APoll01 Nation: A Decentralized Autonomous Nation

Dan GendusoMarch 1, 2020

Abstract:

APoll01 Nation’s mission is to unite people and build community by empowering a global, decentralized population with self-sovereign identity, a digital currency, open access to education, and the ability to vote remotely as part of a government of the users, for the users, and by the users of the internet. A logical set of initial clients to leverage the network for governance would be large social media platforms that have become the front pages of the internet, which means their policies and content tend to trickle down throughout the internet. This white paper outlines the plans for a new “face of the internet” that creates an incentivized operating network (ION), while automating the operations of decentralized communities (DACs) and/or organizations (DAOs).

APoll01 Nation’s new system of polling, endorsing, and financing campaigns with voter-advised funds creates a community accelerator that continually breaks issues down for resolution at the smaller, local levels of the community, while unsolved issues bubble up to the larger parent communities for resolution. This solution creates a single sign-on for the internet to enable highly personalized user experiences, while providing “citizens” of APoll01 Nation with a single UI to engage, agree, and transact (EAT) in each sub-community via our flagship product, APoll01. With each transaction through APoll01, 1% goes back to the initiator to fund campaigns in APoll01 Nation in the form of a donation. The first campaigns are political campaigns. APoll01 Nation is a charitable organization that aims to solve the largest issues facing social media platforms today, including user activation, security, privacy, compensation, trust, and data portability, while building the open source infrastructure to enable each sub-community and its members with a suite of “influencer” tools that can support the future or education and work.

I. Introduction

The internet is in desperate need of governance. For decades, internet companies have been operating in a relatively unknown frontier with little regulation, which has made Silicon Valley feel a bit like the Wild West. In the absence of proper governance, large internet companies, like Facebook, have led the way in creating policies that others follow. However, when companies create policies for the internet, those policies are always going to serve the needs of those companies, as opposed to the people who use the internet. The policies exist to drive profits for the company, which leads to maximum value extraction from users. From a user perspective, this has led to seemingly endless terms and conditions contracts that are continually updated to further restrict the rights of each user as they move from one website to the next. What’s worse is that these terms are automatically applied as soon as a user lands on a website, whether that action was intentional or not.

These problems started with a modern-day Gold Rush, where every internet company started mining for digital gold — user data. This mining process has created a system of mass surveillance across the entire internet, where users are being tracked and essentially spied on to mine as much data as possible. This has led to users being stripped of their gold — their data — and any future earning potential on that data, while creating repetitive user profiles in countless data repositories for every company that interacts with the user. As this digital gold is replicated or copied, it becomes less rare, meaning this process is not only increasing the risk of identity theft by compounding user profiles, but also decreasing the earning potential for each user.

We are stuck in a moment where different governing bodies — states, nations, and entire economic unions — are trying to create and enforce rules in this digital space. However, these rules at different levels in the governing hierarchy are being made without a standard that will allow the internet to properly function and provide a seamless user experience. It is time that we create a governing body with this specific purpose in mind. To ensure that the interests of each person — each user of the internet — are represented, this governing body should be of the users, for the users, and by the users of the internet. Several important aspects of successful communities are missing from online social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Those issues or gaps, which need to be addressed in the optimal solution, include member activation, security, privacy, education, compensation, trust, and self-sovereignty.

II. APoll01 Nation

APoll01 Nation is a decentralized autonomous nation (DAN), which operates as a charitable organization (decentralized autonomous nonprofit). The DAN is a system of decentralized autonomous communities (DACs) that is managed by a government of the members, for the members, and by the members of APoll01 Nation. Over time, we will start to build decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) within the decentralized communities (DACs). The DAN leverages an incentivized operating network (ION) to drive member engagement, while accelerating community growth with implementation of a new campaign financing mechanism. Through this mechanism, a decentralized model of donor-advised funds — voter-advised funds — is established to enable community decision-making with budget allocations in APoll01 Nation. The mission of APoll01 Nation is to create a united people by building community and empowering a global population with self-sovereign identity, digital currency, the ability to vote remotely, open access to education, and the infrastructure to support the future of work.

