Closing The Loop In The Circular Economy

Common Wealth
10 min readOct 7, 2024

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The launch last week of Common Wealth’s Smart Staking program is another milestone in our journey to deliver on Common Wealth’s mission:

  • Inclusive, engaged community
  • Network of community, team, infrastructure & oracles
  • Rewarding participation > Aligned incentives > Legal decentralisation
  • Circular Economy — automated, autonomous, unstoppable

…all coming together in a virtuous circle.

Smart Staking is another big step towards all of those goals, binding the various parts of the ecosystem together into more of a seamless whole.

You can read more about Common Wealth’s mission in our white paper — All Street: The Blueprint.

Reasons To Stake

At its simplest, Smart Staking introduces a 3rd way to stake — staking for participation — which enables more people to join All Street and get involved day-to-day in Common Wealth, and also acts as a way for those already staking to increase their share of the benefits.

But it also introduces a ‘meta’ to Common Wealth for the first time, layering in additional mechanics and options for the engaged user. The core activities of Common Wealth — investing, due diligence, staking, community and earning rewards — are rewarded in XP and now users will have some interesting choices to make throughout their engagement in the protocol’s core workflows.

Currently, Common Wealth runs two staking programs:

Staking for reduced fees

  • Only open to fund investors
  • Only 25–35% of investors currently stake for discount

Staking for $WLTH bonus

  • Staking window is closed — no-one else can stake
  • A temporary program ending in 9 months

Currently 90%+ of stakers are staking for the $WLTH bonus and not for reduced fees in funds.

In addition, sometime in October an improvement to Staking for Discount will be pushed, more users will already have achieved maximum discount and will therefore be over-staked — and may want to use their $WLTH somewhere else.

Unless you are a fund investor or were lucky enough to participate in the $WLTH bonus program, you can not currently share in Common Wealth fully, you can not participate in governance and you can not share in any potential $WLTH Fund or protocol profits.

Enter Smart Staking

The Smart Staking program adds a third staking option to the platform — Staking for Participation — and combines all of your stakes into a single staking total score used to calculate your percentage profit share & voice. Your stake is your skin in the game.

Participating in the standalone staking programs has their native benefits — they are separate but related mechanics. Staking in any one of them also opens up full Rewards participation and guarantees a % of governance and profit.

Over time Smart Staking and rewards reinforces usage of core protocol usage and mechanics including investing, staking, community — it greases the core flywheel, incentivising community and governance. Smart Staking doubles down on ‘skin in the game’ — you must be engaged to earn (History is made by those who show up)!

Staking for participation now enables anyone to get involved with All Street at any time, regardless of whether they have invested into a fund or not. And with the improvements and expansion coming to the Promote programs, everyone will now be able to share in the rewards.

If you are already staking on the platform — here is another opportunity to increase your share.

Aggregate Benefits of Staking On Common Wealth:

  1. Reducing platform fees
  2. Increasing total staking score increases your % share of profits & voice
  3. Increasing total XP score can also increase your % share of voice
  4. Increasing total staking score increases your standing in Top50 leaderboard
  5. Increasing total staking score increases your % share of profits from the
  6. Get access to the full Promote rewards program and occasional additional rewards from our partners

Closing The Loop

In addition to the more immediate benefits above, the Smart Staking program continues delivering solutions to the challenges outlined in the All Street: The Blueprint.

All Street Access — Smart Staking broadens access to Common Wealth by encouraging all to participate in the protocol and share in the benefits. Smart Staking helps answer the question of just who is All Street and who is not, who has skin in the game, and who has not — keeping the rewards generated on All Street for the 99%.

Community, Self-governance & Aligned Incentives — Airdrops do not build community — they build attention and they help with engagement farming — but the users they bring in are ephemeral, transitory. They do not stick around and they add little to no value to communities while they are there other than generating lots of noise and support tickets! Common Wealth needs a sustainable and joined-up way to bring in new users to the ecosystem and ensure a prolonged, mutually-beneficial engagement.

