Multiverse Podcast Episode 3: Tokenomics Volume 1

The transcript is also available at Temi.

Michael (00:40):

Welcome back to the Hadron multiverse podcast. This is Episode 3, Tokenomics Volume 1.


Cliff (00:49):

At last, we are at tokenomics! Before we get into specific numbers and kind of dry figures, it's worth, I think, taking a zoom out and looking at how things are in the current state of blockchain and machine learning. The way things are right now for blockchain and machine learning development, it excludes 99.9% of people on earth. That's actually a pretty staggering figure. It's probably an underestimation. So it's estimated that fewer than 0.27% of people can write any kind of software code and a smaller percentage of people are able to write machine learning or smart contract code. I mean, think about like your friends in high school, for example, in high school, how many people eventually became software engineers and how many of those people do you know write smart contract codes. It's probably around that level. And then if you expand it across the rest of the world where people are maybe not quite as fortunate in the options that they can study, it's an even lower number.


Cliff (01:57):

Right off the bat, when you go into a project and you see it's like start hacking with this new coding language, that project has already excluded the vast majority of people from being able to participate directly. On the other side, fewer than 1% of people globally are accredited investors. In other words, most people in the world are also not able to participate financially with other projects. So not only can they not code the projects or build projects, they also cannot support projects early on. In this environment, we see things as the entry barriers being way, way too high for someone to start a project. And what that means is if you, unless you're one of those 0.1% of people, you're probably not going to be able to start a project, unless you just have access to lots of capital.


Cliff (02:51):

We're talking like car levels of money, where you have to hire engineers. Perhaps you have to pay for code audits, which are thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. You have to build a website, you have to have all these things lined up to start a project. And we strongly believe that only 0.1% of people can currently do blockchain or machine learning software development. But the other 99.9% of people, many of them will have great ideas. It's undeniable, right? Just because you can't code doesn't mean you don't have great ideas. So that's really the goal of our platform is to make this very difficult process of developing machine learning software in a distributed sense, much more easy for ordinary people to participate in because everyone has good ideas. Maybe not everyone can start a company, but we want to make us, at least anyone can. The difference is not obviously not everyone can be a founder.


Cliff (03:50):

Not everyone can be an entrepreneur, but if you have a good idea and you're willing to work for it, it should be possible. So the concept that is really central to the multiverse is that our projects are dApps. They're called planets. The reason we call them planets is that every project, every planet project has its own token, its own product, its own economy, its own governance, its own leadership, inflation and deflation rates. All of these things are integrated into each project and that's because every project is going to have different goals, right? Some projects are going to work directly with enterprises. Some projects are good to work with other planets. So believe it or not, there'll probably be a planet that all it does is make planet artwork for other planets. Right? And, it seems kind of random, but it actually makes sense. And there's another planet that all it does is make loans to other planet founders.


Cliff (04:47):

And all of these are third-party, they're created by other people in the community. So planets are essential to our concept, right? You're not just making a dApp in our case, we're trying to make it so that the Hadron multiverse is just like physics. It's just the physics that kind of runs the universe. But within that individual, planets can choose what they want to do with that framework. And that's where they can set things up. Like, I want to have 10 million tokens for my project and I'm going to have a 3% inflation because we want to mirror the existing real world inflation. And another saying, no, I'm going to only have like a thousand tokens and it's going to be strongly deflationary because I believe that's really what I want to emulate something like a rare metal, just for an example. I don't know if I think that's a good idea or not, but again, we're not here to impose our ideas on people.


Cliff (05:43):

We're here to just build the framework that is flexible enough so that 99.9% of people can build what they want without writing a ton of code and spending tens of thousands or more of US dollars to build something. And then only to find out that no one wants it. So I think that's like a very, very central point. We want to open it up to 99.9% of people. And we want to make sure that you can find out early if your project is going to make it, or if it seems like there's some rough edges that need to be smoothed out. So the biggest problem with making entry barriers low for people to start is that you have people who do exit scams or rug pools, right? And this is not a problem that's exclusive to crypto. This is a problem that happened in the nineties.


Cliff (06:32):

This is a problem that has happened in the twenties. It's happened over and over again. And, how do we take the blockchain ethos of visibility and dependability, and apply that also to the founding of these planet projects. And the way that we do this is that everything from the founders' stake, how much did they stake into their own project? How long are they going to invest? What are their spending plans in the lockup terms, all of those things, instead of just kind of someone just saying them in a pitch deck, they're actually all hard-coded into the smart contract when you start your planet. And what that means is that anyone who wants to stake on the planet now they're not investing in planets. They're just staking on them. By staking on them, they're still kind of giving a vote of confidence. And when you stay on the planet, you can see all of these factors.


