Hi. Michael here. I’ve had a dozen or so conversations over the past few weeks with folks working in crypto to better understand what to build. In addition to the on-going research, I’m developing a clearer picture of what could be built. My “north star” during this product discovery process has become “using crypto to help people do more good stuff.” Below are a few ideas of project angles. Join the discord (discord.gg/tVnyJ8JM7T) and share your thoughts. Your help is needed!
Ideas List
- An information ranking platform: Use a native token to incentive users to rank information specific to their community. Done well, this would help communities reach consensus and know where to allocate their attention. For example, which are the most pressing problems facing the Ethereum ecosystem? Or which are the most promising projects tackling climate change? Or which people are the best political leaders within the Austin community? Here’s a rough example of this called ProblemRank, which ranks ETH problems. The goal would be to improve rankings by creating a more effective evaluation mechanism over time, starting with simple votes and growing into features like reputation weighted voting, prediction market speculation, and off chain data.
- A “single purpose DAO” platform: Make it easy for users with a specific DAO goal in mind to create the smart contract that will receive DAO funds and ultimately run DAO governance. The DAO creator enters the DAO name, the project goal, the estimated funding needed, the timeline of completion (if the end date passes without the task completed, then the smart contract expires and automatically returns funds), the name of the token funders will receive in return. The goal would be to make creating DAOs with one discrete goal, like ConstitutionDAO, simple.
- Tokens pegged to “collectively relevant” real world prices: An example would be a token pegged to the cost of solar energy per kilowatt-hour. Imagine a “SolarCoin” whose price equals $1-((current cost /kWh)100)). With a cost per kWh of 6 cents, the token value would equal $1 - .06100, or 40 cents. This type of token would incentivize holders to work towards reducing the cost per kWh of solar, and keeping the cost as consistently close to $0 as possible.
- An NFT “Ideas Marketplace”: A two-sided marketplace where one side submits ideas for projects and the other side picks up those ideas to pursue them. A newly submitted idea is automatically minted into an NFT, not unlike a piece of art on opensea, and the idea submitter can select the royalty amount they want from the project. The goal of this marketplace is to decouple ideas from execution, enabling the idea people to be easily compensated for their contribution and providing executors with a rich library of valuable ideas.
- CivTracker: a freely accessible database of civilization’s pursuits. You can think about it like Wikipedia, except instead of organizing general knowledge, CivTracker organizes all the tasks the 8 billion of us are pursuing at any given time.