What is it?
It's a simple betting game, where people bet on the success of the new projects. The bets are placed in token value and this token-weighted sum is used to calculate the ranks of the competing new projects. The higher the rank, higher the reputation and chances to get early stage funding.
How is it related to prediction markets?
Prediction markets are games to trade the outcome of an event. The logic is captured under a contract that does the book keeping of which participant staked how much and on what outcome. When the outcome happens, the contract rewards to the correct predictors and confiscates the stakes for incorrect entries. The likelihood of the outcome is traded for a certain time before the outcome.
Startereum's TWR on the other hand do not trade the outcome. It is a simple majority voting game, where after a predefined interval of game time, the game closes and the outcome is announced. Here the outcome is majority. In a way, this changes the objective of the players from which project is more likely to win to which project is more popular or crowd favourite. One of the problem with this shift in goal post could be that innovative or novel projects may not win crowds. We will have to figure how to counter this risk.
How is it related to curation markets?
Curation markets are games to trade assets in the market. It is similar to prediction markets that there is a trade of an underlying value - signals, in case of prediction markets & digital assets (meme, project, data, information), in case of curation markets. Another property of a curation market is that the market for an asset exists, as far as the demand of that asset exists. In a curation market, the consumption drives the demand and value of a market. This demands directly incentivises the players who curated the asset by buying (trading) into the asset.
As before, one of the key difference is that Startereum's TWR do not trade any asset. The objective of the game is to curate a crowd favourite ranked list. TWR is not a market, instead it is a crowdsourced ranking algorithm.
Why is it a blockchain project?
A decentralised platform removes the need of a middleman or a central authority that is responsible for administering bets. This creates a trust-less environment where participants can enter a predictive contract without the need of a broker. Moreover, all the information are publicly available to everyone.
Is it a crypto economic game?
Let's see.
It's an incomplete information game.
It has an action:
a project is looking to generate positive signals, pays a staking fee
a member signs up to play bets, can earn or lose
an investor signs up to consume signals generated by crowd bets, pays access fee
It has a payoff:
project pays x
betting per game has an avg y
investor pays z
platform earns z and up to small single digit % of y
platform do not earn from project.
It has a strategy:
project deposits x as guarantee and withdraw if it does not believe in the game
players stake delta y to earn from their knowledge
investor pays platform a fee z to get crowdsourced investment signals
though there are some caveats in the game. For instance, players winning do not rely on their own wisdom but the popularity. This means that a good player can continue to lose if they play with majority of poor players.
Who are the actors of this game?
TWR game has only players to bet against each other.
Startereum on the other hand have use cases for three roles:
- project
- players
- investors
What are the objectives of this game? What is the primary goal/objective?
Primary objective of the game is to generate investment signals for early stage funding. Early stage projects do not have enough market signals for investors. Hence, investors have to take high risks in placing bets.
The current crypto market have a white paper-centric evaluation. Whitepapers have become the new pitch decks and every new project is floating ambitious theories on the whitepaper. This is certainly not a good way to consider investments. There is too much money riding on the promises.
One way would be to build an attestation network that can verify the information put in the project proposals. This idea definitely looks meritorious at first look, but soon the challenges of verifying signals at early stage starts to look daunting as there is very few credible information about the project available publicly.
A white-paper or a project proposal consists of complete-incomplete, trivial-non trivial information. An example of complete information would be KYC documents around identity and incorporation., and an incomplete information would be the ability of the team to execute the project. An example of trivial information would be legitimacy of the community that exists to support the project and a non-trivial information would be the opportunity cost/value of the project. This is primarily a subjective judgement at large scale. Moreover, non-trivial and incomplete information requires the average player in the network to carry good knowledge. Unlike the trivial information which can be achieved by proof-of-human verification such as accreditation networks.
Hence, in a way the goal is to make an objective inference from the inter-subjective opinions, i.e to generate crowdsourced trusted signals on projects for investment.
How do you describe the game?
Please refer to the TWR Concept in the root directory or the drive link here: TWR Concept Note
What does the alpha of the game look like?
Please look at the Product Specs in the root directory to learn about the alpha release.
What are the technical requirements of this project?
Please look at the Technical Specs in the root directory to learn about the technical specifications.
further questions (WIP):
What are the success criteria of the game.
How do you create a proof of concept?
What does the beta of the game look like?
How do you determine the value of the game? How do you measure the impact value of this project?
Can this cryptoeconomic game be generalised to more domains or problems?