Cliff (07:23):

You can see the vesting, you can see spending plans, founders have to pre-register sales of their own tokens from their planets. That's something that just doesn't really exist right now. Right now you've heard of projects where some of the token supply will drastically change due to essentially centralized control of a project. In this case, it's all hard-coded into the contract. And so it actually dramatically increases the barriers for bad actors. And we think that's something that is truly overdue in this space. And these things, I think, are all great. And you can do this with a lot of existing platforms. I think the difference with Hadron and also is that we open it up to the 99.9% because you can do all these things, setting your economy up, setting up your governance, leadership, inflation, deflation, all those things without writing any code, it gets turned into a smart contract.


Cliff (08:18):

We don't control it and you decide what it is, but you don't have to write code. It gets turned into a smart contract and it runs everything autonomously. And so again, we're sending up the physics for the world, the universe, and people choose what settings they want for their planet projects. We also have workers or data miners. So they are the network of people and the devices who provide the intelligence and computational power of the system. These workers are different. They actually help provide kind of the muscle to build these planets and to build their products. That can include data annotation. It can include data filtering. It could include data collection, even user testing. What's interesting and very unique in this space is that these founders can initially designate the workers' rights on their planets.


Cliff (09:14):

Essentially you can set something like automatic citizenship for workers. You can allow unionization and voting rights, and maybe even worker benefits. You can imagine if you operate in a specific region, you could potentially even offer health insurance to the workers. And I'm talking about real life health insurance. These are things that are up to the initial founders, but then what founders can do is specify if this is also can be set by governance. And, governance means that these are set by votes, by citizens of the planet. And so that becomes a very important factor where you're deciding who is going to be and is going to have a voice in your system. And again, this is all transparent. We don't dictate what a founder should do. We don't say, "Oh, you must have unionization support", or "you must have automatic citizenship for workers", but we give the framework that lets founders make these settings on their own.


Cliff (10:12):

And you can transparently see, as a worker, what your rights would be on a planet through ratings by other workers on those claimed rights because people can claim things, but not necessarily deliver them. And that way workers can make these fully informed decisions. And I think that's completely unique in the centralized and decentralized worlds, and an important step towards greater equality as an option. And so again, I think that these things are going to be laid out by the founders. And people, when they see this, they can decide that I'm going to stake on this planet because I think it's going to have great potential for growth, or I'm going to work on this planet because I think I'm going to be taken care of well on this planet, or I don't really care about my rights on this planet because I just want to make money and it's just going to do a quick job on this planet and be done. It really people can make their own decisions on this. That's the key point of the multiverse that we don't dictate what founders should do. We just give the framework that lets them make these settings.


Michael (11:13):

Citizens are something that it's a setting that the founder can set that enables individuals to become citizens. Citizens can vote and partake in governance of the planet. And one of the unique things is that not all projects can have the same citizenship requirements and not all projects need citizens. In fact, a project could choose not to have people vote on the governance and, in that case, there wouldn't be any citizens. A project could choose to have any staker that has greater than a certain amount be counted as a citizen, or they may require additional participation in order for people to become citizens. These are decisions that the founder can make when they are when they first create the project. And, also later as the project matures. The citizenship settings and parameters are all transparent to everyone who is looking to participate in the project, or not. Everyone can see these. So it's clear to everyone what the rules are for the particular planet.


Cliff (12:23):

I think some of the things you could set, for example, through governance would be inflation or deflation rates for the economy, interest rates, exit fees, even rules for citizenship. In other words, citizens can decide how future citizens are added. And, a founder can make citizenship highly exclusive or inclusive or anything in between. And again, the key is transparency, right? More people can see these settings. These settings are visible before you do any staking, working, or trading with that planet. And you can decide for yourself, what are your priorities as a staker, worker, or a trader. Overall, I'd say it's a very straightforward token model. And, the reason for that is inside the multiverse, you have quite a bit going on and we wanted to have something that was more predictable and understandable. Our entire project is about approachability and making things, especially something as complicated as machine learning on a decentralized platform, making that as approachable and understandable as possible.


Cliff (13:26):

In terms of the basics, we're looking at 25 billion tokens, fixed supply, but deflationary, and we'll get into why it's deflationary. More importantly is how these tokens are used within the multiverse. So again, there's 25 billion ERC20 tokens. And, within the multiverse inside our blockchain, there are 25 billion corresponding coins. And then once you get into the multiverse, you can essentially stake that on any of the planets that you find interesting, or you can just hold them as coins if you want. I think it's probably more interesting to stake them on projects, but think of them almost like gold at that point.


Cliff (14:08):

This is Episode 3 of the Hadron Multiverse podcast. Next episode is Tokenomics Volume 2. Thanks for joining us.