While transactions use stablecoins, rewards are dispensed in OwnYou governance tokens.
OwnYou takes fees in stablecoins. Fees will be used to fund public goods (platform development) and to buy and burn OwnYou tokens, helping to maintain monetary stability.
OwnYou tokens help align incentives, encourage participation, and spur good governance. As we discuss in the section on economics and incentives, all utility transactions are made using stablecoins.
OwnYou tokens are not securities
OwnYou tokens are not issued on the promise of future network earnings and are not securities. OwnYou tokens are issued to all stakeholders for behaviour that benefits the whole community. The higher the number of transactions, the more tokens are issued as rewards, on a sliding scale. Transactions, paid for in stablecoins, will result in fees paid into the OwnYou treasury.
Tokens will be burnt to maintain inflation
Part of those fees will be used to buy back, and burn, OwnYou tokens. The higher the number of transactions, the more OwnYou tokens are burned, lowering supply. The rate of burn will vary in proportion to the number of tokens in issuance and the velocity of transactions. While the precise mechanism is under development, the objective is to ensure the number of tokens in supply never exceeds a predefined amount. After a critical number of daily transactions-per-day are reached, the scale will tip so that number of tokens burned will match the number of tokens issued as rewards. Initially we expect the value of tokens to rise to reflect the slowing rate of new supply. In a steady state, daily rewards are equal to the proportion of fees paid to the treasury.
A fixed supply of initial tokens
Token issuance will fall over time, rewarding early adopters. The treasury will both issue tokens to stakeholders and, using minimally extractable fees, the treasury will purchase tokens from the market.
OwnYou goals and tokens incentives
OwnYou wants to help individual users harvest their personal data, safely and securely. It wants to foster technology that helps users become self-sovereign. OwnYou wants to empower individuals, placing them at the centre of the advertising ecosystem. OwnYou want to help brands develop their existing audiences and find new profitable audiences. It wants to become the source of the single highest returns on advertising spend. It wants to be a trusted platform that provides intelligent input into advertiser campaign management. OwnYou wants to become the standard in personal data management; providing intuitive technology for users to harvest and store their data but also accessible infrastructure for a community of machine learning experts, helping them turn personal data into valuable intelligence for individuals to Monetise safely and profitably. OwnYou wants to help publishers develop new readers, bridging the gap between subscribers and free riders, turning anonymous visitors into valuable traffic. OwnYou wants to be decentralised. Serving the whole community, equitably. Tokens help OwnYou create incentives and provide a powerful governance tool, allowing holders to steer future policy.
User goals and incentives
Individuals want to Monetise their data in a privacy preserving manner. They want to connect to relevant brands, at the right time, without feeling tracked and monitored. They want to be in control of their data with the freedom to express themselves, without censorship. Tokens are issued as rewards for uploading data and rewards for sharing data. Advertisers want to Monetise their existing audience, reach new audiences and remain compliant with evolving privacy regulations. They want to engage their customers, understanding and meetings their needs. Advertisers want to get the best possible return from a scarce advertising budget. Advertisers receive token rewards for using the service. The Intelligence Stack wants access to personal data in a privacy preserving manner. The Intelligence stack receives rewards for turning personal data into valuable intelligence for individuals to Monetise safely and profitably. Publishers want to develop a long-term audience and maximize the return on their advertising.
Motivation factors
Users like making money. Up until now, personal data is something that gets taken from you. Privacy is a pop-up. Individuals use OwnYou because it’s fun. They like the sense of control it gives them. They enjoy feeling that the advertising they see is a function of their data, without the surveillance that comes from “big tech”. They had heard a lot about crypto, but this was the first real world application that doesn’t feel like a Ponzi scheme. After all, they have real dollars, euros and pounds in their new digital wallet for doing nothing other than upload their personal data. They like seeing their ranking improve. And the more they contribute, the more they get paid. The Avatar is quirky too; it changes as you upload more data, to reflect how the data describes you. It changes as the data changes. You can buy additional stuff to customize it, but it is fun to see it change dynamically. You can use your Avatar in games developed for the ecosystem. And whatever you do, you are always pseudonymous (unless you want to connect with friends and family). Advertisers like connecting with real people. Knowing OwnYou is fraud-less makes a huge difference. They like the near-real time attribution data. They like being able to respect individual user privacy while also enjoying a much higher return on advertising budgets. They don’t have to put up with increasingly opaque, and ever changing, big-tech privacy policies that somehow always seem to favor the big-tech company, at the advertiser’s expense. And they can use their existing ad-tech stack, while saving on Data Management Platform fees. They feel closer to their audience and increasingly less reliant than the big tech platforms. The signalling is right, as well; it looks good to align yourself with a privacy first platform. Publishers typically prefer to develop long term subscribers who consume the full breadth of their content. It is less about selling an individual story and it is more about developing a long-term relationship. You have worked tireless to develop a unique product and subscriptions typically translate into stickier, long-term customer relationships. But some users are put off by subscriptions; they might not have the money, or perhaps they worry about a longer-term financial commitment. You want to serve these users, but you need to generate revenue. Good content doesn’t come cheap. Drowning them in advertising kills the user experience and dilutes the content. And the ROI for advertisers isn’t great. These users are still valuable but how do you Monetise them? Publishers without a paywall usually rely heavily on advertising revenues, without knowing much about their readers. OwnYou offers a third option; high quality user data that helps uplift the value of their inventory without having to rely on first party data. Fewer targeted ads improve the user experience and improves advertiser returns. You can still cultivate your premium audience and increase the value of your inventory, without having to rely only on subscriptions.
