WIPP Monthly: August 2021
By: Thomas Dylan Daniel
Tags: Crypto, Nftbooks, Ethereum, Nft, Bitcoin

WIPP Monthly: August 2021

Greetings, citizens of the world! Work in Progress Publishing has been hard at work for another month, and we have more exciting news for you. Not only has work continued on the NFTBook Bazaar, a project we hope to have live as a beta by September 1, 2021… we have launched our own cryptocurrency: the PAGE token. View our liquidity mining guide here.

The PAGE Token

PAGE is live on Uniswap v2 but will not be fully functional until the DAO Drop has been completed. In fact, the function of this article will be to explain why we’re giving all the tokens away and what a DAO-as-product model of DAO creation could do for DAOs in general.

First, the high-level stuff. We’ve created 10,000,000 PAGEs to release to the market on Ethereum. This is all of the PAGE we intend to ever create on ETH, as an ERC-20 token. We have plans to release 100,000,000 PAGEs on Cosmos soon, however, as the staking and governance available via Cosmos SDK appears to be the most advanced available. So the plan is to run a tentative launch in which PAGE becomes available on Ethereum and we build out proof-of-concept using grants of PAGE.

When we have arrived at a functional proof-of-concept, the intention of WIP Publishing is to build the first IBC-compatible library and launch it as a freestanding DAO governed by various mechanisms including PAGE tokens, NFTBooks, and participatory governance. The more involved people are, the more rewards and incentives they can accumulate. It is the intention of the nascent PAGE DAO to eventually put every book onto the PAGE chain, minimize transactional costs, and by so doing make all of the books available to all of the world’s people while incentivizing translations and other collaborative enterprises in the written word.

Legally, the DAO-as-product model is a rather ironclad way for an organization to release a cryptocurrency. It is important for WIPP to give up control as soon as the technology required for governance becomes functional, as market manipulation and over-reserved tokens do not play well with the SEC. So instead, the company will give rise to an organization which will soon tower above its humble beginnings and recruit other startups and groups to work beside WIPP to earn PAGEs by assisting in the mission: bring all the books to the blockchain in a way which facilitates compliance with all applicable legal statutes both American and otherwise.

The financial power of DeFi is only increasing as the algorithms become more widely used; it is now possible, therefore, to launch a technology startup without major VC interest or even much traction with angel investors because the need in the market that these folks used to fill can now be accomplished via airdrops and liquidity pools. Typical startup investors see a return on their money (which they lose access to upon investment) in 4–9 years. Providers in a liquidity pool can pull their funds, lower or raise the amount of ETH/PAGE they hold, and take profit any time they like. The value is two-way: WIPP doesn’t have so many legal hurdles to jump, which diminishes the risk and lowers expenses, and liquidity providers aren’t really investors in the traditional sense so they are able to remain more liquid themselves than investors in startup companies.

LIVE: the PAGE token on Uniswap

Though the PAGE token is already live on Uniswap, WIPP does not have sufficient Ethereum to make it liquid enough to be tradeable by the masses just yet. What this means in practice is that even small trades cause a dramatic shift in terms of the market-set value of the token, i.e., its price. Since a trade for PAGE adds ETH to the liquidity pool and takes PAGE out, and a trade for ETH does the same thing in reverse, a healthy pool needs plenty of tokens to go around so that people can buy and sell them at will.

Right now, almost nobody has any PAGE tokens. This is by design; as WIPP intends to create liquidity mining incentives to encourage others to participate in PAGE token distribution by supplying liquid Ethereum to the pool. 30% of the total PAGE supply is going to Ethereum liquidity miners, and the smart contract to distribute the rules has not yet been written. So instead of releasing the tokens to the DAO Drop Recipients who will be named in the next section of this newsletter only to see extreme volatility in a new market which could potentially represent risk for liquidity providers, the PAGE DAO founding team has chosen to wait to send the grants until liquidity mining incentives are enabled at 12:00 AM EST on August 11.

The token has virtually no circulating supply and hence is essentially frozen in time for the moment, but the initial grants will be distributed as they’re accepted by participating organizations and we hope to have them all out by September 1, 2021.

The DAO Drop

The PAGE token launch strategy reserves 15% of total PAGE supply for distribution to participating organizations from around the metaverse. This would not be possible without the social genius of founder Ezra Levinger, aka Ezincrypto. EZ has a far-reaching network of friends and allies around the metaverse, an ability which has enabled his projects to grow rapidly by contributing to a community larger than themselves. Many prominent Metaverse Communities and DAOs have members who started off at Cent (beta.cent.co) and have gone on to do remarkable things. PAGE DAO recognizes the importance of the original Cent mission; to enable creators to earn a living by creating what they love to create, and aims to take it one step further by elevating the standards of living for online creators even higher.

Creative thought and action have few limits. It is important to focus on multiple avenues if the intention is to develop technologies capable of benefiting everyone. As such, PAGE DAO’s founding team has been in touch with dozens of DAOs and other organizations throughout the metaverse. The DAO Drop strategy involves three “drops” of 550,000, 500,000, and 450,000 PAGE tokens each over a sixteen month timeframe. The initial drop will involve 10 organizations, all of whom have voiced interest in participation and will be free to participate in any way they choose. The second drop will feature five large organizations and the final drop will feature as many individual creators as possible.

