[Phase-1] HIP-83 Invest in Yubiai

Proof of Humanity
1

Simple Summary

Yubiai is a marketplace developed by ProofOfHumanity community members, where you can buy & sell services, digital products and physical ones using crypto deploying on mainnet eth, gnosis and bnb, this will allow:

  1. Extreme low fees in commissions & gas in every transaction.
  2. People have the possibility to use their crypto to buy and sell in a secure and transparent way.
  3. People offer their services, physical and digital products globally.

To support the development of the Yubiai Dapp, we would like to ask the PoH for funding in return for Yubiai Tokens & an increase in PoH Dapps and user adoption.

Abstract

Yubiai is a project born from the Proof of Humanity community that came together online to develop a web3 marketplace where you can buy everything with crypto. What was done so far?

At the core of Yubiai there are some protocols that give life to the platform:

  1. Gnosis Chain/BNB/ETH builds new market mechanisms for decentralized finance. Their three interoperable product lines allow you to securely create, trade, and hold digital assets on Ethereum at very cheap gas fees. Yubiai deploying on those chains is a must, enjoy the p2p transactions of everything there is on our platform at the cheapest gas prices.
  2. ProofOfHumanity a sybil resistance protocol on the blockchain, a mechanism for social identity on ethereum.
  3. Kleros Escrow, and the Dispute Resolver.
  4. Kleros Curate. “ Is this item following the marketplace rules?” By creating a list, defining guidelines and putting curation in the hands of the community you make a marketplace to operate according to our own systems of rules.
  5. TalentLayer 1 is the interoperability layer for work reputation. When you complete a job on Yubiai, you and the person you transacted with will give each other a review; growing your reputation over time. TalentLayer IDs allow freelancers on Yubiai to own your reputation as a soul-bound NFT. TalentLayer IDs are interoperable: your reputation can work on any integrated marketplaces. If you lose access to your wallet, your TalentLayer ID can be recovered to a new wallet via an emergency recovery process.

To support the team, we are asking for funding as a form of invest for future tokens from PoH over 10 ETH.

Motivation

  1. Increase adoption of PoH. This will benefit PoH ecosystem and Yubiai users due to the low gas fees.
  2. Attract users and sellers to Yubiai.
  3. Add fee for every transaction (optional) to send to the PoH treasury.

Our goal is to provide a platform where buyers & sellers meet to transact in a secure, cheap & fast way. We will build a DAO in order to have project participants be in control over the project.

We believe that bringing together PoH and YubiaiDAO would be mutually beneficial to the community. By supporting the YubiaiDAO community in technical matters, such as Gnosis Chain deployment and Zodiac integration, the launch of YubiaiDAO could be facilitated.

To enable the YubiaiDAO launch team to keep developing pre-launch, we propose a token swap in which PoH would transfer 10 ETH to support the project. The majority of the funding will go towards the development of the Yubiai Marketplace and marketing.

More information about YubiaiDAO can be found in a dedicated write-up at Lite Paper 5.

Specification

  • PoH will invest 10 ETH.
  • Received funds will be managed within the DAO multisig at yubiai.eth.
  • The signers consist of core YubiaiDAO members. If interested, a representative from PoH can join the signatories.
  • yubiai.eth will hold the minter role for YBI tokens.
  • A portion of the revenues, including but not limited to transaction fees generated on the Yubiai Marketplace, will flow back to YubiaiDAO.
  • Deployment of the Yubiai Marketplace on Gnosis/BNB &ETH.

Rationale

Yubiai tackles peer to peer transactions of services, physical & digital goods, NFTs using crypto as currency. We believe that this use case hasn’t been developed enough (most projects focusing on financial applications). Others projects attempting to create marketplaces, do not have the protocols that we are leveraging in order to provide the best and safest UX as well as all the incentives that are in place, such as the lowest fees from each transaction, leveraging the Proof Of Humanity community and being able to get the most out of their offerings for the seller and get their needs met by the buyers. The marketplace business has huge adoption of the total crypto population.