Behaviour framework - what we want users to do
We want individuals to add all their personal data. We want them to keep their data up to date. We want them to share that data, in a privacy preserving manner, with the intelligence stack. We want them to share the resulting target audience data with advertisers. We want individuals to engage with advertisers. We want advertisers to pay individuals for their data and engage them with relevant advertising. We want advertisers to reward engagement. We want publishers to attract individuals with relevant content. We want them to implement OwnYou technology that helps furnish advertisers with OwnYou generated target audience data via header bidding infrastructure. We want the Intelligence Stack and, other developers, to contribute to ecosystem technology development. We want them to produce relevant and useful target audience data while respecting personal data privacy.
Behaviour framework – what do we want user NOT to do
Competition will be fierce, and we do not want any participant to churn off the platform. At the same time, we want users to be able to move their data; self-sovereign identity and personal data portability are core values. In other words, we don’t want to gate users, but we do want all participants to remain loyal to the platform.
- We don’t want individual users to upload fake personal data.
- We don’t want advertisers or publishers to store personal data.
- We don’t want the intelligence stack to output target audience data without substance.
Incentive design – how we incentivise our desired behaviours
Stablecoins are used to compensate individuals for sharing pseudonymous personal data. OwnYou tokens are used to reward individuals for uploading authentic personal data to their personal web node. The more valuable the intelligence output, the higher the OwnYou token reward. Intelligence output is a function of advertiser ROI. The higher the advertiser’s ROAS resulting from a particular intelligence output, the higher the related token rewards. Individuals will be penalised for uploading false or misleading personal data. Using verified credentials to authenticate “real” users makes it more difficult to create fake accounts, we need to consider the risk of real people uploading fake data. Ultimately misleading or fake personal data will lead to poor advertiser ROI. To make it more difficult for bad actors, we will only release stablecoin payments once user behaviour falls within an acceptable part of the overall population distribution. If a user falls outside of “normal” behaviour parameters, with respect to clicking on ads and completion behaviour (purchasing goods, making information requests etc), funds will not be released. Individual user behaviour can be monitored via a decentralised smart contract using OwnYou Ltd as an oracle. While identifying bad actors without false positives if is a challenge, weeding out bad actors is fundamental to the success of the overall platform and an important design consideration. Also, under consideration is for a proportion of reward tokens to be locked up for a period of time that allows advertisers to challenge data provenance and authenticity. However, implementing a complaint process in a decentralised architecture, with billions of daily transactions, is not feasible. We remain confident that a transparent data framework will help reduce the prevalence of bad actors while minimising false positives. More important, good behaviour is incentivised with rewards.
- Individuals are rewarded for uploading high quality personal data.
- Advertisers are rewarded for using the system.
- Publishers are rewarded for using the system.
- The Intelligence stack is compensated in stablecoins but receives a reward in OwnYou tokens, proportional to the reliability of their output. For instance, the reward is linked to completed user actions (app downloads, user sign ups, purchased products and services etc).
How are OwnYou tokens used
- OwnYou tokens can be used to pay for services including storage and the use of the intelligence stack.
- OwnYou tokens can be used to vote for network proposals.
- Tokens will be convertible to fiat currency, stablecoins or other tokens.
- OwnYou tokens are not securities. They are not issued to stakeholders with the promise of future earnings.
System side effects and remediation
OwnYou tokens are issued to incentives stakeholder behaviour. A proportion of fees collected by the OwnYou network will be used to buy and burn OwnYou tokens, helping to rebalance supply.
