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