Curation markets with infinite staking

Extending the bandwidth of token-curated registry designs.

TCRs are a crypto-economic primitive for distributed curation. The hordes are falling in love with it. Some have predicted there’ll be a 1000 live TCRs this year. Others believe they’re overhyped and bet many examples will be wed out soon. This text will try to show how both sides can be right.

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On social scalability

TCRs have some well known limitations. First, the utility they provide needs to be above a “minimum economy size”. How much of its+140B annual spending is the digital advertising industry willing to redirect to AdChain-verified domains — what’s the sum of value applicants to the the registry will be staking to compete for? How much of the billionaire crypto investment industry are VCs willing to reallocate to tokens which happen to be in the Messari registry?

This requirement is not about the size of a list, but rather the economic value behind it. A short grocery list is unlikely to hold enough value to attract waves of applicants — unless it pertains to the Queen’s weekly supermarket plans.

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Besides this “minimum economy size”, needed to drive new applicants and incentivise curators (token holders) through price increases, there’s the issue of a “maximum bandwidth”. It’s infeasible that a curatorship base will keep growing forever to afford adjudicating over an ever growing number of items. An interesting unknown with TCRs is just how large they can become.

🎯 The canonical TCR: a narrow set of applications

TCRs are simple sorting machines. Black & white, binary registries: either you’re in, or out. They are a good fit for lists whose focal point is very objective, application has a reason to be costly, and curation expertise is neither too cheap nor too expensive. Even better if membership is capped, or naturally limited. Few real-world, valuable (that people would actually pay for) curation engines satisfy these constraints.

Objective focal point & truth: the propose-challenge game must be able to converge towards a truthful outcome, one that’s unquestionable but previously not wide open or not consensual (otherwise it may be simpler to just use an oracle).

the propose-challenge game must be able to converge towards a truthful outcome, one that’s unquestionable but previously not wide open or not consensual (otherwise it may be simpler to just use an oracle). Publicly observable evidence, cheap to adjudicate over: on one extreme, this leads to curatorship at zero marginal cost (e.g. “are this list’s websites all cookie-free?”), work that will likely be done by machines. On another extreme, we get to work that’s too expensive, and will more likely be done by an expert alone (e.g. “are the diamonds registered in this list all above 20 carats?”). TCRs are fit for anything in between, with specific shortcomings when it comes to highly controversial issues.

Justifying costly applications: a key aspect is the stake or fee (in the case of Messari) required to apply for a listing, since this is the money that ultimately moves curators. There has to be some unique value in the registry from the point of view of new entrants. Note that such cost ideally can be staked from other forms of non-financial capital, in order to allow for potentially more inclusive registries.

a key aspect is the stake or fee (in the case of Messari) required to apply for a listing, since this is the money that ultimately moves curators. There has to be some unique value in the registry from the point of view of new entrants. Note that such cost ideally can be staked from other forms of non-financial capital, in order to allow for potentially more inclusive registries. Capped or limited membership: lists with a naturally defined cap can benefit from a constant or ever-growing churn as they approach saturation and keep generating interest from potential applicants. This applies to social status tiers such as schools, clubs, VIP events, premium catalogues, and even charity, where social status signalling means philanthropists basically “spend to escalate” between tiers.

Curation markets vs. Token-curated registries

Curation Markets are a variant of Token Curated Registries that aim to achieve richer signalling (some people would rather take the first as a broader definition that encompasses the second).

By translating curatorship into a non-discrete stake-based game, we can make for a continuous vetting system as opposed to a binary one. Think “grades of approval” (0 to 1), instead of the straightforward “yes” or “no” (0 or 1). Curation markets are more flexible, though even less battle-tested, than TCRs.

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♾ Adding stakes, or “faites vos jeux”

The AdChain team has already discussed the incorporation of a prediction market to enrich signalling in the original TCR design. The 1.1 version even hints at the concept of “liquid trust pools”. Here we’ll propose an additional feature to the canonical Registry.sol contract: the possibility to add stakes towards any item in the registry. It can reduce the entrance barrier and cost to curate information, potentially increasing the throughput or bandwidth of the propose-challenge mechanism.

Each item i in the registry is associated with staked_i tokens, that signal belief in the item’s permanence in the list; and challenge_i tokens, that are staked as a signal of belief on the removal of the item.

in the registry is associated with tokens, that signal belief in the item’s permanence in the list; and tokens, that are staked as a signal of belief on the removal of the item. To add a new item to the list, the applicant needs to stake at least MIN_DEPOSIT tokens to the stake_i .

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To simplify, we set the applyStageLen to zero, effectively morphing this phase into an indefinitely extended stakingStage: an item is by default in the list from the moment it’s applied, and can be challenged for removal at any point thereon. This represents a tradeoff of security for scalability.