Perspective | Pledged Profit Model for Productive Asset Tokens

Although it still depends on the exogenous assets obtained to some extent, there is reason to believe that the stored value basis of these exogenous assets is stronger than the pledged project itself.

After decoupling the dependence on the growth of the value of native assets, participants should be more motivated to participate in the system, because they no longer need to worry about whether they want to all-in (“dedicate themselves”) to a small project.

Theoretically, the more the project gets, the more value the token holders who pledged the native assets will get.

What's special is that because the rewards are issued in the form of exogenous assets, the need to sell native assets has been greatly reduced. After reducing the volatility of the token price, it can be reasonably assumed that the increase in demand for native assets will coincide with the decrease in circulating supply (new token holders will participate in the pledge), and then drive the price up.

With these theoretical ideas, let's take a look at some projects that use this model.

Similar to Dai sponsored by PoolTogether, the 0x team also subsidized the liquidity reward pool with USD 5,000 worth of ETH to test the reliability of the new economic model in a short enough time. The 0x team will continue to inject value into the liquidity reward pool at a pace of $ 5,000 per period (epoch) to motivate early testers; the last subsidy will end at Epoch 9 and a total of $ 25,000 will be issued.

The current eppch ended on February 7, and 10.67 million ZRX have been pledged to compete for 31.06 eth (worth about $ 5200) in the liquidity reward pool. In other words, each ZRX token pledged can get 0.0000029 eth; or, the epoch return of the liquidity provider is 0.20%.

Although this change has created a reliable model for the value accumulation of ZRX, 0x still has to shift its focus to create a larger transaction volume. The good news is that 0x just released a liquidity aggregator for the protocol, and people now only need one API to buy any token on all major decentralized exchanges.

Looking into the future, it is interesting to see how much acceptance the decentralized exchange aggregators can achieve, and how they will affect the protocol fees created by ZRX liquidity providers.

In Ren's dynamic fee mechanism, all fees are paid in the form of tokens (BTC, ZEC, BCH, or DAI) transferred by the user; this makes the protocol's native tokens a pooled liquidity Productive assets. Ren token holders can pledge REN and obtain benefits in the form of exogenous assets, because the proceeds are not issued in native tokens, so there is naturally no selling pressure from rewards.

REN is still in the early stages of development, and they launched ChaosNet in late 2019, an unaudited, pre-production environment version of RenVM for stress testing of new virtual machines. In addition, this agreement already has 60 registered darknodes (at least 10,000 RENs need to be pledged to become Darknodes, and the return on exogenous assets is only a few dollars).

The GRT, the native token of this agreement, has not yet received much attention; however, the GRT provides a reliable economic model for value accumulation, and also abstracts the need for end users to hold native tokens: users can use ETH or DAI pays for the cost of querying data, and validators earn money by pledged GRT and run infrastructure. In addition, Graph indexer can also get GRT inflation rewards.

Orchestrator and its commissioners can earn the inflationary income of the protocol's native tokens, as well as the broadcasting fees in the form of ETH and DAI. When people pay fees to the network, both Orchestrator and its commissioners can get a proportion of the fees.

Livepeer's pledge reward is almost the highest, with an adjusted return of 18.60%. And this protocol also recently realized Streamflow upgrade and launched the token holder main site.

However, we have not been able to find data on the amount of exogenous fees that this platform has created so far. If you have a data source, please contact us and we will be happy to update this article!

Augur was one of the first token economies to offer exogenous asset rewards to their token holders. In the age of Augur v1, REP can act as an arbiter for the prediction market and earn ETH fees for honestly reporting results. However, in subsequent v2 releases, their team plans to integrate DAI as a basic asset for predicting market bets.

Therefore, the earnings of REP token holders will be converted into DAI payments. Although Augur's prediction market has so far struggled to acquire users (largely because of their oracle machine problems), upgrading to Augur v2 should simplify their token economy with a reliable value accumulation mechanism, At the same time, the oracle of the protocol is decentralized (creating a more secure data supply mechanism for the prediction market).

"Kyber will introduce a new pledge mechanism for the token model. From now on, KNC holders will be able to obtain a portion of transaction fees by pledged KNC and participates in KyberDAO."

Although they did not explicitly point out that the fees will be collected using exogenous assets such as ETH, we are very much looking forward to this model coming true with the release of KyberDAO.

In the pledge model of non-productive assets, the most striking point is that these projects do not need to collect exogenous assets and distribute them as rewards. In the eyes of many founders, it is much simpler to distribute tokens minted by their own projects than to introduce mechanisms to capture the value retained by more mature tokens.

Secondly, we believe that inflation of native tokens is a good way to maintain the balance of native token prices. Although we would like to see a return of 1,000 times, slow and reliable growth in the long run is more feasible. With this in mind, developing an issuance schedule is a good way to avoid low liquidity caused by strong pledge incentives (as is the case with Synthetix).

If anything is certain, it is that the examples described above have proven that the token economy is still developing. Although many of the added value-added operations can only be participated by those who know the technology, we have no doubt that in the future, these roles can be abstracted to ordinary users and can also get a share.

Going further, we want to emphasize the importance of the value accumulation plan. Although many projects tend to consider native tokens to be the core fuel of their ecosystem, we would like to point out that native tokens do not need to be unique and not regarded as the ultimate value in all scenarios.

In an ecosystem like Ethereum, many projects are doing very special things, and using the success of existing projects has all the advantages and disadvantages.