Implementation

Once this HIP gets approved, the first release of 2.5 ETH requested for development and marketing will be sent to the Yubiai’s multisig, which will administer the funds: 0x17d79CF96896c4d2aa4d4a19a2c8dD08DaFd163D.

Divided in 4 stages:

_1st & 2nd release: would go for team salaries of dev and marketing, We will start with the implementation of the fee to the poh treasury.(at the end of the second stage the deploy of Yubiai on mainnet and gnosis will be live)

_3erd and 4th release: will be for the final steps of the implementation(testing and auditing) of the fee to the poh treasury for each transaction.(would be optional)

_ $YBI airdrop will be given to PoH users that buy or sell something on Yubiai.

_10 ETH worth in DAI equally to 1:1 $YBI. i.e if at the moment of the first stage of the release eth worth 1550, then 1550 $YBI will be sent back to the PoH treasury. Capping at max 10 eth of worth i.e if 10 eth worth 15500 dai then 15500$YBI will be sent to the poh treasury at then end of the final stage.

Funds Allocation Details

Team salaries

7 ETH

Marketing

3 ETH (focusing 50% on the weeks before and during the launch). The rest to maintain a stable {but less intensive} (marketing effort for the rest of the year). This rest would be locked and would be unlocked progressively on time.

Our plan to acquire users and get traction consists in an elaborate marketing plan to raise awareness of the project. This will consist of several ways to increase visibility and grow usage of the platform, such as through paid campaigns like Search Engine Marketing and Display Ads, collaborating with influential content creators and bloggers, promoting the product on social networks, implementing referral and affiliate programs, and hosting offline events such as meetups and workshops to build community and introduce new features to attendees.

The marketing plan will feature a timeframe of 4 weeks, which will consist of conveying the message about the project and building hype around it. This will be accomplished through live demos, Q&A sessions, and Twitter Spaces over the first 2 weeks. The following weeks will focus on having a strong presence throughout all social media platforms. Once we receive funding from investors and grants, we plan on further expanding our marketing push through collaborations with influencers and KOLs.

All in all, we want to ensure that there is no possibility of failure by simplifying the setup process so that it is easy for anyone to follow and execute. Let me know if you would like to see the latest version of the marketing plan.

Total 10 ETH

References

8 Likes
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Yubiai is a great product and I’m looking forward to use it, but unless there’s a specific ROI, I think IMHO that this benefits much more Kleros than PoH (disputes arising, curation, etc.) with zero return to PoH treasury afterwards.

If I were you I would either

  • submit this proposal after the split, or
  • have you tried writing a KIP? I’m sure you can find the link to Kleros forum, or
  • have a way that each transaction returns a reasonable fee to PoH treasury.

Wish you the best.

5 Likes
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If you announce the airdrop as a condition, everyone will farm it. And then we still need more info, how much % YBI will be dropped per user? Interacting more will net more % YBI?
If Yubiai accepts to send some of those YBI tokens to the PoH, then this grant won’t necessarily be awarded at a guaranteed loss. What is the valuation of YBI marketcap, and how much YBI % allocation could be awarded to PoH treasury?

unless there’s a specific ROI, I think IMHO that this benefits much more Kleros than PoH (disputes arising, curation, etc.) with zero return to PoH treasury afterwards.

Kleros already funded this project, and afaik this project has fees dedicated for UBI burns in scope, don’t they? So this is linked to PoH ecosystem. + In order to buy/sell, users need to be registered in PoH so it is also consuming the registry and incentivizing new registered users.

If Yubiai offers a % of their ERC20 token towards the PoH treasury in exchange for the grant, it could be interesting.

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What you mean as condition ? We offer as a retribution & promise. “That everyone farms $YBI” will mean that they sell or buy something in Yubiai, that will benefit all the protocols and their users that yubiai integrates (kleros, poh, ubi, talentLayer, Push and more to come).

