An interview with Simon de la Rouviere

Bounty0x recently interviewed Simon de la Rouviere regarding curation markets, blockchain, and the future of the crypto currency industry.

In today’s spotlight article we sit down with Simon de la Rouviere. He is best known for his work on the development of “Curation Markets” and Ujo Music where he serves as lead Smart Contract developer. A curation market refers to the concept of using tokens to curate information & exploring ways to mint/spawn these tokenized, curatorial markets (eg continuous token models). Examples of curation markets are available here. Most notably District0x’s Meme Factory district will be structured as a curation market.

Curation Markets are a broad concept that will ultimately allow more groups to coordinate globally around shared goals.

On a related noted, Simon recently proposed a smart contract for developing “a bot that creates, owns and sells the digital art it creates without relying on humans.”

Bounty0x believes in pushing forward the vision of the decentralized economy. Bounty0x will be one of the first districts built on the district0x network, thus bounty0x will be a decentralized autonomous organization, such that DNT token holders will participate in bounty0x governance in conjunction with a corresponding Aragon entity.

Bounty campaigns and curation markets are both effective tools for organizing and incentivizing the decentralized workforce. In that regard, bounyt0x will be seeking Simon’s Curation Market expertise in order to discover ways to utilize tokenized curation markets within the bounty0x network of bounties.

One step bounty0x is making to bring the decentralized economy closer to fruition is by enabling a feature on the bounty0x network which will enable any bounty hunters to receive payment from startups in any type of token. We will be releasing more information on this project soon. Stay tuned for more information.

Simon please tell us a little bit about your background? How did you get involved in the crypto space?

I initially found Bitcoin in 2011 stumbling through the internet. Thought it was quite interesting. Studying programming at that time, I needed to know how it worked. So, I went down a rabbit hole, and kind of never stopped.

In 2014, I went full-time in the space after finishing a Master of Arts in Socio-Informatics (studying information overload), then worked on Bitcoin/Litecoin codebases and meta layers such as Counterparty. I was quite excited to see Ethereum come along, because as a developer it was really hard to make Bitcoin codebases do the things you wanted it to. I was interested in experimenting with tokenization and Ethereum was the perfect place to do that. It’s a protocol primarily for developers and you feel a lot more welcome in this community.

Tell us something most people don’t know about you?

As a future birthday gift to myself, in October 2015, I decided to lock up 5 ETH (~$5) in a smart contract till the year 2065. 48 years to go! ;)

What excites you most about the crypto space right now?

That it is growing! We’ve always been kinda crazy, and one wondered whether the world will really take notice. But this year, 2017, it really feels like we weren’t that crazy and that everyone is coming along for the ride.

Getting thousands of new perspectives is very interesting and exciting. New people, new industries, new ideas coming from all directions. Just keeps getting more exciting.

Can you tell those of us who aren’t already familiar what projects are you working on in the crypto space?

These days I work primarily on 2 projects: Ujo Music, making independent artists more money through the improvement of the licensing system. I’m a musician myself, so this project is very dear to me. I think the crypto space has a lot of potential to improve the lives of all creators. There’s many ways to tackle these problems, and improving the way music is licensed is one of those ways.

Then secondly, a long rabbit hole of thinking of new ways to tokenize networks of value led to designing Curation Markets: a protocol that uses tokenized signals to reduce information asymmetry.

Tell us a little bit about Curation Markets, What are they and how did you come up with the idea?

By incentivizing agents to curate information through tokenized signals, Curation Markets, very broadly, aims to reduce all kinds of information asymmetry. In doing this, it can produce quite broad outcomes: things like increasing coordination and decision making around open source projects, to tokenizing memes themselves (Dogecoin on steroids essentially).

It works primarily in 2 steps: allowing interested parties to mint a communal token continuously through a smart contract (say: #football), and then using that token to stake to information that the parties feel are relevant. If the token is minted with ETH, it is then kept in a communal pool. The staking of tokens, signal through a knowable cost is what is important/relevant. If it is, more participants might want to join, increasing the amount of tokens in supply and the size of the pool. Token holders can at any point leave by burning their tokens into the pool. Thus Curation Markets form and dissolve as they are needed.

As long as the tokenized signals help reduce information asymmetry, participants will want to join as the protocol rewards them for doing that work. Some Curation Markets will be bigger or smaller, depending on the need for better information dissemination.

What are some interesting use cases for Curation Markets?

Monetizing all open source projects. Meme Markets (see: District0x’s upcoming Meme Factory). Attention Markets (get paid for your attention). Tokenized Sub-Reddits (every sub-reddit having a token). Creating autonomous artists. Incentivizing funding of public goods (rewarding curators who best direct cashflow to communal goals).

It’s very broad. In a way, it’s rethinking the modern corporation: a corporation is used for many, many things.

Where do you see the crypto space heading in the next few years?

I still think we haven’t seen anything yet, tbh. The reduction to barriers to coordinate has been so vastly reduced that I’m fairly certain, we don’t nearly understand what’s going to come. We are in the phase of blockchain technology where we are publishing a newspaper as is daily on the web and people are reading through 56kb modems. Marginal improvements over existing systems. But we haven’t the reached the stage of blockchains where we are real-time consuming news through feeds (to use an extended metaphor). A lot of innovation still is going to come.

For example, I think all ICOs currently are thinking way too much like the legacy world. It’s a round peg in a square hole. Token generation can be done continuously as it is needed to use the protocol/network/dapp. I think almost all tokens will eventually move to continuous models as it more appropriately rewards everyone involved.

Simon thanks for your time! The bounty0x team is looking forward to working with you in the future!

Learn More

To learn more about Simon de la Rouviere:

Medium: Simon de la Rouviere

Ujo Music

Twitter