PegaNation Manifesto
“Not just another governance token”
At Pegasus, we push the envelope. As we build out our ecosystem of products, we’ve been thinking long and hard on an innovative approach towards our own token design. We wanted our token model to drive the type of self-sustaining, meritocratic community we want to build. So naturally, we kept coming back to the idea of contribution within the community and rewarding great work.
From that, it only made sense to create a token that combines both value and reputation. That way, trading a token no longer means just an exchange of monetary value or governance privilege, but also a vote of confidence in that specific member for their contributions.
Our tokenomics model prioritizes making the token an effective means of payment for work. That means a token that isn’t perpetually forcing its holders into a prisoner’s dilemma of holding or selling, but a means for those who contribute the most value, judged via market economies, to rise up the ranks. Thus, we needed to design a system where contribution was actually meaningful and acquiring it had value beyond social capital.
Welcome to PegaNation
So, we are introducing an upgradeable NFT that’s inspired by principles of nation-states. The NFT allows scaling governance weight, offers benefits at Pegasus built protocols, and enables a means to achieve internal mobility. Nation-states have many qualities that are extremely desirable for protocols in crypto, such as strong internal treasuries, systems of internal trade, constituent unity, consumer protection, and identity. So from here on out we’re calling our community the PegaNation. There will be three tiers of membership, those who are “citizens” of PegaNation (or Pegizens), residents working towards Pegizenship, and visitors just passing through. We’ll outline the technical details of the system in a future post.
What’s Coming for PegaNation:
- Launch of PegaNation, a digital “state” to align incentives for Pegizens through shared identity, financial markets, and social frameworks. (Deep dive coming soon)
- 1 of 1 Upgradeable NFTs for each Pegizen (Citizen of PegaNation)
- A token that combines contribution and value.
- 30 Day bootstrap period to rapidly expand protocol treasury and awareness (your first chance to join PegaNation!)
- A retail-focused interest rate perpetual. (more details soon!)
Philosophies and Justifications
For those of you who are in it for PegaNation.
At its core we want the design of PegaNation to satisfy three core philosophies.
- Incentivize and reward active contribution within the system.
- Allow the best to rise to the top.
- Encourage hodling to maximize value appreciation on active contributor earnings.
Why these goals?
First, incentivizing active contribution. This one is a bit obvious, but incentivizing members to always be actively seeking to add value to the protocol benefits the community and reduces the amount of time people spend engaging in negative-sum activities. So, we plan to create an issuance system that aligns verifiable “check-in” tasks with longer-term protocol goals.
Allowing the best to rise to the top. Contribution is often asymmetrical and some members might work long and hard to create a huge amount of value for the rest of the protocol. We believe they should be rewarded directly with wealth and influence. But, how will we do that? Firstly, we’re leaning into the financial nature of crypto and allowing internal markets to help us value different types of contributions. Contributors who create very useful products within PegaNation will not just be rewarded by the protocol but also by their fellow Pegizens via native token exchange. More earnings mean more reputation, allowing them to quickly accumulate more levels and status within PegaNation.
Lastly, strong tokenomics. Why prioritize holding? If you do work for a protocol, you want to know that what you earn today is worth at least as much as it is worth tomorrow. People contribute to protocols because they believe in them. You put your best foot forward because you believe the value of the protocol will rise and with it your own financial interests. This is the natural relationship between protocol and providers. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, that formula got a little twisted and some contributors were rewarded disproportionately.
Looking at you mercenary liquidity 👀.
This resulted in a consistent devaluation of the currency because of self-reinforcing sell pressure. However, this isn’t the fault of any single player within the system but rather a poor design of incentives and tokenomics. If you provide the protocol with value and earn tokens for work, you may want to hodl, prioritizing the common good. But, if someone else sells then suddenly you’re in a worse position than if you sold immediately, leaving everyone to default into the suboptimal choice of selling. Classic prisoner’s dilemma.
Enter OHM and (3,3).
Ohm proved an important notion: There is always a solution to misaligned incentives. We want to take it one step further, building upon the designs of OlympusDAO and many other creative protocols. Our goal is to create a system that not only incentivizes holding, to maintain a strong lower bounded token value, but also efficiently rewards contributions and establishes a system of reputation to allow the best to rise.
We at Pegasus subscribe to the notion that there are no bad actors, only bad system design. People who operate in inefficient or negative-sum ways for a protocol are simply doing what is optimal for them given incentive designs. It’s up to institutions to continue to iterate and devise more airtight systems. Instead of trying to chase down every “bad actor”, we seek to instead design systems to counteract and minimize the effects of such behaviors.
In the coming week, we’re going to detail our roadmap to token launch, outlining the goals for each step and how to become a Pegizen. We’re also going to be dropping more details on the exciting new interest rate perpetual we mentioned in our launch post. In the meantime keep up to date by subscribing to our medium, joining our discord, and following our PegaNation Twitter.
If you’re feeling the energy of the PegaNation hop into our discord, we’d love to chat with you. In the meantime, find your fellow future Pegizens and help share the message by adding ⭐PegaNation⭐ to your Twitter handle.
P.S. Hop in early, the initial Pegizen process is gonna be fun and you’re gonna want to be in our discord as soon as possible 🙃.