TBD, any suggestions ? we can do a first airdrop for the first use(i.e buy or sell something), and for a former airdrop certain cap of transactions.

Yeah we do accept to send some $YBI, for now $YBI has no valuation but we can do 1:1(if 10 eth = 1650 usd/dai then we will send $YBI 16500 to PoH treasury)

This is correct.

We do offer.

1 Like
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We can sort something out for a v2 of the smart contract so we don’t delay further more the deployment, the return are stated on the comment above and in the airdrop for every poh registered user.

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Sounds like a plan, to turn this asymmetrical agreement into something that it is actually profitable for both DAOs. Yubiai right now is having only benefits from PoH curated registry for free, the arrow of benefit now needs to be bilateral. And to be clear, airdrop of $YBI tokens is great and all but does not benefit the DAO, but the users. PoH has its own operational costs which cannot be currently paid in $YBI.

3 Likes
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what you mean for free ?

Isnt the DAO composed by all its users and potential ones ? currently PoH have a 1p1v mechanism right ?

Well every proyect is like a baby takes time to start giving “revenue”, which costs you referring to for example ? Because with the fees of every transaction on Yubiai sended to the PoH Treasury maybe the cost could be taking care.

1 Like
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Gracias por tu feedback, podemos agregar en la propuesta enviar $YBI al treasure(governor) de PoH + el airdrop a todos los q usen $YBI como ROI, que te parece Luis ?

1 Like
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Yeah but isn’t your suggestion of

have a way that each transaction returns a reasonable fee to PoH treasury

the same thing as:

Yubiai offers a % of their ERC20 token towards the PoH treasury in exchange for the grant

with less steps? Assume they, say, send 5% of their YBI to the PoH treasury. If YBI works as I expect it to (make you eligible to a % of the funds treasured in Yubiai project, including the Yubiai treasury), then, from the adminFees that go towards the Yubiai treasury, PoH treasury could receive 5%.

tldr: sending YBI to PoH treasury makes PoH a shareholder, which is equivalent to hardcoding a % in fees.

Is YBI like stock, or did I get that wrong?

2 Likes
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That is a less than ideal deal. We have no idea what the supply of those tokens are, what percentage will be actually given (and there’s a very important precedent from Yubiai team of changing deals last minute, so sorry my distrust), and what the value of that token represents over time in a predictable manner.

11

We changed the fee only due to the community feedback, all changes that were made was for the good of Yubiai and its ecosystem.

How could someone predict this ?

12

think IMHO that this benefits much more Kleros than PoH (disputes arising, curation, etc.) with zero return to PoH treasury afterwards.

I’d actually argue that Yubiai’s success would benefit PoH more than Kleros. Not every tx would net us a dispute, but every tx would net UBI burning - thus increasing the value of being registered in the registry in the first place. It’s entirely possible that thousands of txs happen on Yubiai before a signle dispute is escalated to Kleros, of course it’s also possible for a dispute to happen on the first tx but rationally speaking, even if you look at Amazon for example, although there is a large percentage of disputes on the platform there are still millions of problem-free transactions.

That is a less than ideal deal. We have no idea what the supply of those tokens are, what percentage will be actually given (and there’s a very important precedent from Yubiai team of changing deals last minute, so sorry my distrust), and what the value of that token represents over time in a predictable manner.

I do however understand the caution for downside risk of $YBI. Unlike a VC that has millions of $$ to afford risking on tokens that could go to zero, PoH need to naturally be more frugal with the usage of it’s treasury.

Perhaps there’s some way to find a middle ground? Some ideas:

  • Retroactively fund the grant, starting with n out of 10 eth with the total amount distributed on successful milestones (as defined by the community).
  • Await more clarity on tokenomics, portion of $YBI to be received by PoH in the event of funding, and/or percentage of fees redistributed to treasury directly.
  • Await some external validation before reconsidering the grant. This doesn’t need to be investment from someone else (although that would be ideal) and could include stuff like compiling a list of committed vendors on the platform, secure some MOUs with potential partners of the platform, get some big-ticket seller to commit as a vendor (for example getting the top auditor on Code4rena to list freelance code-review services). I’m just thinking aloud at this point but could be interesting to explore some external validations that the community and Yubiai team can agree on.
3 Likes
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Overall, I support the notion that funding Yubiai would benefit the PoH ecosystem and user-base. But my recommendations are a bit more nuanced than that.

