Anshool•The "Inspiration Network" is a public good that is decentralized and can be accessed by everyone. Copus, the browser extension, and all related infrastructure will be open-source.
A public good is a commodity or service that every member of a society can use without reducing its availability to all others.
To power our decentralized network, we need a mechanism to incentivize compute providers to run the indexing and payment transactions—we came up with a unique business model to do that.
The design is based on the interconnectedness of our network. Every payment across the network that a piece of content is linked to will trigger a cascade of transactions (because the sources also have their sources and it goes on and on). The compute provider will then charge a $0.01 transaction fee for each transaction.
What does this look like? Let’s say you are paid $10 and your content credits 10% to two sources (20% total). The sources will earn ($10*10%) – $0.01 = $0.99
As the network grows bigger with more interconnections between the content, one payment action can trigger hundreds and thousands of auto-transactions, as the revenue stream reaches all the connected content. The micro-transaction fee can accumulate to an amount that is enough to incentivize compute power providing.
The micro-transaction fee can even decrease as the network grows. In a network like Copus, charging less transaction fee can result in more overall earnings because the payment gets to reach more sources, therefore, increasing the number of transactions.
*The transaction fee also prevents infinite computation (i.e. when two pieces address each other as 100% source) which can result in software crush.
Because the transactions can be numerous and micro, we needed to replace the US Dollar with our own token "Drip" so we could minimize the transaction cost. Payment providers, such as PayPal or Stripe, usually charge more than a couple of dollars of transaction fee—too much for our use case. Therefore, we have to first convert the USD to Drip ($1 = 1 Drip) so it can flow in the network with a very low transaction fee. Drip is converted back to USD when content creators withdraw. So only two transaction fees are paid to USD payment providers: when purchasing & withdrawing Drip.
Drip's bookkeeping is publicly available on the immutable blockchain, Arweave/AO. As more of the network's participants own a Web3 wallet, we plan to eventually make Drip a cryptocurrency so no centralized entity or personnel has the power to manipulate the system, including our team. A governance token will also be introduced in the future for content curation and network governance.
Some key benefits of our model are:
- We minimize charges from the creators' earnings to $0.01. The charge can even decrease.
- Copus is decentralized—it is censorship-resilient and has no single point of failure.
- Everyone can join the powering of the network (with a mobile device). Calculating revenue splits requires minimal computing power.
The challenge for this model is that it relies on everyone to actively address their inspirations.
Will people do it? Instead of giving a big cut to the platforms, will you share your earnings and exposure with fellow creators while others also share with you? We will witness the answer together as we go.