Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism

Equity prices are based on the present value of future cash flows because that’s what they confer rights to, ultimately. You can’t use Airbnb shares to get free stays or pay a lower fee as a host. You use Airbnb shares to own a percentage of the business, and to vote...  But BTRST tokens offer both ownership and utility. And for network partic... See more

If the need to issue tokens as rewards outstrips token buybacks, Braintrust will still pay out of the treasury, but if they’ve designed the system right, that means they’re only increasing the circulating supply when participants are doing what the network wants them to do even beyond what client fees can afford to pay down...  It’s like if Ub... See more

Here’s another important callout that is very different from equities: tokens should be more valuable to network participants than they are to purely financial holders.

Instead of increasing the fees you charge all of your users, Gurley recommends that marketplaces figure out other ways to make more from those users who want more from you. Back then, he brought up advertising as an example. If you can get some of the suppliers in the marketplace to pay for ads, you can effectively earn a higher take without needin... See more

The long and short of it is that now, there’s a direct link between the token price and network volume. More volume creates more demand for the token. As the network grows, there will be more fees to buy more tokens from the open market.

Braintrust is a clear distillation of an incredibly important point: good tokenomics can enhance a strong value proposition, but can’t replace a strong value proposition. 

one key way that a user-owned network can outperform a purely investor-owned one: by giving away something that’s more valuable to recipients than it is to anyone else.

What can the BTRUST token be used for?  -Governance. This is the most important. Governance has financial value here because it might mean the difference between paying higher fees or not, or even keeping the network alive or not. At some point, if the token value drops and the network is more reliant on fees, participants may decide it’s actu... See more

-Bid Staking. Clients and Talent can stake BTRST to stand out to the other party and prove that they’re serious; if an applicant no-shows an interview, for example, they lose their tokens. This is the web3 replacement for the advertising models that web2 marketplaces graduate to. -Career Benefits. This one is a little hand-wavey for now, but the Br... See more

But there’s a long way to go to achieve the vision and pull all talent network business onto its protocol. Braintrust has done $37 million in volume all-time. Upwork, a Web2 talent network, did $904 million in its last quarter alone, Fiverr did ~$260 million. Deloitte did $50.2 billion in revenue in 2021. In all, companies spend trillions of dollar... See more