Grain

[burrrata]

Description

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Grain is SourceCred’s native token. It is earned based on the flow of Cred to contributors.

Grain can be sold or used to play the SourceCred game via Boosting.

Contributions

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The SourceCred protocol makes it possible for us to calculate Grain payouts from Cred scores.

SourceGrain is the precursor to Grain.

An ERC20 to track Grain

Based on comments by @burrrata, as well as conversations with @s_ben, @tables, and @ianjdarrow, I think it may be time for us to make an ERC20 token that tracks Grain. This would tremendously simplify the process for contributors selling Grain to receive $. Currently, every transaction requires either: Going through OpenCollective + PayPal, which incurs middlemen fees of around ~13% Having PL manually send a wire to the contributor, which requires exchange of banking information, and is gener…

Grain: a project-specific, cred-powered token

A big part of SourceCred’s vision is the desire to create project-specific cryptoassets, called ‘Grain’, which represent contribution to or support of a project. Here’s an overview, as lifted from my own writings on GitHub. SourceGrain SourceGrain will make open-source software projects financially sustainable by letting them issue their own project-specific cryptoassets, called grain. Properties of Grain Grain is always project-specific. For example, “SourceCred grain” and “IPFS grain” wou…

On Floating Grain Prices

Since the launch of the CredSperiment, we’ve had a fixed redemption rate of 1 Grain = $0.01. This was a really simple way to get the system going, and assign some real value to Grain. However, this system has some serious flaws. Problems with a fixed Grain price It ties Grain issuance to external funding Grain represents “accumulated value” that’s been contributed to the project. Therefore, its issuance rate should be primarily driven by internal considerations, i.e. how much value has been add…

A Mechanism for the Weekly Grain Sale

In On Floating Grain Prices, I discuss why we’d like to switch Grain from a fixed-price redemption to a floating, market-driven price. However, constructing a reasonably robust market with only a single buyer is challenging. Before proposing a mechanism, it’s helpful to think about what constraints we are trying to satisfy, as well as what constraints we are not trying to satisfy. Constraints market driven price: the price should be set based on market dynamics (i.e. relative supply and dema…

Grain: a project-specific, cred-powered token

A big part of SourceCred’s vision is the desire to create project-specific cryptoassets, called ‘Grain’, which represent contribution to or support of a project. Here’s an overview, as lifted from my own writings on GitHub. SourceGrain SourceGrain will make open-source software projects financially sustainable by letting them issue their own project-specific cryptoassets, called grain. Properties of Grain Grain is always project-specific. For example, “SourceCred grain” and “IPFS grain” wou…

References

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Retroactive Initialization: Pre-requisite to distributing a lot more Grain

Currently, SourceCred’s cred is based almost entirely on activity-level data. As discussed at length in Supernodes: Moving past raw activity, this is a somewhat fragile metric, and misses contributions that don’t occur on GitHub or Discourse. Once we have the supernode system (i.e. Initiatives, Artifacts, and Spotlights) working, I intend to re-orient cred so that it generally flows from the artifacts and initiatives to activity. This is likely to cause some material changes in the cred distrib…

Harberger Grain License

Thanks to @burrrata, I discovered 1Hive’s Harberger’s Commons License project, which has a lot of relevance to future plans for SourceCred / Grain: The vision for Grain is that it will create a project-specific token for any open project, and thus provide a way to flow economic value to the project’s contributors, supporters, and upstream dependencies. Thus we could imagine a ‘Harberger Grain License’ as follows: I believe this has several improvements over the base HCL: It provides a fram…

Team Meeting re: On-chain Grain

[SourceCred Logo] We’re going to have our first team meeting 2019-12-19T18:00:00Z (UTC)! (same time as the community call) We’re going to be discussing setting up on-chain Grain via an ERC20 token, with @ianjdarrow, who is interested in championing it. It’ll be held on our Discord. We’ll decide at the start of the meeting whether or not to record it. @burrrata: hope to see you there

Setting up an Independent SourceCred Foundation

Shortly after SourceCred’s founding, @Protocol Labs (PL) decided to officially support the project. As part of that, I joined PL, which became the de-facto home of the SourceCred project. Since then, PL has helped the project in many ways, most notably paying me (and, for several months, @wchargin) to focus on the project full-time, providing logistical support, and acting as the initial Grain purchaser. Now that SourceCred is starting to get up and running, I think it’s time for SourceCred to …

Stacking cred with (grain/isk/mana) gravitational effects?

A thing that came to mind talking about the dynamic between cred and the second quantity. Cred flow has had this situation where being someone with higher cred can create circular reasoning. This issue is worth more cred, because a high cred person engaged with it, earning the high cred person more cred. I’m sure this has been discussed a lot before. Adding on top of this a second quantity, I wonder if this will amplify or dilute this effect. Would it sidestep the clout of high cred people bec…

SourceCred ERC-20 Token and/or DAO

SourceCred ERC-20 Token and/or DAO Status: in progress! As per this thread this initiative is in progress. @burrrata is exploring what this might look like with an Aragon DAO. Champion: @burrrata Initiative Description: Research the feasibility of minting cred and/or Grain on Ethereum. Could be a stand alone ERC-20 contract or an Aragon DAO. The solution will need to allow Cred and/or Grain to be minted and burned in order to facilitate moving tokens from the off-chain Credsperiment to th…

SourceCred in 5 minutes

What is SourceCred? SourceCred is a reputation protocol for open collaboration. At a basic level, SourceCred tracks the contributions that are made to a community project. It does this by assigning each contribution and contributor a score, called “Cred”, based on the contributions’ value to the project. You can think of SourceCred as turning community collaboration into a game. To earn high Cred scores you need to make contributions that the community values. SourceCred itself is dogfooding S…

Boosting: a prediction market on ideas

Overview Boosting is a mechanism that allows people in the community to express that they believe a contribution is undervalued; that is to say, that a contribution is receiving too little Cred. In order to boost something, the booster must have Grain. They can then “plant” the Grain in order to Boost the contribution. That causes the Cred of the contribution to increase, in proportion to the amount of Grain that was planted. The fact that Grain was planted is crucial; it means that Boosting …

SourceCred Contributor Payouts

[SourceCred Logo] Week Date Topic Issuance 1 2019-9-22 CredSperiment: Week 1 Payouts 500g 2 2019-9-29 CredSperiment Week 2 Payouts 500g 3 2019-10-06 CredSperiment Week 3 Distribution 3,000g 4 2019-10-13 CredSperiment Week 4 Distribution 3,000g 5 2019-10-20 Week 5 Grain Distribution 10,000g 6 2019-10-27 Week 6 Grain Distribution 5000g 7 2019-11-3 Week 7 Grain Distribution 5,000g 8 2019-11-10 Week 8 Grain Distribution 3,000g 9 2019-11-17 Distribution for Weeks 9 & 10 10,…

Cred/Grain Dynamics

As per this thread, creating a thread to highlight properties of Cred and Grain. The idea is to aggregate conversations and data from this forum into threads that explore a theme. If you want to add any relevant data points and/or link to relevant content from the forum, please do! Every post is a wiki so you can edit freely. This is an experiment, so set your expectations accordingly.