For the last year we’ve been heads down re-architecting the meme economy. We’re excited to reveal what we’ve been working on with the Meme Team Six (MTS) testnet release!

What is MTS?

MTS is a social memeing platform that creates an economy around memes! In the current meme climate, most of the value of memes is siphoned off by social media accounts with a large number of followers. The path to the top consists of plagiarism, reposts, and the removal of watermarks in the battle for meme supremacy. Instead we envision a future where meme originators are rewarded for their creativity, and early meme followers are compensated for their ability to identify viral trends ahead of time.

This looks like twitter, but for memes?

Yes! The UX is heavily inspired by twitter. You can share memes to your own profile and users can comment on the memes that you have shared. You can also follow other users and the memes they share show up in your meme stream. The meme stream is just like the tweet feed but for fresh memes. The more users you subscribe to the more curated dank memes that you’ll have in your meme stream.

How Does it Work?

The economy depends on creators uploading quality original content memes, which draws in enthusiasts to the dank memes. When viewing memes enthusiasts occasionally see ads that are placed among the memes in their meme stream. The revenue from these ads is then used to buy crypto which is used to back credits, the currency of MTS. Enthusiasts can get up to 100 free credits a day to vote on memes. Through the act of voting the credits are paid out to the actors that make up the meme economy and those actors can then redeem their credits for their underlying claim of the ad revenue.

Who are the players in the meme economy?

The platform is made up of 4 key players:

Enthusiasts

Creators

Prospectors

Curators

Enthusiasts — Meme enthusiasts are the end users of Meme Team Six. They are the type of people that always have the fresh memes that no one else in your friend group has seen, and may have even built their social standing around being the “meme guy” with the fire memes. Through the monetization of votes (upvotes and downvotes) the meme enthusiasts are what makes the meme economy go round. When the enthusiasts vote on memes they pay a 1 credit fee to perform this action. Enthusiasts get up to 100 free credits a day to spend on the meme economy, though they can buy more at the current rate if they wish to have more funds to vote with. The revenue from voting on memes flows back to the other key players in the meme economy (more details on the economics are provided later in this article).

Creators — Currently creators lack any way to monetize their creativity, and watermarks are not sufficient to protect their content from being stolen. In MTS, meme creators who upload a new meme are given cryptographic proof as being the originator of a meme. Uploading and sharing a meme is free for the meme creator. If a curator wishes to share a meme to their own stream they must pay the creator a small fee. Meme creators earn more from the meme economy as their memes are shared and voted on by other members of the community.

Prospectors — The prospectors of yore risked life and limb exploring the world in search of riches. In MTS prospectors wade through reposts and shitposts in the hopes of identifying the next “bad luck brian.” Prospectors who find a new gem signal their backing of the meme by winning the rights via a dutch auction. The prospector puts up collateral, in ETH, to participate in the auction. Each prospector cannot bid on more than 10% of the meme rights. The winning prospectors have a claim on the earnings of the meme for as long they hold the rights. At any time the prospectors can burn their rights in the meme and get back 100% of their collateral they initially put up plus their earnings from the meme proportional to the amount of rights they owned.

Curators — The curators can be thought of as your influencers on traditional social media platforms. Curators identify the best memes that have been signaled by the prospectors and share them on their profile (sharing requires a 10 credit fee if you did not create the meme). The main goal of the curator is to amass a large following of meme enthusiasts who like their memes and monetize those users through their votes.

Architecture

MTS is not only an innovative approach to the meme economy, but is also a next gen DApp built using cutting edge technology. MTS reside on a p2p network that uses a POA node to set the latest blocks. It utilizes a layer 2 scaling solution to pass checkpoint blocks to ethereum that contain a merkle root and through fraud proofs ensures that there is no unauthorized funny business with the user’s funds. The combination of a p2p network and POA mining system with a layer 2 scaling solution that checkpoints into ethereum ensures that MTS will not run into scalability issues that have impacted other dapps.

What are the user actions that are monetized?

Upvote — Cost 1 credit

Downvote — Cost 1 credit

Share (If you are the meme creator) — Free

Share (If you are sharing a meme created and uploaded by another user) — Cost 10 credits

How does revenue flow through the platform?

Currently

50% to the creator

50% to the curator*

*It is possible for the creator to also be the curator

Future

25% to the creator

25% to the stakers

20% to the curator

15% to the rights owned by the prospectors

15% to the node operators

Sharing

Full 10 credits goes to the account that meme was shared from

Will there be a token?

Yes, the layer 2 scaling solution is dependent on a staking token that is used to activate fraud proofs. In return for providing the staking security of the system stakers will get paid a percentage of revenue from votes on the platform. We will be releasing more info on the token and our token sale at some point in the future.

Testnet is Live

At this time users can do the following actions:

Upload memes

Vote on memes

Earn testnet funds — Tesnet funds have no value and will be reset from time to time

Share memes

Comment on memes

Rank on the creator and curator leaderboards

Interact with other users

What can’t be done at this time:

Prospecting and bidding on memes via the dutch auction

Cash out any earnings (the funds aren’t even real right now)

Run a node — We have not finalized a system around tracking node uptime and payments and will not be open sourcing the nodes until we have done so

Interact with the client code — We will open source this later on

View the source code of the ethereum contract — Currently all data is stored on the sidechain

Delete memes you upload

While MTS is definitely not production ready we’re just too eager to keep it under wraps any longer! We really want to get it out there and get feedback, and would love for you to participate!

There are still many bugs lurking and we’ll be working to fix them as we move forward. All account data will also be reset a few times as well. All the funds on the platform are fake money until we have a more stable version of the application.

Where do we go from here?

We really want you to play around with MTS, like really really want you to. If you encounter bugs please let us know! The comment section below is a great place to leave them. We also have a twitter and subreddit, come hangout.

We’ll be pushing updates at a healthy pace and plan to do more community outreach as we add more features.

-Friendly neighborhood memers