Funding the Commons | Beyond Philanthropy: Memetic Altruism and Future Prizes

[Music] [Applause] [Music] to evan and next up we'll hear from daryn zhu darin is a scientist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded and advised several synthetic biology companies he's currently working on adams.org a web3 research funding and publishing platform darren's going to take us beyond philanthropy to discuss incentives for funding public goods at scale welcome darren how's it going can you hear me all right and let's see if i get this all right let's get this screen share going and i'm actually joined here today with um let's click the run share button uh with my collaborator and colleague lawrence who has been doing some crypto economic research with me and as carol mentioned we're interested in thinking about mechanisms for funding uh public goods at scale uh beyond just philanthropic means lauren's kind of kick us off absolutely so why are we here we're approaching a world in which marginal value is too cheap to meter that means that we increasingly want to subsidize things and we eventually want to subsidize beyond a level of the limits of generosity so that's going to require us to flip the script and not rely just on asking people for money but actually move to a world where people are actually asking to give in this presentation we're going to give two classes of tools which may be useful for amplifying the allocated power of these retroactive funding dials that we've been talking about throughout the day and these classes are going to include memetic tools and economic tools and i'll start off with the medic side uh my friend kevin simler wrote a great book with robin hansen uh started discussing in one one chapter sort of the underlying motives the for for donating a charity that goes kind of beyond the altruistic and and really it's about being driven by social status whether it's visibility peer pressure uh proximity or relatability and we think um actually nfts are pretty powerful primitive for uh for for kind of achieving what we call this uh degree of memetic altruism they're both verifiable in terms of being a proof of donation but also shareable as a form of proof of social status and vitalik uh i guess now almost four years ago during the crypto kitty uh wave back in 2017 pointed out that there would be an opportunity potentially to revive this idea of charity stickers uh to help incentivize and recognize and reward the people who are actually donating to public goods while this primitive of nfts doesn't actually address the allocation or adjudication issues of public goods funding it does help address some of the social buy-in challenges that various folks i know owen mentioned earlier for trying to get something like an impact market started and so this is sort of what we've got excited about is um as carolyn mentioned we are interested in and and working on building a platform for funding science research at scale with various uh sort of crypto native primitives and i just want to highlight there are some i guess non-crypto native analog nfts in the past have been used to amplify how science is funded whether that was the list around bracelets in the early 2000s as a memetic token for raising over 100 million dollars for funding cancer research or the ice bucket challenge more recently as a sort of proto nft for funding als research clearly there are powerful tools for getting individuals excited and activated to fund research and so uh what we've been building are essentially these nft donor badges that that are awarded to contributors to public goods funding it's a a much less exclusionary mechanism compared to existing uh projects that have funded public goods either through charity or selling a limited series of nfts in this case uh contributors can donate at the level that they feel comfortable at and then we can actually calibrate the nft they receive based on some sort of contribution score uh where we can add something like referrals to that contribution score to actually amplify uh the the awareness and the funding of of these projects maximally speaking compared to auctions where bidders are sort of often incentivized to try to minimize competitors and spread spread the project uh less so so uh this nft uh donor badge system can sort of serve as this primitive for other downstream financial incentives which we're excited about uh creating certain ecosystems to further the the social buy-in um to something like this and also they can be useful for us establishing and aligning norms where these uh various high-impact projects can receive sort of ideally the best financial rewards whether those are air drop rewards where you can imagine uh art where the sort of um scarcity or rarity or desirability of it scales with the contribution score uh where you can imagine coupons being awarded uh scaled for the various contributors to these public goods projects vitalik has written a bit about uh this concept of marginal price discrimination where uh i guess in our analog world today we have discounts for veterans or aaa holders in america uh you could extend that digitally where uh organizations you know maybe you can get an ens domain for free uh as somebody who's donated certain um public goods projects and obviously the the last sort of announcement financial incentive would be uh secondary sales um and this uh mirrors some of the earlier discussions on uh certificate of impact markets uh as paul cristiano uh in his sort of 2015 experiment on impact purchases show you can imagine building a sort of robust secondary market market for some of these nft badges although that will require probably quite a bit of memetic engineering to get a secondary market off um so those are some quick examples we've also been prototyping um a prize or self that would essentially leverage uh this this uh usage of nfts to encourage people to crowdfund new prizes in this case this would be sort of a retroactive crowdfunded prize um for the coven 19 mra vaccine researchers that we're hoping to launch soon we've been embroiled in some uh traffic and tax bottlenecks but i'll hand it off to lawrence we'll talk briefly about some uh economic incentives for prospectively crowdfund funding and amplifying prizes absolutely so let's go ahead and talk about some additional economic ways that we can increase leverage and also improve allocative efficiency so let's assume this sort of retroactive price market setup that other talks have covered where you have where you have post impact you have the dow giving impact proportional rewards two projects and you also have speculators who are advanced financing these projects in order to gain exposure to these prizes maybe that market is stacked with some of the memetic features that we mentioned so now in this setup you might imagine that an investor would seek more exposure to a project than a project is targeting to raise what we could do is we could capture this excess and we could redirect it from speculative projects towards realized impact and that will leverage returns on impact and create bigger rewards for those who impact in more impactful projects so then something additional we can do on top of that is introduce a medium of exchange for the priority fee and the impact price this could give us an asset plus an exchange rate which would be useful for altruists and businesses alike in terms of offsetting impact and it will also be useful for speculators to set their bid knowing that one impact corresponds to one dollar of social benefit finally another way that we can recover money for the protocol is to unlock part of the prize for the team at some milestone and so there's some literature on this where if you um if you don't unlock all the upside until you reach a milestone like for example like you can imagine like elon musk gets more stock right this actually happens yellow must gets more stock when tesla goes past certain price uh certain milestones of stock price you can have this sort of um discontinuity where the team unlocks part of the prize after a milestone but if you do this you end up with um unaccounted for prize money and so we can recycle this difference back into the protocol and so in that particular case we would amplify again how much we allocate money from ineffective products to effective projects and further leverage the return on impact and i think that's pretty much everything that we've got wrapped up here um we can take a couple questions we only had 10 minutes so we kind of blasted through those quickly uh either now or we can uh take them off afterwards retroactively as careless said earlier on telegram yeah we have time actually for a few questions and i think the first has to do with um the atoms the adam's prize how did you decide what your first prize target would be and how do you think prize targeting will work going forward yeah for the first one i think it was important to find something that was sort of broadly important and uh applicable to society and there's sort of also this in our opinion a missed opportunity for the nobel prize foundation this year to respond uh quickly to something like this i think and so in some ways essentially decided as i guess some of these uh many of these early retroactive uh public goods funding projects are but i think the future we we we could and should open it up uh in terms of how how those prizes are determined uh you could imagine various schemes for uh identifying who who should and could be the um awardees so that's something we're we're still figuring out right now but i think to sort of start off uh we just kind of want to test this mechanism for crowdfunding new prizes in in a more um straightforward way great well thanks a lot for that thanks to darren and lawrence for giving us a new perspective on prizes and we're looking forward to hearing about the adam's prize in the future and the exciting new topics and research that will incentivize and reward so thank you for joining us [Music] [Applause] [Music] you