Top-ranking lists, by such metrics, could be referenced by advertisers on media bids over a decentralised impression-exchanging scheme, serving as a segmentation tool and driving revenue to listees. Objectively, if such lists have their native tokens, one could pose that each token’s value should grow in proportion to how much its list increases revenue flows to listees. It is conceivable to think of lists within lists (cryptoTubers -> best ICO reviews -> best ICO reviews nobody’s heard of in the last week).

4.b.🏆 Decentralised Oscars

An award as a list.

TCPs can be used to leverage distributed award-picking. Just like Vimeo has its Staff Picks, a video-sharing application built on TCPs, for example, could have its Crowd Picks: a list is deployed such that applicants stake to compete for its top spot, from anywhere in the world, making it more costly to participate (inflating the price of the native token through a bonding curve) as more competitors join.

Oscars may be just tradable memes. Which they are, a bit, already.

Items in the list can be ranked by the stakes behind each applicant (see “staking towards other items”, on section 3), and the list shall shrink in size from a point onwards, what constitutes the duration of the “competition”.

At each pre-defined period (hours, for Crowd Picks that “end” after a day; weeks, for the Oscars that “end” after a year), the worst-ranked applicant is put on a challenge against the second-worst-ranked, and a forced PCLR voting round determines who stays vs. leaves. Poor-rankers may just be bottomed by whales constantly, but if the public perceives a chance of them ever reaching the top, placebo effects or abrupt “game turns” can occur.

At the end of the competition, a NFT is minted for the — transparently verifiable — winner(s). Note that, for each award, voting can either be democratic (anyone can mint a token and participate) or tokens can be pre-minted and distributed to agents the issuing entity is interested in seeing participating.

4.c. 🔋 DAL (Decentralised Autonomous Lists, a.k.a. Autonomous Publishers)

A publishing entity as a self-paying list of its content. o.0

Simon de la Rouviere has floated around an idea, a couple of years ago, to breed what he called Content Producing Decentralised Autonomous Organisations. These should “host content, distribute it and incentivise people to contribute to it”. How could a TCP achieve such goals?

Picture a list that “makes money for itself”. Two means of achieving this come to mind: (1) keeping different buy/sell bonding curves for pricing its tokens, making the contract some profit on token redemptions; (2) implement a “fiscal policy at the source” on the amount of tokens being minted by network participants, or directly taking fees from transactions.

The registry contract can then trigger a utility contract that makes payments, with the list’s “cash flow”, for buying permanence (e.g. pinning on IPFS) for the content in the list, increasing storage redundancy or security as its superavit grows, or shrinking in size (see “forced PLCR voting”, on the subsection above) and cutting off listees if it becomes deficitary.

Self-paying lists of on-demand delivered content. You get the idea.

A sponsor, or kickstarter, can fund the initial costs for maintaining / distributing such a playlist of content and bet on its future ability to garner interest, generate earnings and literally self-scale. Assuming such lists’ native tokens increase in price as more applicants mint them to join in, it’s reasonable to foresee it will eventually reach equilibrium, growing and shrinking to the size it can afford.

This model is suitable for groups of producers whose content’s value is more than the sum of its parts, and whose video distribution is currently controlled by an agent not necessarily aligned in interest with the value-producing parties. That’s basically the situation for soccer clubs (valuable content producers for millions of fans) in the Brazilian National Championship. The local Series A has been broadcast by the same media group for decades, and royalty distribution is surely skewed in disfavour of clubs. On the other hand, one, or even a few of them alone, don’t make up much value for audiences if they leave the legacy agreement and stream their matches on their own (actually, that’s what some have already been doing).

4.d. ⏰ Smart programming / temporary playlists

E.g. Weekly’s favourites!

One can think of lists of trending music clips that reset every Monday morning, with “radio” dApps providing interfaces for the most prolific curator-to-fan multisided markets to compete and flourish. There can be a list whose staking token is set to be any NFT minted by the “Oscar Competition” contract, meaning if I subscribe to it, I’ll only get to see Leonardo DiCaprio and his colleagues’ latest picks. The range of possibilities here is broad.

5. 🔧 On making lists (UX and “market fit”)

Can deploying a TCP become as easy as making a list of issues on Github? If you have any suggestions, please email pedro@paratii.video 📧

10 out of 10 mothers, aunts and grandpas out there don’t understand a thing when they face the adChain registry interface for the first time. The process behind TCRs is obviously very clunky from an end-user perspective, still. And, if we ever want models like those described above to be put in practice, somebody’s got to be making these lists.

There’s natural friction stemming from the whole PLCR flow. Curators need a lot of uptime to effectively participate, due to the requirements of revealing votes and claiming payouts. Having to acquire a token beforehand is another pain.

Currently, there’s very few interfaces being tested in the open. The adChain team has set the standards, and shipped the only TCR we are aware of that’s live on the Ethereum main net. They’ve also done an amazing work on open sourcing their designs and spreading out educational material.

By adChain.

Worth noting, there’re some tradeoffs that could be taken to improve UX. In-browser wallets, like Machinomy’s Vynos, could ask users to pre-approve transactions up to a certain threshold for them to execute before requiring an explicit signature again. A TCR with “higher throughput”, and thus lower security requirements per-interaction, could prompt curators to store their votes on localStorage , without having to be urged to come back and explicitly interact again at the reveal period. What’s more, the ability to delegate stakes could avoid the average token holder from having to think about most of the process at all.

However, we must remind ourselves: the kind of curation TCRs are suited for is far from any type of massive-scale flagging-like or end-user application system. This mechanism translates (and moves around value derived from) work that’s specialised.

Another very rough estimate, again in the realm of user-generated videos: assume YouTube receives ~400.000 new clips a day; hypothesise a video library with 1% of its influx; project a network of curators who can review on average 8 videos / day; reach an estimate of ~500 reviewers. Foresee a redundancy of ~5, per video, (counting clips 2 or 3 reviewers saw, and were never challenged; also challenged clips 10 or 15 reviewers had to see and vote on), and you reach ~2500 people. Back of the envelope math shows us that, even for a huge platform (1% of YouTube’s content influx), the number of agents required in the underlying curation game remains relatively small.

The kind of work is specialised, nevertheless it deserves to be as humanised as possible. On a recent panel at ETH Buenos Aires, Teemu Paivinen reminded us of how we sometimes forget we’ve been using (and switching!) social media under zero financial incentives for over 10 years. Subjective incentives, too, play a big role in influencing human behaviour within networks. Fine-tuning block rewards can be just as important as fine-tuning market fit: lowering the costs of participation, paying off some security in exchange for scalability / decentralisation, and simplifying UX to decrease cognitive barriers are all tradeoffs we’re exploring, and are happy to discuss.

💬 Join the Curation Markets Gitter channel, if you’re into TCRs.