Through incentivising community participation and self-governance at every level of the protocol — Common Wealth is building out the core of a sustainable ecosystem, one that is representative and inclusive and one that must aim to be self-sustaining and self-governing, while also levelling the playing field between holders/whales and active members and aiming to strike the right balance between technical and legal decentralisation and the speed at which we get there.

Gamification — One of the ingredients in the Common Wealth recipe has always been gamification. Legendary game designer Sid Meier once said — ‘A game is a series of interesting choices’.

An investor’s reduced fee amount is determined by staking 50% of their invested amount in $WLTH. If the investor stakes when $WLTH is, let’s say, $0.05 but six months later the token price has risen to $1 — how does that affect the investor’s calculus? Is the reduction in fees still worth the amount of $WLTH staked? Is there a gain to be had in unstaking at least some of the

$WLTH? How do unstaking penalties and where the stake is in its lifecycle factor in all of this?

Smart Staking effectively introduces a ‘meta’ to Common Wealth

Now with Smart Staking another layer is added. Through Staking for Participation, the investor can increase their share of any potential profit payouts as well as increase their standing in the TOP 50 Stakers leaderboard guiding the future direction of the community’s $WLTH Fund. After Account Abstraction is introduced sometime next year, will the user choose to DCA into the All Street Fund to increase their chance of profits across all of the invested venture funds or instead will they choose to DCA into Smart Staking to maximise their share of any potential platform profits?

Gamification is ultimately about changing behaviour, highlighting the consequences of both action and inaction. The points-based rewards programs (and Smart Staking) bring more interesting options to the platform, generating activity and even more data for social and security operations model. It is a big part of the ‘grease’ on the engagement flywheel — and helps Common Wealth unify and reward useful activity on the platform with a share in say of running the protocol and with the $WLTH token economy that powers it.

Are you on the Staking leaderboard yet?

Circular economy — Using $WLTH to the benefit of the protocol, enabling & incentivising community participation, generating transaction fees for the protocol, which powers the $WLTH Fund which has a built-in deflationary burn mechanic alongside any profit-generation. Common Wealth’s protocol distributes any and all profits based on the individual user’s depth of participation in the ecosystem.

Community support — Blending team and community and infrastructure as the protocol evolves towards automated, autonomous and unstoppable is how Common Wealth becomes self-generated, self-governed and self-sustaining.

Support and guidance needed for new users will be key to the platform’s success, but supporting end-user in community-run ventures is notoriously challenging. The current plan is to offer first line support for 70% of users in the Telegram channel and in the app forums via our stalwart Community Moderators and with the aid of LLM/RAG-enabled chatbots. This is why the plan is to stimulate the forums over the Telegram channel and why the moderation program needs to scale. Common Wealthcurrently does not offer any kind of expedited support — but perhaps users could spend XP to have their support case escalated? Every economy needs ‘sinks’ as well as ‘sources’.

How Do Rewards Fit Into All of This?

Most activities on the platform are awarded XP to track and incentivise engagement — including investing, staking, community engagement and voting in both fund and governance proposals.

Staking in any or all of the programs on the platform enables a user to participate in the full Rewards programs as they roll out in Q3 and Q4.XP can also be redeemed for $WLTH OR held onto and converted into share of voice during governance discussions.

Registered users on the platform who are not staking in one of the programs will be restricted in the rewards they can earn and will have fewer options for redeeming their XP. In the Promote program, for example, only 3 of the 15 missions per project will be available to non-staking users.

Investing, staking, community engagement, decentralisation — from these we can judge Common Wealth’s success/velocity. As part of this journey a user’s Staking and/or XP totals become the north star metrics for community engagement and participation on the platform and a foundational piece in the DAS part of legal decentralisation as we go forward.

Now users can visualise their Staking Total and assess their standing overall in the community and their participation in it (or not!). How close are you to inclusion in the Top 50 leaderboard and getting to oversee the management of the community’s $WLTH Fund?

The next release of the Promote program will also see a number of new automations and upgrades enhancing both operational security and competitive integrity.

The three rewards programs (Promote, Engage and Learn) are detailed more fully in the white paper — All Street: The Blueprint.

