4.0 – Decentralization.
Transferring and managing information/content needs more processing power than a financial transaction. And given that speed is the critical ingredient for social communication, the Chat platform architecture is deliberately hosted on a centralized database (AWS). Unfortunately, Blockchain has proven to be an inefficient database for content management. Users do not want to pay to transfer content (regardless of cost) nor wait when sending or receiving content/information. And from a privacy standpoint, it is risky, given that content posted to the Blockchain is immutable and publicly searchable. However, in terms of token infrastructure, Blockchain’s consensus mechanism and immutability are crucial for crypto-currencies. Public transaction ledgers need to be accurate and immutable; chat feeds do not.
Jesse Walden’s progressive decentralization playbook details the roadmap to building a sustainable, compliant, and community-owned product.
- The earliest stage of building a crypto application requires all the ingredients of a typical startup: a great team, lean development, tight execution, and quick learning. During this phase, the only thing that matters is product/market fit. It is essential not to fall into the 'design by community' trap.
- Once early product traction is achieved, and the developer ecosystem is beginning to emerge. It's time to start devoting energy toward fostering harmony between passive users, active contributors, and the core team by investing heavily in product best practices, open-source projects, and good documentation. During this stage, offer bounties/grants and other incentives for third-party development. And hire community leaders to help steward open development; and introduce rough consensus on decision making.
- At this stage it will also likely make sense to employ the community membership mutual model:
It's time to decentralize by airdropping tokens to users and contributors based on the token distribution plan. Once the tokens are distributed, the following will have occurred:
- 1.The core team will have ceded majority ownership of the application, and mitigated platform risk by ensuring the product is community-owned and operated.
- 2.The token may have transmuted to a non-security, given that the service is now sufficiently decentralized — that is, independent of the efforts of a single entity that might have asymmetric information.
- 3.The company is sustainable, having retained enough tokens to benefit from fees and growth.
- 4.User-owners realize increasing returns to scale, as the cooperative economics of the service allow for better alignment and growing value.
Last modified 6mo ago