Let's chat with... Mike from Abundance Protocol! 🚀

In this LinkedIn series, we chat with the amazing people behind projects that have been featured in Octant's previous epochs. This time we're talking with Mike from Abundance Protocol: a novel mechanism to public goods funding based on Value Consensus. It is the first blockchain protocol that proposes a mechanism to create effective feedback loops for both public goods and negative externalities, and a way to fund any common or public good self-sustainably (without the need for external funding sources).

Abundance Protocol is a novel mechanism to public goods funding based on Value Consensus. What does it take to build a new protocol?

A lot of concentrated effort. Coming up with the mechanism and red-teaming it wasn’t easy but the real challenge is making it work in practice. It’s quite an ambitious goal – since the endgame is allowing any individual to make a living simply by creating impact in the world – but the only way to get there is one step at a time, seeing how people interact with the system, if the mechanisms work as expected, and so on.

Can you share what you’ve been up to on Farcaster?

I strongly believe that to move crypto forward we need to connect the on-chain world to the social world, and for that we need an effective social coordination layer. That is what Impact App is trying to achieve.

At the moment Farcaster still uses legacy social media’s approach of valuing content based on engagement - but that’s the model that leads to social polarization and other toxic behavior. Our approach is to value content based on community consensus; one way to think of it is if you’re an investor in the stock market, you’re looking for stocks that you think the market (consensus) undervalues at the moment and invest in those.

What we’re building on Farcaster with Impact App is a curation market. The idea is that users can look for the content that they think the community undervalues, and then stake points based on the value of the content to the community. So curators have an incentive to look for the best content and value it properly, users have an incentive to create quality content, and the community has an incentive to fund the content because it promotes growth for the ecosystem.

What’s been the biggest challenge and biggest win for you so far?

Biggest win is taking this abstract concept of “Consensus Value” and making it more concrete through Impact App. It is still in its early stages but people can already start playing with a simplified version of the mechanism. Biggest challenge is just trying to achieve something big with very limited resources.

What’s the biggest goal for 2024?

For 2024 the goal is to test out Impact App as a proof of concept, see how it can be improved, and how much value it can bring to communities on Farcaster. Once the mechanism works well and scales we can bring more crypto communities to use it, and see it how helps surface value within these communities.

Please feel free to shout out any other project in the space doing amazing things!

So many! Will give a shout out to Octant (obviously) which has a great opportunity to create something scalable and innovate in the public goods space. GreenPill.Network is another great community that tries to connect on-chain public goods funding mechanisms to impact in communities around the world. Index Wallets is also a super interesting approach to public goods funding which I recommend looking into - both for the mechanism it’s based on and for the kind of innovative thinking that I think can help push the whole space forward.