2Cents

Inspiration

The importance of internet communities has reached an inflection point. Some of the most impactful internet communities now represent entire cultural and economic movements by themselves disrupting opaque financial systems, accelerating scientific research, and exposing the rotting underbelly of legacy media institutions. And yet, throughout the history of the internet the actual contributors to these communities have never been able to capture any of the billions of dollars in value they create or guarantee their online sovereignty. However, with 2Cents we show this seemingly inevitable trade-off is becoming an artifact of legacy technology and, in part, provide a solution to the worsening state of internet authoritarianism.

What it does

2Cents is an Ethereum dApp (decentralized application) for internet communities on which users earn digital ownership stakes in their communities by posting valuable content, following a post-to-earn model. Communities on 2Cents produce their own content, have their own objectives, and earn network rewards when they grow in size and value. Through this mechanism, ownership of the 2Cents network is gradually transferred to community members in proportion to the quality of their contributions to the network.

When using 2Cents, instead of being a user you become an owner. 2Cents flips the existing ownership model of centralized alternatives on its head. Instead of being centrally owned, the 2Cents community earns ownership and participates in the financial upside of the network. Instead of being closed-source and opaque, 2Cents is open source and governed by the community. And instead of forcing third party developers to play Russian Roulette with centralized APIs, 2Cents is permissionless by design & guarantees third party developers can’t be deplatformed.

How we built it

Smart contracts in solidity deployed on Rinkeby, front-end in vue, currently using firestore for backend.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was designing our incentive mechanism/tokenomics. We designed our protocol such that the platform is inherently gamified. For example, new communities earn higher network rewards the earlier they join. Furthermore, due to the bonding curve architecture we used each individual user benefits more when they contribute early. Securing smart contracts is also challenging.