Project Title:
Abundance Protocol
Description
Abundance creates a self-sustainable public goods funding mechanism that does not rely on external funding, and can potentially solve the problem of public goods.
Manifesto/Vision
Our vision is an economy where any person or community can simply focus on creating impact, and be rewarded based on the impact they create - an Abundance Economy.
Problem
Ethereum relies on OSS, and there is no self-sustainable mechanisms to reward both developers and people building public goods within the ecosystem.
This is a much broader problem however; there are currently no effective mechanisms to capture the value of common or public goods. There are traditional and blockchain-based mechanisms to fund public goods (government, philanthropy, quadratic funding, retroactive funding, etc.) but they all rely on external sources of funding (taxation, donations, external revenue sources).
The only mechanism that currently has a (mostly) self-sustainable feedback loop for funding a common good is the consensus mechanism. CMs fund the common good of network security based on currency inflation, where the currency gets its value from supply and demand dynamics. This mechanisms (in its various forms) has funded network security to the tune of over $1T so far.
To be able to generalize such a mechanism to other common and public goods has a set of challenges; the system would need sybil resistance, preventing collusion in gaming the protocol, credible impact valuation, and maintaining stable currency value among others.
Solution
The TL;DR is that participants in any Abundance Ecosystem want to maximize their economic opportunity while maintaining the value of their tokens. Overvaluing public goods leads to devaluation of the currency, while undervaluing public goods lead to fewer public goods contributors in the future, and thus slower economic for the ecosystem. The dynamic equilibrium for any ecosystem is therefore where public goods are fairly evaluated based on their impact. This concept aligns the interests of all participants in the ecosystem and allows self-sustainable funding of public goods where the currency value is maintained.
The protocol integrates a consensus mechanism, a prediction market and a retroactive funding mechanism (in additional to multiple mechanisms to prevent sybil attacks, collusion, etc.) which would create a cryptoeconomic model where public goods funding can be self-sustainable and credible (see whitepaper: https://whitepaper.abundance.id)
The mechanism needs to harness the consensus mechanism used for network security and progressively generalize it to all common and public goods.
Since the mechanism is based on currency inflation, it is necessary to have an ecosystem where funding a public good does not devalue the currency. This can be achieved if funds are only released when impact on the ecosystem is realized (retroactive funding). Since the impact is related to overall economic growth of the ecosystem (growth in demand), increasing the supply will maintain currency stability.
The next step is to create an incentive structure that maintains accurate validations, prevents collusion/sybil attacks, and scales with the growth of the ecosystem. This is achieved through a prediction market (which allows proposers to bring forward the most impactful projects and be rewarded in proportion to the project impact (incentivizes accurate evaluation & searching for most impactful projects). A two-tiered validation system (for domain-specific experts and ecosystem-wide evaluators), and the ability to permissionlessly challenge validations.
Product Features
- Communities can create their own ecosystems and sustainably fund the common and public goods that matter to them.
- Any can join existing ecosystems and make a living as a validator or investor in public goods.
- Multichain integration - creates the emergent property of “Superalignment” where ecosystems that previously competed for developers can cooperate in solving common challenges.
Validation
Vitalik seems to like the idea…
Progress
The mechanism development and red teaming are complete (see whitepaper: https://whitepaper.abundance.id/). Work on protocol’s data flow chart is in progress.
Differentiation (from other projects)
What differentiates this project from other public good funding mechanisms is the ability to self-sustainably fund public goods at scale, without having to rely on external funding sources. The protocol is also expected to have emergent properties that other projects do not: namely, it will be able create effective feedback loops for negative externalities and create Superalignment (overriding the rivalrous dynamics between competing projects and ecosystems to foster coordination)
Other communities centered on public good funding will be able to integrate modules of the protocol to self-sustainably fund their projects as well.
Team
Full-time work on protocol - Mike Natanzon
Grant Request $
$40,000
What the Funds Are For
The funding will go toward full-time development of the protocol, and will apply toward accomplishing the milestones of completing the protocol’s data-flow and some of the initial testing on testnet.
The idea is to get grants from multiple projects and protocols within the Ethereum ecosystem since everyone will benefit from it.
Help Requested
Any help to improve the protocol and its mechanisms will be appreciated.
Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio
Website: https://abundance.id/
Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.abundance.id/
Abundance Economy book: https://book.abundance.id/
Protocol data-flow chart (WIP): Miro | Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration
GitHub: GitHub - AbundanceProtocol/Abundance-Protocol: Abundance Protocol
Blog: Abundance
Farcaster: Warpcast
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Abundance_DAO