Braintrust: Fighting Capitalism with Capitalism

Like the time when Braintrust’s token launched on Coinbase and traded up to above $40, and armies of bots “watched” the short videos in the Braintrust Academy library in order to pick up the BTRST tokens Braintrust offered to incentivize people to learn more about the network. When incentives are baked into everything and backed with a token, you n... See more

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

Because Braintrust relies on a protocol for things that humans might do in a normal marketplace, and because it can pay for work that other marketplaces would need to use cash for with tokens, it can keep fees lower (but will need to make it up by giving away ownership). Giving away ownership might actually create more long-term value, because thos... 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

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.

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.

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.

-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

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