Creating UBI sinks by incentives

Universal Basic Income
1

Motivation
One of the biggest issues with UBI is the tokenomics. I read all the time “Let’s get a high quality registry first, and value will come”. But value has to come from somewhere.

Right now there’s basically two UBI sinks (that i know of):

  • Ubiburner, that has playerblocks (a Play to earn schollarship group), kleros board subscriptions, I think the rest are just individual donations
  • Vaults, most of the burned of UBI comes from this vaults.

If you do some basic math, the UBI created / year is much more than the UBI burned, orders of magnitude more. The solution to this problem comes in two parts (IMO):

  • The first is creating use cases for UBI. This could be the Yubiai marketplace that is being created, or NFTs ideas that incorporate UBI burning.

  • The second (and in my opinion, more important) is creating more UBI sinks.

Idea
UBI sinks could have a lot of shapes, here a few that I just thought of:

  • Some Play to Earn game that incorporates UBI burning (I’ve talked to Sunflower Garden creator and there’s a posibility they add an UBI sink to the game)
  • ETH staking: I love this one. You stake your ETH trough a platform and a percentage of the rewards would be dedicated to burn UBI. In the background, we could use rocketpool protocol.
  • A layer 2 that dedicates part of the fees to burn UBI, something like 1% or 2% of the fees would make a huge impact in the tokenomics
  • A DEX, this could be an exixting one or create one of our own (I’ve read, that someone might be working on this).

All these ideas are great. But i think we need some kind of incentive to get these new sinks. What do you think of creating some kind of incentive program to get people to incorporate new UBI sinks?
It could be something like: If you incorporate a sink that burns 100.000 UBIs per month, you’ll get 10.000 UBI (once).

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This UBI Sink Bounty Program sounds like a very good idea. I would support using funds of the DAO for this.

The description of the requirements for the bounty is very relevant on the creation of a HIP for this.

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I agree this specifications are really important for a future HIP, I’ll share some thoughts about it:

A person submits a new sink proposal (I don’t know where, or how, some ideas here would be apreciated). This proposal should include information about the sink, burning method of the UBI. After 3 months (from the proposal date (?) ), we calculate the amount of UBI burned and the DAO sends x% of that amount to the proposer address.

Problems to think about:

  • What if another person related to the new sink submits the proposal before the “original” proposer? for example: Let’s say I find a new P2E game and have the idea of creating a new UBI sink with it. I contact the community, talk about the idea with the devs, and once the decision is almost made, another person submits the proposal before I do

  • Burnin methods: As I understand there’s two UBI burning methods, sending UBI to null address or using ubiburner. There could be a proyect that would like to incorporate it’s own method (maybe due to gas efficiency it could create like ubiburner). In this case, someone would have to audit the code to certify that the tokens are really being burned. Maybe it’s a good idea to have only specific burning methods as options.

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Hola Juan

I really like your idea of creating an economic incentive for the people submitting a good idea.

In order to solve your concerns of the second post I would like to propose these solutions.

  • We create a pool of ideas and some of them would be selected in a period of time (Ex: Each quarter, we select the best 3 ideas of the pool to be implemented)
  • Best ideas would be selected using a system similar to the Polkadot Parachain Slot Auctions. Users could lock/stake their UBI tokens to support each proposal.
    • Winning proposal gets implemented and your proposed incentives rewards “we calculate the amount of UBI burned and the DAO sends x% of that amount to the proposer” is executed.
    • UBI stakers of that proposal gets the corresponding part according to the %amount staked
    • Idea creator gets a bonus. It could happen that there are people with really good ideas that have no possibility of staking UBI due to their financial situation; so I think it should be fair for them to get a reward.
  • Discarded ideas of that epoch could have a penalty in the UBI staked; like burning half of them. Economics in this issue have to be balanced, but again, Polkadot can be used as an example.
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Hi!

I think that is a great idea as it would be more community driven instead of individually driven. But I have a few questions.

Is the slot auction model needed here? I think one of the reason to use an auction system is due to limited space or resources (parachains in polkadot example). This is not our case, if project A starts burning UBI it doesn’t mean project B has less “resources” or “ability” to burn UBI.

Maybe this model would work even if we are not dealing with a limited resource. But it seemed counter intuitive to me. That said, I know very little about polkadot.

Either way, I think you are into something. As I said, I like the idea of making this community driven.

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Hi Juan

Thank you very much for your useful input.

You’re right and in this because we don’t have a strictly limited resource since many projects can be implemented at the same time; but anyway, there are other elements that could be considered as limited resources for the new ideas, such as: priority, developers, attention…

Community driven projects have brought us here and I think they are really great and helpful for the future; but I also think that economic incentives can have a very powerful impact that can be leverage for the common good.

Considering this, I think we could have 2 different types of proposals to get the best of both worlds:

  • Current proposals:
    • These are the current proposals driven by the community.
    • Voting: Quadratic voting by UBI address. 1 person 1 vote but with the added benefits of quadratic voting.
    • Funding: Based on community resources available.
    • Rewards: I don’t know how developers, community and all the people involved are currently rewarded (sorry about that), but these are some ideas.
      • Use a gitcoin scheme to identify contributions to the implementation
      • UBI burn methods could divert some % to fund development
    • Rate of Implementation: Community driven based on resources available
  • Incentives driven proposals:
    • This new type of proposals will use the economic incentives model to fund their development.
    • Voting: UBI locking/staking similar to Polkadot Parachain Auction model
    • Funding: Privately funded.
      • Developers and resources are paid with the money locked in the Auction.
      • It could be the money locked by the winning proposals and also even include the penalty for the discarded ones.
    • Rewards:
      • Winning proposal gets the rewards specified in the proposal “we calculate the amount of UBI burned and the DAO sends x% of that amount to the proposal”
      • UBI stakers of that proposal gets the corresponding part according to the %amount staked
      • To be considered: Creator of the proposal idea gets a reward-
    • Rate of Implementation:
      • We create a pool of ideas and some of them would be selected in a period of time (Ex: Each quarter, the best N ideas of the pool are selected)

Obviously these ideas are not polished yet and need more work and points of view, so I really encourage any one to criticize them and improve them. At the end, the benefit will be for all of us.

Regards

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All $eth sent to the address ubi.eth now goes straight to the UBI burner contract.

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