TL;DR of Recommendations

  • Retroactively distribute the 10ETH to Yubiai. Agree on customer acquisition being the most important milestone to track. As a community, expect well-documented commitments from vendors to sell on Yubiai. Halt funding should customer traction be un-demonstrable by a certain time.

Recommendations expanded

At this stage, I strongly recommend that Yubiai pivot to a “business over building” mindset. Out of all the VCs I have been interfacing with for Incubator V2, not a single one has shown to be risk-on, and are all very stringent with their funding criteria. Some of which, like PANONY Group, have halted investments altogether and instead just do introductions and referrals to their investment network and portfolio.

In other words, before you approach investors like Outlier Ventures, the base should already be there. There should already be some sort of indication that even if the product is not in its best form, there is already some sort of validated product-market fit. Ideally we want to take you from one customer to five, instead of spending the three months potentially getting to one customer.

This means that founding teams on the journey to that product-market fit should bear in mind that traction is not a ‘nice to have’ for most investors – at this stage, it is a must-have. In the long run, traction helps you to gauge whether or not the idea fills a real market need. While it is so easy to get caught up in the excitement of an idea’s potential, execution is everything, and it starts with executing on the discovery and demonstration of early-stage traction.

Taken from this write-up by OV, the above quotes summarise the harsh reality of fundraising. Customers, traction, and PMF are everything. There’s no point in having a perfectly polished, fully-featured product when customer commitment is vague.

Currently, Yubiai already has testnet deployment, lite paper, code on github, and a pitch deck. This should be enough to shift focus entirely to the business side of things.

  • Start nailing down how to incentivise early vendors. Will you have a lifetime reward available only to the first x number of vendors? Will you have some sort of “founding vendor/pilot vendor” perks and features on the platform? Novelty is key to convert an audience outside the bubble of the Kleros and PoH community. Airdrops may be enough to attract users, but to land committed vendors who will anchor the Yubiai economy, you need stickier incentive programmes.

  • Consider dedicating a portion of funding received to a perpetual crowdfunding pool for PoH registration. It’s important to realise that PoH is actually user-unfriendly, and the vast majority of everyday web3 users (aka the target market of a product/service marketplace) wont even consider using the platform if they need to risk their own money in a deposit. This type of user persona will just move on to a more straightforward marketplace.

The biggest elephant in the room is that Yubiai doesn’t address the “why use the platform?” question for the average user and vendor. People who care about decentralised escrow, curation, and Sybil-resistance in a marketplace platform is far too niche to expect a considerable amount of VC interest.

To summarise, PoH should consider giving first a portion of the 10 ETH grant to bootstrap Yubiai’s effort to solve these major business problems. The release the rest as more of the above-mentioned issues are addressed.

EDIT

Apologies if the tone of my recommendations seems overly blunt. I simply want to emphasise the importance of mindful fundraising given current market conditions and risk appetite.

3 Likes
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I think it’s cool, but for the DAO it’d be better for this to be an investment yielding Yubiai tokens at the first valuation (same deal as with the Kleros Coop).

I think it should also promise that PoH will be used for airdropping tokens but maybe remove the part about UBI as it looks like the UBI project have been abandoned by its founders.

2 Likes
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Great, we would do all the changes on this proposal and remove the project and include the one that is getting support, thanks

16

This is great feedback, ill continue on dms Emmet!

17

I strongly oppose this proposal! No grant should be given before the split of the project take place

18

As requested by the author @Nachobr , the proposal has been put to vote for Phase 2
Link to the proposal Snapshot

1 Like
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nice info dude :slight_smile: keep goin