How are any potential profit payouts calculated?

There are three types of potential profit payouts:

  • Any potential fund profits are distributed to investors proportionate to their total investment and appropriate fees.
  • Any potential
  • Any potential platform / protocol profits are distributed to all Genesis NFT holders (15%) and all stakers (85%) proportionate to their total stake.

The protocol will only have profits to pay out once there is a sustainable business model in place, and the first funds have produced a profit.

Protocol profit share is distributed as follows:

Users’ Total staking amount = discount stake + bonus stake + participation stake

Therefore a users’ APY/profit share could be calculated as:

Users’ Total / APY % = Total staking amount / total $WLTH staked on platform

How is share of voice/governance calculated?

To prevent domination of governance by whales and to ensure all participants in the protocol get a fair say share of voice can be calculates same as profit share (i.e. a % of total) or can be calculated from a user’s XO, a measure of their participation and engagement on the platform.

As some users many only accumulate $WLTH while others may only accumulate XP through active participation — this mechanic provides a means of translation.

As it is expected some users may accumulate $WLTH faster than XP share of voice for $WLTH is capped to ensure fair representation for all.

Therefore a users share of voice could be calculated as:

Users’ share of voice = Staked Total as % of platform total

OR

Total XP converted to Staked total as % of platform total

Governance can’t just be: 1 person = 1 vote (does not recognise skin in the game). Nor can it be: 1 token = 1 vote (does not recognise the individual). Both of these methods would lead to disparity in representation — and if we really want All Street to be for the 99% we must compromise between the two:

1 person + $WLTH or XP (capped) = % of total vote* *Share of voice calculated from $WLTH

staked or XP, whichever is highest

This way, we ensure every person is counted, and that each has a say in proportion to their skin in the game without unduly skewing the result.

More details to come over the coming weeks and months.

How to stake?

If you are staking for reduced fees or for the $WLTH bonus then you are already enrolled in Smart Staking and do not have to do anything.

If you are staking for reduced fees and/or for the $WLTH bonus and would like to increase your share of profits and voice:

  • You can increase your stake at any time

If you are not already staking on the platform and would like to unlock full access to All Street:

  • Minimum stake of 99
  • After 3 months you can unstake at any time without penalty
  • You can increase your stake at any time

Questions that are sure to come up

  • How does XP map to
  • How is the share in governance made equivalent between total
  • What other activities can I earn XP for?
  • Where’s my place on the leaderboard? Where’s my XP??!
  • When can I redeem my XP for

It is too early to share details of something this complex while it is still being reviewed, modelled, audited, designed, and developed. The full program will roll-out over the next number of months.

What’s the plan?

Here’s how it looks for now:

Now:

  • The basic staking for participation mechanics were rolled out this week
  • next week we’ll add the ‘Staking’ tab to Portfolio as well as the ability to add to / reduce / unstake from the program

Oct/Nov:

  • XP is being tracked for some activities in the app and forums since TGE and the first five or six leaderboards will go back in the app in the next couple of weeks
  • Some new ‘Engage’ rewards activities will launch simultaneously with the leaderboards

Nov/Dec:

  • Rewards section in app to re-launch
  • Portfolio changes soon will reflect Smart Staking KPIs
  • Dec/Jan:
  • Re-launch and expansion of the ‘Promote’ program
  • Update of All Street Blueprint (our white paper)

2025:

  • Reputation rewards system
  • Support rewards system
  • Learn rewards program

In the middle of all of this, there are economic and tokenomic reviews to complete, as well as building out the backend infrastructure and automation required to operate these programs.

There will be some ambiguity for a while yet — an unfortunate consequence when building complex systems in the open.

As mentioned above, there will be a big update to the white paper to reflect the latest additions of the new fund types, staking v2, Smart Staking and the Marketplace.

There is a lot going on, on All Street these days. And we are just getting started.

By the 99%, for the 99%.

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Common Wealth
Common Wealth

Written by Common Wealth

Early-stage VC access for the 99%. Fully decentralised. Fully on-chain. The way it was meant to be. --- linktr.ee/joincommonwlth