The time has come - you’re finally gonna be able to figure out what is it that we’re building
Since we’re getting closer to the launch of our JPG Canons, we think it could be useful to start telling people about them
This article was written by Trent - to read the whole article click here - the following is shortened and edited version for the purpose of this newsletter.
In case you just joined us, JPG publicly launched last year as a platform for people to curate NFT exhibitions. We love the exhibitions, but JPG is much more than that - the JPG Canons, which will be launched very soon, are closer to the original vision of our protocol.
The JPG Canons are crowdsourced lists of NFTs, bound to a governance and reputation system, that anyone will be able to contribute to (access will be granted through a free to mint access NFT that we’ll drop soon). The Canons are an evolution of Token Curated Registries (TCRs), so let’s briefly dive into those to understand the Canons, and slowly but surely, we’ll continue to introduce them. If after reading this, you have questions, please feel free to ask them on our Discord - no question is too dumb, and we really value feedback and opinions!
Within crypto, we often talk of “trustless” technologies (which we have discussed in a previous installment of the newsletter), but the better way to call them is “trust-minimized”. The core underpinning of these ideas of trust is really consensus mechanisms, or the ways by which agreements on the state of things are achieved. In a “decentralized” system, consensus is achieved by a network of participants.
TCRs were created around 2017, and are a subset of curation markets, systems aimed at incentivizing the reduction of information asymmetry. In their most simple original construction, TCRs are lists with each entry moderated by a form of economic governance.
There were several interesting experiments in that era around this idea including AdChain (registry for high value digital ad space), FOAM (decentralized and curated maps app), and TCRParty (registry of top CT influencers for retweeting). TCRs felt extremely blockchain-native: economically-safeguarded information by consensus of stakeholders.
In true crypto fashion, many game theory blog posts were published about proper incentive structure, the need for reputation vs. pure economic structures, the level of objectivity vs. subjectivity involved in various registries and its implications. However, TCRs did not pick up steam.
… till now (suspense created for the sake of the newsletter)
Why did TCRs fail to gain traction?
They weren’t really useful for the sources: Most of the information being curated was off-chain, and there were better off-chain sources than what was created on-chain.
Not the right incentives: If you are going to add friction to an existing type of application, you better make the outcome correspondingly valuable to that friction. The protocols were built with economically rational actors in mind, and the economic assumptions were often weak.
Governance apathy hit hard (and continues to do so): Curating a list of already existing information can feel futile, and there’s little personal or global value in it. On top of that fact, TCRs bring in economic calculations and the risk of loss. There’s the potential for reward, of course, but you must believe in the project’s long term viability. In the end, governing a TCR feels a lot like going to work.
Did they really make sense? How does one even generate value with a TCR? The data is public, so you can’t effectively charge for access to it. Instead you must charge for inclusion into it. This is only viable once the registry has become an accepted source of truth, allowing for inclusion to be a necessary step in marketing and discovery.
All of these problems are interrelated.
What would it look like to solve these problems?
Focus on information that creates cultural value, capture moments, and create communities: NFTs being the perfect fit for this
Curate information that currently lives on-chain, and which has not been properly curated.
Make them open accessible for other builders, as cultural “legos”: the base of an economically valuable TCR is laid.
Base the system upon reputational reward in a high status and high passion arena.
Rather than playing money games, play status games.
Create an incentive system around being knowledgeable in an arena people are desperate to prove they are knowledgeable.
Gamify governance and make it rewarding in and of itself, as opposed to a spreadsheet maintenance task. Shift what governance feels like.
Become the source of truth for such data by community-sourcing and making the registries publicly viewable.
By shifting the dataset and reward systems as stated above, we can begin to see more interesting, fun, and less purely economic dynamics emerge. Each new entry to the dataset feels valuable, so people are eager to participate and have their contribution recorded. Anytime new data is created, the creator of the data then needs to be included on the list to ensure discovery. The dataset then becomes more valuable, leading more users to want to contribute to its creation and their own reputation, until eventually the data set is near-complete and viewed as a primary source of information.
There are, of course, obstacles with such an approach, which we will approach as the Canons continue to evolve. For now, we believe starting with the right building blocks will allow for the emergence of viable token-curated registries, upon which many iterations and optimizations can be made.
We hope you stick around to learn more about our Canons. In the next installment, we’ll dive deeper and later, dive into our more culture-focus curation approach.