Proposal #0: Treat $ROBOT as reputation / social currency instead of as money / capital asset
For : Using $ROBOT as a reputation / social currency (creative seeking)
Against : Using $ROBOT as a money / capital asset (profit seeking)
$ROBOT will remain a governance token in both scenarios
Why Reputation / Social Currency
MetaFactory manages brands. Brand value is based on reputation. Reputation, trust, and friendship can’t be bought, only earned. If $ROBOT can be bought on the open market, new members or even brands underneath MF can use their influence to misuse and abuse the reputation and trust we have built up for their own short term benefits. For example a member can buy up tokens, push through a low quality brand, use the MF brand to promote it, then exit scam leaving the MF brand and business tarnished.
Therefore the main asset of the MF DAO is our reputation and must be protected at all costs so this should be the sole focus of our token.
I think this is all the justification we need for making $ROBOT a reputation / social currency vs money / capital asset but I’ll make a long form argument and explanation of how this model will work below.
I’ve gone back and rewatched the last 6 weeks of community calls and categorized all the use cases mentioned below.
What $ROBOT will be :
- Loyalty points (social currency) - only earned through a strict set of value adding activities like creating new design, buying products, etc.
- Social signal (reputation) - boosting products, governance proposals, etc.
- Stake token for access to X (social currency) - Private telegram groups, early product releases, etc.
- Referral fee (reputation) - reward members that bring in artists that become contributing members of MF (this could be perceived as using it as “money” but depends on context)
- Governance rights (reputation) - If there is a minimum needed to partipipate in governance and you can’t buy your way in, then having enough $ROBOT is a sign of community confidence/contribution that you are trusted to make decisions.
What $ROBOT will NOT be :
- Payment currency (money) - no “pay with ROBOT” option in store.
- Liquidity mining incentives (money + capital asset) - reputation is not liquid so we shouldn’t incentive that. With my proposed liquidity model we would be driving more sales and brand value than liquidity mining (explaied below)
- Company stock (capital asset) - holders don’t have rights to revenue, etc. This is abundantly clear by the DAO <> LLC division.
As you can see, almost all the use cases we have discussed fall under the reputation / social currency category. This proposal is aimed at formalizing and preserving this asset class by making sure we don’t pollute it with money / capital asset use cases (namely liquidity mining at the moment) and to set boundaries for the future of what the token should not do.
Using $ROBOT as a reward for participating on governance is a toss up, it’s could be seen as either a reputation or money use case just like governance rights but using it as rewards isn’t extremely value adding if this whole reputation/social currency system works.
Complementary or replacement reputation systems for the DAO could be used as well:
If any of these alternatives looks better than using $ROBOT directly as reputation then please vote AGAINST.
Why Not Money / Capital Asset
So far I have been giving reasons why $ROBOT as reputation token benefits MetaFactory but why is using it as money / capital asset not the right thing?
Most importantly the LLC handles the money and payment which frees up $ROBOT to be used for more effective use case - reputation and social currency. This is also for legal reasons as explained by MF core. If anyone wants to gain a financial profits from the MetaFactory brand, they should go through the LLC not the DAO. Therefore the ROBOT token should be completely segregate from monetary and financial use cases.
We aren’t DeFi nor have any type of financial product so a monetary asset has no connection to what we are building. YFI is a financial protocol so having profit seeking individuals running the business is symbiotic because they understand the market / products they are interacting with. Those types of individuals have no idea what it takes to run MF. For example I will make more money off $ROBOT than any other current member, yet I add nothing to the actual MF business because I have no graphic design, fashion production, marketing etc. skills. I myself am a perfect example of how using this token model is inherently flawed. Obviously other members have created more value than me so far so why do they not posses more tokens than me?
Being creative and making profit are not mutually exclusive but one must necessarily take precedence over the other. Since design oriented companies generally earn higher profit being focused on cultivating the best creatives will bring us better profits.
Also if $ROBOT is a capital asset, it inherently disadvantages people that need to sell their $ROBOT for their day to day life (mostly artists we are funding) and benefits those that have alternate revenue stream (non-value adding members) who reinvest and gain more control even though they are the less engaged. (This makes the assumption we want people to be fully committed to MF which I see as desireable)
Yes I think a pure reputation token would be as you say but thats a very limiting token model so what we have now I think is good for exploring use cases and experimenting.