VALU

What if… we could design an economic system native to the internet?

In our current system we're forced to treat value and monetization as separate entities. In social media the value is the content, and the monetization is through ads and the sale of our personal data. This works well enough for the platform, but it's at the expense of the actual users.

What if monetization was dictated by the will of the users rather than generated by extracting from them? What if money was generated based purely on what people find valuable?

What if… we can create value with online engagement?

Users engage with content they find valuable.The value of content can be measured by engagement. Using DeFi primitives, it's possible to tokenize it — to turn it into money. This eliminates the need for monetization, because value itself becomes the monetization.

This is the future of social media.

How does it work?

Wendy makes a quality post, and Ryan (who is staked) signifies that he finds it valuable with a Like. This Like generates yield based on Ryan's stake, and the yield is rewarded to Wendy (as an incentive to create more quality content). Some of it is also rewarded to Ryan (as an incentive to stake).

To prevent spam, if Ryan comes across Anne's post immediately after giving Wendy a Like, and he Likes Anne's post, then less yield would be generated.

Introducing ValuDAO

ValuDAO is being built for Discord, allowing any Discord community to create their own engagement token with a simple bot command!

Thanks to Polygon’s low fees, this allows us to tokenize emoji reactions — allowing community members in a Discord community to earn tokens based on the value they provide the server!

Users can connect their wallet to Discord using Coinbase Wallet or Wallet Connect. Then, those that verify with WorldCoin’s Privacy-Preserving Proof-of-Personhood Protocol, can receive an airdrop!

From there, users can use Discord as usual, knowing that they’re being rewarded for the value they provide! 🤍

The power of engagement… power

To earn tokens with the protocol, engagement tokens (e.g. TOKEN) have to be powered up (staked), becoming 🤍TOKEN. While powered up, it’s non-tradeable. To trade it, it has to be powered down again (unstaked).

The tokens are meant to give monetary value to social value, making online engagement a yield-generating event. As long as a token is staked, it gives the user engagement power.

With every positive engagement, 80% of the yield is rewarded to the creator, incentivizing them to create quality content. 20% goes to the engager, stimulating them to participate in the community, and interact with that quality content.

No spam

As ValuDAO is all about creating quality content and valuable communities. A couple of built-in measures have been built in to prevent spam:

For example, your engagement power has a cooldown period, making sure you can’t serial-engage. Also, the protocol makes sure people cannot join one server with multiple accounts.

Other use cases

ValuDAO will soon be able to run on any platform. And because of the principles that it’s based on, any place where content is appreciated and engaged with by users is a good place for ValuDAO.

Think hotel or restaurant reviews, video and music streaming platforms… And how cool would it be if you can reward people for contributing to open source projects on Github? Or what if signing a petition on Change.org wasn’t just a vote, but a donation to a crowdfunding at the same time?

Meet the future of social media - create $VALU with online engagement.

Valu is very much a clone of Steemit with the added benefit that a) any sub-community can create their own token (we call these Engagement Spheres) and b) it's meant to work on pre-existing web2 platforms. We pay for gas so it's important that the underlying chain is low-fee (thank u Polygon!). The main contract is a hub that creates these Engagement Spheres and links them to a discord server id. When a call is made to the hub contract, the server id is used to make a call to the Engagement Sphere (which is inside of a struct, mapped to the server id). Within the Engagement Spheres, every user has a struct containing their wallet address and the last time they made an engagement (to prevent spam), and this struct is mapped to their discord id. On the bot side of things, users can link their wallet in-app (thank you WalletConnect! + Coinbase mobile) or via a quick web page link to use their Coinbase browser wallet. After that, we use WorldCoin to allow Engagement Spheres (aka discord servers that use our bot) to airdrop their members, while ensuring sybil resistance. From there, users can simply use discord as normal.