Last week, Andreessen Horowitz' Future published a piece I co-wrote with my good friend & old professor, Scott Kominers (← can’t sing his praises enough, follow his work!)

As a builder in web3, I’ve been concerned by the number of projects that have become overrun by a community of speculators, rather than of actual users. Much of that is due to the way they’ve been bootstrapped around a reputation system that lacks true product-market fit.

At koodos, as we’ve been navigating the idea maze with our community, we’ve been asking ourselves about our reputation system and how we can make contribution rewarding without over-financializing social capital. I previously wrote about how bad incentives ruined the internet and am acutely aware of the misalignment in incentives between users, creators & platforms today. We found that many web3 platforms are grappling with similar questions.

So in the interest of thinking in public (and thanks to Startupy’s GhostKnowledge drop), Scott and I joined forces to develop a generalizable framework. The result:

Jad Esber 🕺 @Jad_AE

>1 year ago, I was sitting in (my fav prof) @skominers' class, learning about marketplace design & dreaming up @koodos. Today, we're excited to share our 'tokenomics' essay for @a16z's Future & a framework to help web3 platforms design reputation systems A Novel Framework for Reputation-Based Systems - FutureWeb3 projects should be designed around a two-token system—one signaling reputation, the other for liquidity—that would represent people’s contributions.future.a16z.com

September 30th 2021

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TL;DR: to make the incentives work, a reputation system should separate social capital from financial capital, particularly if the former offers a clear path to the latter. Scott and I are hosting office hours for anyone who’d like to discuss further! 

To end, here’s one of my favorite quotes about koodos 💚:

"As you pass through the digital world - filled with content, ephemeral and fleeting - koodos is letting people state, ‘I was here, this meant something to me’ and giving them the opportunity to make it a part of who they are online."