The 10 organizations to receive unconditional PAGE grants of 50,000–100,000 tokens are as follows:

1. (100,000 PAGE) Cryptowriter

Cryptowriter is the first publication to pick me up and run with my writing, so thanks to them for that! Also, Cryptowriter has been a supporter of the project that led to PAGE longer than anyone else. As a thank-you to these community leaders and as a gesture of support for the important mission of getting the word out about crypto, the top grant goes straight to Cryptowriter.

2. (50,000 PAGE) Tokensmart

Tokensmart is a Discord server where people can hang out and have fun, while also learning new things about cryptocurrency and NFT projects. WIP Publishing has had a show in Tokensmart for several months at this point — Wednesdays at 10:30AM PST, be there or be square!

3. (50,000 PAGE) Cipher

Cipher is a lot like WIPP. We even share a cofounder, EZincrypto! The Cipher mission is to do for hip hop what WIPP wants to do for books. That is, create and refine Web3.0 technologies to provide these content forms for audiences everywhere.

4. (50,000 PAGE) VR Graffiti Battles

VR Graffiti Battles needs no introduction! A metaverse art guild, VR Graffiti Battles is a visual art project PAGE DAO is proud to support.

5. (50,000 PAGE) RaidGuild

Talented developers, designers, businesspeople… RaidGuild has it all. They’re launching their own token soon, and PAGE DAO intends to work with RaidGuild to build technology. A decentralized Web3.0 skunkworks, RaidGuild is worth a look if you have a strong idea that’s ready for prime time.

6. (50,000 PAGE) LADz City

LADz City is an organization with a massive membership base and a never-ending stream of killer events all backed up by Web3.0 technologies. PAGE DAO looks forward to the partnership with LADz, and a token swap is in the works even beyond the DAO Drop in the immediate future.

7. (50,000 PAGE) MaskDAO

MaskDAO is the community side of the famous Hashmasks art project. The Hashmasks themselves are undergoing development and can now be named, so why not longer content blocks? We may find out soon!

8. (50,000 PAGE) TosDis

TosDis is the provider which is enabling the Liquidity Mining Incentive program, so our hat is off to this team! Smart contracts are difficult to work with, but an audited contract often has more than one potential application. We’re thrilled that TosDis has made their contract available to the public.

9. (50,000 PAGE) Charged Particles

Charged Particles is a revolutionary new smart contract platform for NFTs that enables users to lock things (tokens, other NFTs, be creative!) into NFTs for users to claim after they purchase.

10. (50,000 PAGE) TrustSwap

TrustSwap has served over 7500 different crypto projects over time, and we are no different at PAGE DAO. The PAGE ERC-20 token was minted with TrustSwap and while the 50,000 PAGEs that went to TrustSwap are already out, the tokens are earmarked for the TrustSwap community and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Coming Soon: Liquidity Mining Incentives

The PAGE Token will be released upon the successful automation of Liquidity Mining Incentives, powered by TosDis and Uniswap v2.

When the contract launches at Midnight EST on August 11, 3,000,000 PAGEs will be staked into it as rewards to be paid out over time to liquidity providers who choose to stake their liquidity pool tokens into the incentive pool. Simply stake ETH & PAGE into the Uniswap pool at this address and then navigate to the PAGE + ETH LP Token Staking page here. This incentive will run for 18 months from the date of launch, and will continue to incentivize Ethereum liquidity provision until it runs out.

Another 100M tokens may be launched on Cosmos at a later time, and the best thing to do will likely be to allow people to burn ERC-20 tokens to receive Cosmos versions which will enable staking and liquidity on Cosmos-native platforms while continuing to provide rewards on the Ethereum blockchain which started it all.

In the coming weeks, the organizations receiving PAGE grants will be receiving their tokens and deciding what to do with them. Some will sell, some will HODL, and some will provide liquidity. Some may institute programs to drop their tokens to DAO and/or community members, and some will devise even more complicated strategies to maximize the mutual benefit created by the unique strategy behind the PAGE token. To read more about the inspiration for this strategy, have a look at Osmosis.

As a result of this process, it may be the case that some organizations receive their tokens before others. Nothing beyond liquidity mining incentives can be done to stabilize the price of the PAGE token at this early stage, but with community-assisted price discovery, it is likely that a reasonably stable token launch is in store.

Eventually, users will be able to use PAGE tokens to trade for NFTBooks and perhaps earn rewards for certain behaviors that benefit the network as volume mining incentives are developed. PAGE DAO is an open organization and will be looking to continue to create mutually beneficial relationships with other organizations in the crypto/NFT space.

Follow us on Twitter @pagedao and @wippublishing and @thomasdylandan2 and @booksonchain to keep up with the latest, and we’ll continue to work on the Web3.0 standard for books. Everything we do will be open source, and it is impossible to even attempt to speculate about the ultimate market size and/or value of what is being created by this collaborative group of organizations working together to create a new game-theoretical model of economics: mutually assured benefit.