Internet Cities & The Social Uniswap

Perhaps the greatest factor in rethinking the protocol design is timing. Over the past month, I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself: why have previous attempts at building curation markets and decentralized social markets repeatedly failed? I believe the answer is that the behavior of “staking to curate” is still extremely nascent and the proper i... See more

We know the problem: “how can we build signal-legitimized social markets?”. Solving this problem is downstream of the need to build a better way to surface, process, and consume information.

In a world rapidly accelerating toward automation and measurement, data is a commodity. Filtered, labeled, and processed data is the most valuable asset. Thus, information processing is the most important force of our reality. It’s critical that this power is decentralized.

Just as Uniswap pools have liquidity providers, Verse markets can have signal providers. Token holders for a market can stake their tokens to other people in the market, effectively signaling that person’s value. In return for providing signal, stakers are rewarded with auxiliary signal provider (SP) tokens. Whenever a new buyer purchases tokens fo... See more

So armed with this understanding, how do we design a mechanism in which participants of a network can stake tokens to each other to signal a person’s value to the network? At a high-level, we can think of this behavior as a natural evolution of “following” someone. But now, the action of “following” is no longer binary; it’s a gradient. If you thin... See more

After the staking-to-curate behavior becomes better familiarized among users, then I think the timing will be more ripe for introducing staked curation of specific content. This is how I hope to actually expand the Verse protocol in the long-run. Over time, I want users to be able to curate their top “people” within their network as well as the top... See more

Building a signal-legitimized network isn’t necessarily about curating the best individual posts that appear in a feed. It’s about signaling the most reputable and valuable people that participate in the network. The network gains legitimacy not by a centralized algorithm showing you what’s most popular, but by the participants themselves provably ... See more

The vision for Verse remains the same: build a multiplayer standard for media.