Curation Markets is a way to mint a token without a 3rd-party being involved around a topic in order to allow a group to curate and thus coordinate more easily around it.

The response to curation markets have been really great! One of the things that a lot of people want to know, is a more concrete/practical example.

And thus, I’ll quickly demonstrate a crude example around an #ethtrader token. /r/ethtrader is a sub-reddit where people discuss trading strategies around Ethereum.

Let’s assume this sub-reddit wants to have a token that represents the in-group of the people in the sub-reddit, as well as wanting to better coordinate around good trading strategies. By adding skin-in-the-game, tokenized signals to good technical analysis, the whole community can benefit from it.

We assume that the cost curve in this example is relatively simple (token price increases by 1 ETH per token bought). In practice, I designed a more complicated one.

This is how it could practically go down:

Deploy a curation market contract and set the topic as #ethtrader.

Initially, supply is 0 and cost to buy a token is 1 ETH. There is nothing in the communal pool.

Thus, person A comes in and buys a token. The state of the curation market is thus:

The new cost has changed to 2 eth. And there is 1 eth in the communal deposit. B decides to buy in as well and thus it updates again to:

Person C is also interested. And also buys in, having to pay 3 eth for the token now.

“A” decides that in order to have more weight, they buy another token, leaving the state as:

Now. The community has skin-in-the-game for this specific topic and wants to start curating good TA. Both A and B think they are the best at curating the information and stake the tokens to themselves. They stake it to the sub-topic #ethtrader.ta to indicate that they want to curate technical analysis in this community.

They now partake in curating technical analysis as it comes in. Using their tokens they back good TA. Crudely, the signals that will be generated will look something like this.

Ideally, a lot more UX will be done on how these signals are interpreted and displayed.

You can re-use your backing as a curator across multiple pieces of information. You can with your tokens back any curator (not just yourself). You can take it back if you think they suck at it. In other words, you delegate the curation to good curators.

One can re-align the tokens to other sub-topics, such as #ethtrader.lols for curating the jokes in the community, or #ethtrader.news for surfacing news in the trading community.

At the end if A thinks they want to leave, they can sell their tokens back into the communal deposit.

In this case, they broke even. But it is possible to leave with a loss or a profit as well.

Conclusion:

In this example, there was no 3rd-party involved in the creation of the tokens. It helped a community curate around information using skin-in-the-game signals specific to their topic. If they do that well, it will hopefully attract more who want to be a part of that in-group and want to help curate information in it!

There are quite a lot of potential curation communities that can come to exist. What about?

Open Source Projects?

#truffle.pullrequests? #ethereum.eips? #ethereum.research? #nodejs.features?

Music Discovery?

#music.dubstep? #music.techno?

People?

#vitalikbuterin.conferences? #vitalikbuterin.advice?

Dank Memes?

#rarepepes.verified? #rarepepes.topkek?

Decentralized Virtual Worlds?

#world.<coordinate>? #world.canon?

Feel free to contribute to the smart contracts! Let’s experiment.