Design Goals
This is a high-level view of AraCred. It does not intend to define mechanisms in a granular way, nor does it include all the mechanisms that might be part of an AraCred instance. It does, however, intend to provide intuition as to how the pieces fit together.
Vision
AraCred intends to empower communities to collaborate in a way that is positive-sum. It is expected that they will modify, augment, and tune the AraCred system to their own preferences. This might look like modifying the SourceCred parameters, changing DAO architectures, or creating secondary markets and use cases for on-chain tokens. AraCred does not aim to put people in a box, but rather to support and empower them to do what they want to do. We strive to design, deploy, and support mechanisms that are interoperable and encourage freedom of choice.
For this to be possible the core game mechanics of AraCred need to be as minimal as possible. That's why we're integrating with Aragon, SourceCred, and many more cool technologies. These tools are modular, interoperable, and offer maximum freedom for users and developers - which is why we're using them.
While AraCred = Aragon + Sourcecred, the most important part is not Aragon or SourceCred: it's the +. It's the bridge that combines them to create something greater than their parts. We intend to build this bridge so that you can swap out the contribution tracking algorithm from SourceCred to any other mechanism. You can also swap out any type of DAO design that you want. We will provide sane defaults that often work good enough out of the box, but we encourage experimentation and exploration.
Mechanisms
Concretely, what does all of this look like?
Off-chain
Contributions to community discussions and code will be tracked and computed off-chain. This might include the summation of chats, emoji reactions, bots interactions, Quests, and more. These will happen on centralized Web2 platforms and servers. This data can be aggregated and scored based on value metrics (what a community/project thinks is valuable). You can use any system to measure and manage value creation, however, we like SourceCred a lot and it is the default tool for this in AraCred.
On-chain
Once you have scores for contributors, you can mint tokens based on those scores. Once tokens are on-chain people can do whatever they want with them. This might look like taking out loans on your tokens, trading them, pooling them together in a MolochDAO to fund the commons around a project, putting them in a Colony to reward tasks, and much more. Whatever you want.
By giving people choices, they are empowered. People can create all sorts of dynamic and interesting mechanisms around their community. Some on-chain, some off-chain, but all awesome. This is what we want to encourage: more awesomeness.
Tokeneconomics
By separating concerns of off-chain vs on-chain mechanisms we can create robust systems that are interoperable and composable. In the current architecture of AraCred there are 3 main components:
- Off-chain contributor scores: SourceCred
- Bridge: the + of AraCred
- On-chain tokens: the world of Ethereum
The tokens you give people can have any properties you want and be part of any DAO or contract you want. To give contributors both economics and governance rights we recommend minting and managing tokens in a DAO. How this DAO is set up is unique to every community or project - but the important part is that it allows the project to be driven by and for the community.
TL;DR:
- You earn points for contributions. (off-chain)
- This then earns you tokens according to a payout strategy. (on-chain)
- Token balances are tracked in an on-chain ledger. (DAO)
- There is a market for people to buy and sell tokens. (a bonding curve as well as secondary exchanges)
- People can use their tokens for things on-chain. (Moloch, Colony, DeFi, etc...)
- People may or may not also be able to use tokens for in-game features/rewards, but to do they might have to burn, stake, or trade their tokens. (dependent on the use case of each project)