Anchoring Personal Tokens in Time – Jonathan Tompkins
A trend in DeFi over the last couple months has been the proliferation of “personal” tokens. These are tokens an individual mints that represents a claim on their time or efforts. You send one $JON token to me, I burn it, then I spend an hour doing whatever it is that you ask (within reason). Recently P3terpan had some of his $MAGIC token purchased and redeemed by Totle to write a blog post for them. There are numerous iterations with a wide range of “use cases” espoused by their creators. The general theme though is that it is a claim on that persons time at some point in the future. The coins used in the John Wick movies have similar properties — they represent some claim on the services of another in the future. Instead of everyone having their own token though they all have set tasks that they perform which have a price associated with them. Demand and the person executing that task can adjust its price in real time.
- Open market for my time tokens, market forces drive price (must stay erc20 that can be on uniswap)
- Control over redemption windows (I dont want the situation of someone redeeming my tokens during a time when I cant or do not want to accept the task)
- Clear use case and expectation around time tokens. The existence of a time token shouldn’t mean that no one is allowed to talk to me or ask for help without buying my token first.
- Avoid anyone having a monopoly on my time but me
- Optimize my time – allow higher priority but more spontaneous requests to pay for access.
This is by no means a request that all experimentation cease with how these tokens can be used but is intended to lay out a framework that can be used somewhat universally and help the proliferation of this market. I think it is best to walk through an example. I want to set aside 2 hours per week of open-ended freelance time. Being a product guy and mostly interested in cryptoeconomics I think there are some tasks that I am qualified to do and could help others by doing. All of them take roughly 2 hours
- Review project info and have a call discussing token economy and provide verbal feedback
- Build a google sheet model based on your tokens behavior for testing (like this)
- Write a review of your projects economics
- Do some QA of your product and provide feedback
Lets say there are 6 weeks over the next 52 I know I do not want to make myself available, this leaves 46 2 hour slots, for 92 total hours.
To represent this I will
- Mint 92 $JON erc20 tokens.
- Mint 42 erc721 non-fungible tokens, one representing each upcoming week.
When I mint these NFTs in the future another 2 $JON will also be minted. I will list all of the NFTs for sale at a price of 2 $JON. If you know you would like my services in 6 weeks, you can buy some $JON and then lock it into that specific weeks NFT.
- Each NFT becomes “locked” (unable to be tranferred) at the beginning of its redemption week
- Each NFT expires at the end of its redemption week
- If an NFT has not been purchased at the start of its redemption week I have some control over setting a premium on top of the current price for
This model is an improvement itself as it aligns expectations of the token issuer and redeemer more clearly. 1–3 are satisfied above but not 4 &5.
Lets say you would like me to do a writeup on your project at some point before March. You had booked my time for next week (2/10) back in January. This happens to be the week before ethdenver though and another project realizes they really need some critical feedback before they go to the event mid next week to feel prepared. Normally they would be out of luck (or have to go through some negotiations which may not be worth it) but your preference is not being expressed in this scenario so we are at an inefficient state. What is needed is a liquid market for specific points of time in the future.
The next part of the model is around quantifying your need for something to be done at a specific time. Lets go back you buying the NFT representing the 2 hours of 2/10/2020. You paid 2 $JON but what also is required is for you to set a price at which you would sell this timeslot to someone that needed it more. This is where I find the COST method for efficient allocation of property as an compelling solution. It involves the owner of an asset to set a price at which they would be comfortable selling it and then paying a tax (will use 100% annual rate for the example but this can be adjusted) based on that price.
In our example you would have used your 2 $JON to initiate the purchase of the 20200210–14.JON NFT ([date].[token] naming convention) but to complete it would need to set a price (in DAI) you would be willing to sell it at. So lets say you set the price at 100 DAI. If you bought the token on January 1st of 2020 from then till the beginning of the tokens week is ~11% of the year. To buy the token at that point they would need to pay both the 2 $JON tokens + 11 DAI. This DAI is streamed to the NFT continuously.
At this point a couple things can happen
- Nothing, you redeem the NFT with me, and we have our call
- Someone else finds the NFT at a marketplace and buys it
When an already activated and owned NFT is purchased there are 4 different components to the transaction. Assume the transaction happens on February 1 2020.
- 2 $JON tokens — These go to you, the previous holder (the initial 2 $JON you used to buy the NFT are still bonded to it)
- 100 DAI — This is split between the NFT holder (you) and the token issuer (me) by some proportion (say 80% holder, 20% issuer)
- X DAI — The new purchaser also sets a price at which they would sell (say 500 DAI), and starts a stream of 13.7 DAI to the NFT.
- The previous stream stops (2.68 DAI remaining)
In the end you still have 2 $JON to use in the future + 71.7 DAI for the inconvenience of having to reschedule.
If the 2nd buyer holds the token and redeems it on Feb 10 then in total the NFT holds:
- 2 $JON (which I Burn)
- 20 DAI (from the transaction)
- 8.32 DAI (from purchaser 1 stream)
- 13.7 DAI (from purchaser 2 stream)
This model meets all of the criteria I listed above and would be reasonably seamless to the user (need personal tokens + DAI to book) with most of the complexity hidden. With the value accruing to the NFT and then redeemed it is an easy flow for the token issuer. A legal wrapper can be generated for each NFT as well to provide some protections and clarity for all involved. Time may be fungible but my time isn’t.
Published at Mon, 10 Feb 2020 06:01:21 +0000
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