The purpose of APoll01 Nation is CLEAR and the operations of the community are transparent to build trust among members. We exist to Compensate, Legislate, Educate, Accelerate, and Regulate the community, while serving and protecting the members. Key opportunity areas addressed by APoll01 Nation include:

A government of the people, for the people, and by the people to regulate the internet
Creation and management of a universal digital currency
Building open source infrastructure, protocols, and standards to support a decentralized operating model and enable the future of education and work
Compensating people for their role in serving and protecting the community

III. APoll01

APoll01 is the flagship product that allows members to engage, agree, and transact (EAT) in APoll01 Nation and its system of sub-communities. This can be thought of as a member’s private and secure wallet with interactive elements on top. The primary form of member engagement is polls. This user-centric product allows each member to build and manage a self-sovereign identity, while maintaining the ability to vote from a mobile device in APoll01 Nation and all sub-communities (DACs) or organizations (DAOs) operating in the network. In short, APoll01 establishes the incentivized operating network by linking member, community, and poll profiles, which function as transactable entities and automate the decentralized nation. Key opportunity areas that this application addresses are:

A single user interface for members to EAT within all DACs and DAOs in the network
A wallet for managing an individual’s identity in a private and secure manner
The ability to vote from a mobile device in all community elections and campaigns leveraging a Universal Voter ID. Voting is the first act of building a nation.
A flat transaction fee of 1 Cent, which is 30x cheaper than current-day transactions. In combination with APoll01 Nation, the cost per transaction starts at 1 cent + 1%, compared to the 30 cents + 2.9% charged per transaction today.

IV. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)

APoll01 Nation is a fully decentralized network, which is built on a foundation of self-sovereign member identities. Member freedom is the bedrock of democracy. Each user’s identity enables a Single Sign-On (SSO) for every community or organization operating in the network. These identities are constructed with binary values that make up a unique, digital DNA of each member. The design and architecture of member identities is consistent with the principles outlined by Christopher Allen, which include independent existence, member control, access to data, transparent systems/algorithms, life-long (or beyond) persistence, portability and interoperability across communities, consent for use, minimalization, and protection of data.[ii] Through self-sovereign identity, members will receive a highly personalized digital experience which can transition into the physical realm, while being compensated for access to their data. This compensation serves as a Universal Basic Income (UBI) within APoll01 Nation, which is enabled through an Identity as a Service (IaaS) licensing model for each member. Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) creates portable and interoperable records for each member, putting the member in full control of their data. This also enables high levels of control over child identities for parents or guardians who have children (or pets) using the internet. Key opportunity areas for self-sovereign identity (SSI) include:

One identity that functions as a Single Sign-On (SSO) for all DACs and DAOs operating on the network (potentially the whole internet)
Highly personalized online member experiences, including education, work, and healthcare
Verified and trusted IDs for members, communities, and organizations, which trickles down into trusted content
Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every member through data monetization
Secure and private identities with provisioned, anonymized access rights through an Identity as a Service (IaaS) model controlled by each member
All member records and receipts are managed in one place, which automates tax filings/reporting and eliminates timely bottlenecks
Portable health and education records (potentially work records depending on disclosure agreements) managed and controlled by each member
Innovative Citizen to Citizen (C2C), Citizen to Network (C2N), Network to Citizen (N2C), and Network to Network (N2N) licensing models for uniquely bundled data and digital assets (pictures, videos, songs, etc.)
Parental Control that can restrict viewing or content rights for a children version of the internet that evolves based on age and/or ability

V. Sub-Communities and Organizations

APoll01 Nation is intended to be the universal decentralized autonomous community (DAC), inside of which smaller DAC communities are built, leveraging a roll-up/down system of governance by the members, for the members, and of the members of the nation. As previously mentioned, this allows us to recreate the communities where we live and belong into a technological system, while ensuring that local and national rules are created and enforced for the internet. This is critical because we need a global set of rules and standards to be created before more localized communities — like the European Union and California — start creating rules that may not adhere to the principles or standards for the parent community. Once we have created all the sub-communities in APoll01 Nation — a global blueprint essentially — we can then start to build additional sub-communities and DAOs (companies) that operate within those communities, ensuring proper taxation and rules enforcement.

