Unijocks proposal for grant funding.
What are we building?
The first marketplace for limited edition creative work that, by design, allows talent to rise to the top. The works are represented as tokens with limited supply and a fixed price however we integrate with uniswap to raise or lower the price depending upon demand ensuring that everything sells within the crowdsale period. The track record of each creative’s success is tied to their address. Savvy buyers can identify talent amidst the crowds (as their popularity and sales results increase disproportionately) by using tools that track on chain records. In this way genuine creative talent is promoted autonomously through the market’s web 3 payment mechanism rather than reviews or advertising like in web 2.
POS (Proof of shipping)
Here’s our testnet MVP video pushing tokens to Uniswap (the password is tokenn). This is a different usecase for this functionality than described here.
We are a team of three. Me (UK/Ireland based) and two solidity devs, Natalia and Bogdan based in Ukraine. We have worked together since early 2017 building DAOs and dApps.
What is the solution?
Having already integrated with Uniswap we had an idea: we could create a limited edition works revolution by making the token issuing contract create an initial market by pushing tokens and ETH to Uniswap BUT THEN depending on how the sale of the limited edition goods is going it continues to either send more liquidity, supply or withdraws tokens from Uniswap.
This does three things:
- It creates parallel markets - one with a fixed price and one where the price fluctuates on Uniswap depending on supply and demand. Buyers will buy on Uniswap when the price is better than the sale contract price. Where the price rises above the contract’s static price on its parallel Uniswap market our tool sends more tokens increasing supply to drive the price down. This accelerates the overall sale building hype and fomo. The UI will make this simple abstracting away complexity.
- If the goods aren’t selling, Uniswap will automatically reduce the price because our contract will send more tokens to it over time. This means that all items have to sell for the price that the market determines over time. Sales will cease at the end of the crowdsale and everything will definitely be sold.
- It creates organic marketing pressure. If you buy a limited edition painting that you think is a treasure or will be treasure, you are motivated to share the news and promote it so that the price does not drop on Uniswap harming the brand and your investment.
Why here?
Honestly, we feel like we could build this and launch it and no one would notice (boo hoo). No “ex-coinbase” story here, nor influencers to shill the project. This is a “go fast go alone go far go together” moment.
WTH does this idea come from?
I’ve been thinking about such things for a looong time; I bought fashionrep.com in 2009 after a stint at Parsons fash school with a view to disrupting talent’s route to success. Watched possible tech implementations come and go. At various points considered launching a startup but the technical solution always missed a wow factor. Now having been buidling on ethereum for 4 years it is time. Probably wont use fashionrep but just highlighting how long I’ve been looking at this particular problem.
Last year considered launching Unijocks using the solution described above. I even made an actually pair of jocks with the uniswap logo for fun, but timing just pulled me back from pushing on with the development. And I was worried about the innovation being a bit lost on a then nascent community.
Competition and how are we unique?
Interesting to see @ourZora and Fame launch but I think we were actually the first DAO to lunch a Uniswap market over a year ago having been inspired by unisocks. They are first mainnet as recently reported on The Block. Well done! Competition is good. Metafactory’s digiphysical future is also in this space.
However, the Unijocks solution differs because its not so Kanye can make more money off people selling limited edition sneakers (rather than others on secondary markets), its so underdog talent can rise up in a meritocracy and savvy shoppers can get the next big thing before it become the next big thing. Its also different than metafactory because our DAO won’t “manage and curate our product marketplace”. The market will decide which talent rises, the DAOs purpose will be curation at the inevitable dick-pick spam level, or where a user tries to game an index such as that described below.
Just think about whats possible - we can capture the average sale price to listed token price for each market created for each address (creative person). We can list creatives by growth in this index over time so that shoppers can talent spot and so that talent rises. This is great for artists especially, or NFT creators, but also good for fashion and potentially musicians. Actually, the platform is creative-type agnostic. We see the platforms insta, twitter and facebook accounts being key channels alongside website.
Use of funds
We are a UK non profit which is a good type of entity to grant fund. All funds will be donated to Natalia and Bogdan for the solidity work. A bit will be needed for design too. We can start right away.
If we can light up this space we would love xyz to have first investor dibs on a spin off, and we love crowd equity funding (tokenised if possible).
Thanks for listening )
Fraser, Natalia and Bogdan