Summary
Abundance Protocol is a novel mechanism to public goods funding based on Value Consensus. It is the first blockchain protocol that proposes a mechanism to create effective feedback loops for both public goods and negative externalities, and a way to fund any common or public good self-sustainably (without the need for external funding sources)
Our vision is an economy where any person or community can simply focus on creating impact and be rewarded based on the impact they create, where impact equals profit - an Abundance Economy.
Problem
If we look at current public goods funding mechanisms, the one that stands out the most is the consensus mechanism. While other crypto mechanisms rely on external funding and provide tens or hundreds of millions in funding to public goods, consensus mechanisms have provided over a trillion dollars in rewards for the common good of network security, and have done so self-sustainably (without the need for external funding).
Yet, consensus mechanisms only work for one specific common good. If we wanted to generalize this capability to other common and public goods we’d need an effective way to both gather the data on the impact of the goods, and a way for a community to come to consensus on what it values - without such consensus no amount of data would be sufficient to determine how much public goods contributors should be rewarded for their work.
On top of that the process would need to be credible; preventing sybil attacks and collusion, credible impact valuation, and maintaining stable currency value among others.
Solution
Abundance Protocol introduces the concept of Value Consensus: the idea is to align the economic incentives of all participants in an ecosystem such that valuing (and rewarding) public goods fairly and accurately would be in the economic self-interest of every participant.
Participants in any Abundance Ecosystem want to maximize their economic opportunity while maintaining the value of their tokens. Overvaluing public goods leads to devaluation of the currency, while undervaluing public goods leads to fewer public goods contributors in the future, and thus slower economic for the ecosystem. The dynamic equilibrium for any ecosystem is therefore where public goods are fairly evaluated based on their impact. This concept aligns the interests of all participants in the ecosystem and allows self-sustainable funding of public goods where the currency value is maintained.
The protocol integrates a consensus mechanism, a prediction market and a retroactive funding mechanism (in additional to multiple mechanisms to prevent sybil attacks, collusion, etc.) which would create a cryptoeconomic model where public goods funding can be self-sustainable and credible (see Whitepaper or check EthDenver presentation)
Abundance Protocol’s approach is then to integrate this mechanism within a decentralized social media platform. Such integration would allow users to seamlessly participate in the process, get rich data on the interests of their community, and the impact that public goods projects create, and eventually allow anyone make a living simply by creating impact for their community and the broader world.
The app could allow, for example, Octant community members to get a sense of what the community is interested in, and then would allow anyone create public goods for the benefit of the community and be rewarded through the protocol.
Milestones
- Completed research on and released a whitepaper outlining the Proof-of-Impact value consensus mechanism (https://whitepaper.abundance.id)
- Released The Abundance Economy book, describing the public goods (and negative externalities) problem space and its challenges, and how blockchain technology can address these (available for free at https://book.abundance.id)
- Ongoing work on developing the onchain dataflow for the protocol
- Initial work on user app
Project roadmap
- Impact app development
- Development of onchain dataflow
- Development of smart contracts for protocol
- Integration of onchain contracts with user app
- Testnet version of app/protocol
- Audit of smart contracts
- Initial mainnet version app/protocol
- Launch protocol on mainnet
- Progressive iteration on the user app and protocol
- Multichain integration for protocol
- Progressive integration of AI into protocol
Funding
Received $5,000 grant from Polygon. Full-time work on Abundance is currently funded from personal savings.
The goal for 2024 is to raise $100,000 in grants (from multiple sources) - this will cover full-time work on developing the protocol/impact app
Contributors
Mike Natanzon: Founder and developer of Abundance. Background in economics and architecture. Author of The Abundance Economy
Links
Website: https://abundance.id/
Whitepaper: https://whitepaper.abundance.id/
Abundance Economy book: https://book.abundance.id/
Impact App (in early development): https://impact.abundance.id/
GitHub: https://github.com/AbundanceProtocol/
Blog: https://paragraph.xyz/@abundance
Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/0xabundance.eth
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Abundance_DAO
