About Revnets
by Jango – originally shared on revnet.eth.limo
Revnets are revenue-backed networks of friends, investors, builders, donors, fee-paying consumers, and anons around the world without need for governance, management, permission, or any coordination.
Revnets are great for managing revenues and funding for open source projects and internet networks by:
- Derisking bets for investors.
- Providing custom initial boost periods for builders.
- Rewarding today’s retail consumers with tomorrow’s network growth.
- Play with revnet simulations -> sim.revnet.app
- Deploy your revnet -> revnet.app
- Ask questions or help others -> t.me/revnet_eth
- Read the yellowpaper -> revnet.pdf
- Learn through examples -> sim.revnet.app/about
Thesis
Networks should own their own growth
Investors, builders, artists, storytellers, fans, donors, and fee-paying retail consumers are all participants who help sustain a network and should all benefit from revenue growth.
Incentives should be clear to everyone, from startup to scale
Financially empowering both elders and newcomers within a framework of open, voluntary participation supports a network’s evolution by transparently reflecting everyone’s risks and contributions over time.
Rent seeking should be inefficient
Given our world of uncertainty and opportunism, networks best sustain fruitful participation when equipped with a reliable immunity instinct that efficiently protects and rewards productivity.
How it works
In practice, revnets implement Retailism:
(The following is adapted from original Retailism post)
What is Retailism
A business framework where wealth is exchanged programmatically over time from newer participants to elder ones, and where investors and customers are treated as alike participants. The “bag”, or the debt, is passed incrementally, predictably, and ceremonially from one generation of voluntary participants to the next, without need to orient towards retail extraction. Nothing is free, but things reliably tend to become more and more free as a network grows over time.
Why do we want it
Retailism is neither corporate capitalism, which defines generations through the passing of a bag along Series A, B, and C investors, eventually selling to retail who continues this cycle of amplifying narratives that pump and dump bags. Nor is it corporate non-profitism or donationism, which obfuscate risks and incentives altogether.
These are both increasingly fragile forms of production within internet-native markets since their requisite delineation between capital and labor becomes fuzzy – does an AI assist you or do you assist it? Does your crypto currency work for you or do you work for it? Do your social networks serve you or do you serve them? Hard to say, on the internet the act of investing and consuming are often intertwined, and tail-risks of a network’s failure are spread throughout it.
Retailism hints at a progression of the status quo that can outcompete within a broader capitalist marketplace of -isms by empowering the producer-consumer.
Who is it for
Devs and communities will choose a Retailist business structure when they prefer their outcome to be oriented towards maximizing the network’s self-propagation while minimizing the growth potential of any party with privileged access and exploitable liabilites. They’ll understand their work to have value while also understanding a network’s preference to work for itself once instigated.
Why now
The Retailism framework is too fragile to exist if a rent-seeking fiduciary facilitating the handling of money and the generational handoffs is required. It can only outcompete as an encoded contract between network participants enforced by a blockchain, a recent breakthrough.
It is now possible to encode this without any new code at all through onchain protocols like Juicebox.
How exactly does it work
For each network, the framework depends on only three variables:
1. Ceiling increase rate
- How much does the maximum cost to enter the network increase from one generation to the next, and how often are generations?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol by kicking off the treasury with a $TOKEN issuance rate, and using a discount rate with funding cycles to consistently decrease the issuance rate of $TOKEN forever forward, tending toward zero in quantized chunks.
2. Floor tax intensity
- How much does the minimum value reclaimed from leaving the network increase each time?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol using a redemption rate, leaving those $TOKEN holders who stick around with proportionally more as others redeem their $TOKENs for a chunk of the treasury.
3. Boost
- How will the startup work be valued? How much boosting should the network start with, favoring whom, and for how long?
- This is encodable from the Juicebox protocol using a premint of $TOKENS, and a reserved rate to devs and $TOKEN stakers effective until a future date when it is auto-removed via a scheduled funding cycle reconfiguration.
Once in motion, a network’s revenue and investments should all be routed to its revnet, the only way to access its $TOKENs.
If a liquidity pool with a better price than the current issuance rate exists, inbound payments are routed to it instead. The issuance rate dampens upward hyperbolic price manipulation of this pool by setting a price ceiling, and the redemption rate dampens downward manipulation by setting a price floor that increases with each subsequent redemption. These ensure participants a window of opportunity for each generation, with a frame that can only progress upward over time.
More
A Retailistic View on CAC and LTV
Retailism for Devs, Investors, and Customers
Observations: Network dynamics similar between atoms, cells, organisms, groups, dance parties
Implementation
Revnets and $REV are expressed using the $NANA fork of the Juicebox V3 Protocol and Uniswap Protocol, on Mainnet, Optimism, and any number of other L2s.
$REV Specifications
The Revnet Research Network (RRN) will develop tools for people to grow revnets across the internet, including at revnet.app where new revnets can be deployed and accessed. It will work with the JuiceboxDAO community to deploy a forked Juicebox Protocol that runs as a $JBX-operated revnet ($NANA), and will itself fund the development of tools it builds through a revnet that issues $REV.
The $REV revnet will have the following specification:
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Initial price ceiling | 1,000 $REV / ETH |
| Price ceiling’s increase rate | 2.5% every 28 days |
| Boost | 30,000 $REV upfront and 20% new $REV for 3 years to RRN multisig |
| Price floor’s tax intensity | 10% |
Once deployed, revnets cannot change their specification.