Litepaper
V0.1 27 Oct 22
Moni.xyz
A Staking-Powered access protocol.
Introduction
The world is full of valuable information, each day millions of creators generate thousands of megabytes of content that is beneficial, meaningful, and important for humanity.
The Internet has brought us together, more than ever before in history, anyone can produce content and distribute it to billions of people, but yet, something is broken: the financial incentives between creators and users are hugely misaligned, and creators struggle to monetize the value they generate, while users can’t always pay for content and compensate for the value they’ve received.
We are on a mission to fundamentally change the way the Internet works
Problem
Classic micropayment services force the users to assess the value of each interaction they do on the internet, to determine if it is worth the cost, this thought places a mental cost equivalent to the energy required to make a buying decision every time a purchase is considered. This problem grows as the users explore services not only for buying but also for consuming content. If every website requires a small fee to view or access. In that case, this cost is placed on the user many times over a short period of time, this is an explored topic, and we believe we have the tools for getting rid of such mental costs that microtransactions carry by using the power of blockchain.
There are more factors that are part of the interactions between creators and consumers, media companies need to devise a low-friction method for users to pay across sites owned by dozens of different publishers, the objective could be to get rid of new log-ins and usernames needed across all websites, that would require lots of websites to take the plunge at once, agreeing on a system and payment provider which would presumably need to take a cut in order to keep operating. There are existing identity and payment providers that can help to minimize the impact of those factors, but they don’t solve it for good, we still need to deal with micropayments, fees, and mental transaction costs. We believe the users need a solution that can offer a universal identity and a service that can create a smooth experience between publishers, content creators, and content consumers while trying to minimize the friction between them.
We are used to dealing with zero-sum scenarios where the content creator offering a subscription or premium content gets paid a percentage of the transaction value. In this process, the money gets transferred from one side to another, and in the end, the gains and losses (in economic terms) sum to zero, but the content creator doesn’t even get all the money, there are intermediaries costs and other factors that make the situation a little bit more complicated.
One of the first challenges is the transaction cost or fee. Fees are not a bad thing, they are necessary and fair in the context of distributing value with those who contributed and made possible the creation of the connection between the content creator and the user, they are a necessary component of each transaction between parties.
Fees are not the only aspect that can generate a barrier in such transactions, there are more components that should be considered such as dealing with small amounts, the mental cost of starting the transaction, country barriers, economic aspects, and infrastructure requirements.
There are several ways of solving the challenges presented above and we are proud to present our proposal based on a positive-sum scenario where all the parties: the content creator, the user, and the site owner can gain, such a solution must consider Security, Scalability, Reliability, Interoperability, and Privacy.
Solution
What’s Moni?
Moni is a protocol based on DeFi that seeks to create a new way of monetizing internet resources, where all parties involved can win.
Using the power of DeFi
DeFi is an open and global financial system powered up by anyone with an internet connection that is willing to participate, bringing financial benefits to everyone. In this case, we will take advantage of such infrastructure to power our project, specifically using Staking.
Staking
Staking will be the core of our product, projects like Ethereum use a consensus mechanism that’s powered by Proof of Stake, where transactions are validated by people who invested in the blockchain via staking, and this process can generate rewards. Many crypto users use staking as a way of making their assets work for them, and we believe that the Proof of Stake concept can be applied not just to secure networks but to create a whole new set of decentralized applications.
Locked access
Locked access means content or experiences that are locked behind a single payment or subscription basis cost, we call this a Gate, users unlock such gates by paying in the traditional way.
Moni
Moni is a staking access protocol, it combines staking & locked access to create a system that can offer the possibility to create a new era of application powered by crypto with the same concept that Proof of Stake uses.
The simplest example to understand how Moni works is by imagining the scenario where you were capable of paying a monthly subscription to your favorite podcast by committing (or delegating) an amount of your crypto to the protocol, after a month (and after enjoying hundreds of minutes of this amazing podcast) you decide you want to get your crypto back. You just unlock them and you get them back from the protocol, that’s it, you get access by committing crypto, and then you can get it back.
Behind the scenes, what Moni does is put the committed crypto into stake using an interest rate protocol such as Compound protocol and rewards the owners of the gates by distributing tokens using a Rewards Formula, this formula takes into account the amount staked on behalf of the gate owner and the interest that the users could have earned by doing a classic stake. This means that the more tokens locked on behalf of the same gate, the more rewards that gate will generate. In other words, the more crypto staked in order to get access to the early mentioned podcast, the more tokens the podcast owner will get.
Flow of funds
Moni aims to subtract the bad things of micro-transactions and the mental costs involved in such a small amount of payments but leveraging a positive sum system, and the key part is that Gate owners will get revenue in exchange for their work and consumer will get their crypto back after unlocking the gate. Fees can still exist and will be paid collectively by the parties involved without noticing. The protocol is based on creating a relationship between the consumer and the creator, based on trust and powered by crypto, such compromise bound benefits both of them, and thanks to DeFi and blockchain this relationship is transparent but anonymous.
Token & Reward System
All the systems will work around the $MONI token, an ERC-20 token deployed on Polygon (TBD).
Market
104 Billion Market
This is the total size of the creator economy in 2020, this number is expected to rise to above 1 trillion by 2023.
50 million Creators
That’s the number of people around the world who consider themself a creator. 43% of those making a living wage.
Staking
From May 2020, the current total value locked in staking sits around $8 billion. However, this is expected to increase dramatically upon the launch of Ethereum 2.0. (Source). These numbers show how popular staking has become.
Tezos and EOS remain in positions of absolute leaders by locked-in staking. Staking is becoming more popular over the years, with solid projects and applications we believe we can contribute to this initiative and bring staking rewards & services to all users.
Roadmap
Last updated