By taking this path, we can create a system where a single, trusted identity follows a person throughout their life, moving seamlessly in and out of communities and/or private organizations. This is a Universal Passport composed of membership access tokens (passport stamps), which function like a dynamic work badge that builds and evolves over time, unlocking access to opportunities and experiences within APoll01 Nation. While membership in APoll01 Nation is free and granted to all, every sub-community can charge for memberships (with defined duration) and create their own rules, so long as those rules do not infringe on member rights guaranteed by APoll01 Nation. This structure allows us to:

Continually build sub-communities inside of each other, while maintaining a parent-child relationship to ensure rules are properly enforced at the child level
Build a membership structure that funnels members into smaller sub-communities to optimize value creation and delivery

VI. Community Taxes — Value-Added Donations (VADs)

APoll01 Nation charges a base transaction fee of 1%, which decreases as the population grows. This transaction fee serves as a Value-Added Donation (VAD) for a community or sub-community operating on the network, as APoll01 Nation is a charitable organization. Every time an incremental milestone of 750 million members is reached, the VAD for APoll01 Nation drop by 0.1%. By the time there are 7.5 billion members (the global population), the base community VAD for the network will drop to 0%. Sub-communities can add their own VADs on top of this base community VAD, which is like a state and/or city sales tax being incrementally added on top of a federal tax. The key difference here is the tax is a donation. This VAD represents the liquidity, which is seen in products like PayPal or Stripe that charge 30 cent base fee + 2.9% liquidity fee to transact. Like sales taxes, the VAD for a parent community is not paid down to the sub-community, which means that the sub-community needs to charge its own VAD to help support independent operational costs. There is a flat fee of 1 cent charged by our flagship product, APoll01, which is a currency transmitter. This means the cost to transact within a sub-community would build based on the sum of the sub-community VAD plus all parent communities VADs, plus 1 cent.

1 Cent + APoll01 Nation VAD + Sub1 VAD + Sub2 VAD + Sub3 VAD…Sub100 VAD

Let’s imagine that within APoll01 Nation, we have a marketplace, like Craigslist, Amazon, or Airbnb. There might be a state-level sub-community for a California marketplace, which adds an additional 1 percent VAD for transactions, costing each member 1 cent plus 2 percent per trusted peer to peer transaction in California. Within California, there might be an additional sub-community marketplace created for San Francisco, which adds another 1 percent, leading to a cost of 1 cent plus 3 percent per transaction in San Francisco. Within San Francisco, there might be a neighborhood marketplace, like Pacific Heights, which adds another 1 percent, increasing the cost to 1 cent plus 4 percent per transaction in that specific neighborhood. This can continue to a single street within a neighborhood, and then to a single building or unit on the street that is operating as a private DAO within the DAC, which is responsible for charging those incremental VADs. This structure ensures that state and local taxes (in the form of donations) are captured to support and build local communities — the actual communities where we are living — operating on the network. These VADs are automatically dispersed to community and sub-community donor-advised funds, where each member can vote on campaigns to direct where their tax (donation) dollars are spent. If the campaign that is voted on fails to get enough voter support, the voters who chose that campaign would receive a re-vote to re-allocate those funds to a new campaign. We will discuss this further in the Community Engagement and Campaign Financing sections of this paper. The benefits of VADs are:

Vote on campaigns to advise where tax dollars are allocated
Community VATs are pulled into a community fund that is managed and allocated through member votes
VATs accelerate and build open-source infrastructure for APoll01 Nation and its sub-communities. This infrastructure includes decentralized education and work systems to accelerate member growth, but it can also include physical infrastructure in communities (schools, hospitals, co-working spaces, etc.).

VII. Reputation

Within the community and sub-communities, members can earn and build reputation, which is denoted by the acquisition of currency. Members have several ways to build reputation, including answering polls and inviting new members to join communities. When a member completes a poll, this is the equivalent of completing a microtask with the assigned incentive signaling the expected increase in reputation. Over time, these microtasks will become larger tasks that are more difficult to complete, which means the assigned incentive is larger to provide a bigger reputational boost for more difficult work. Each sub-community can have its own leaderboards, which show the accumulated lifetime value — reputation generated within that specific sub-community — for each member. The leaderboards for APoll01 Nation are an aggregated view of reputation across all sub-communities, which can be broken down into aggregated category pages with reputation standings (member reputation in legal categories or education categories, for instance). As reputation increases, access to different opportunities for work are presented. Reputation isn’t just for members, as it is inclusive of polls and sub-communities, which also have leaderboards. These leaderboards are continually updated, like stock tickers moving up and down the boards. Reputation scoring allows members to:

Engage with reputation leaderboards for members, sub-communities, and polls to visualize who or what is creating the most value in APoll01 Nation.
See reputation points on profiles to build trust in the network before engaging, agreeing, and transacting.

VIII. Endorsements

Members can endorse members, polls, and sub-communities. When a member endorses a profile, they are staking their reputation on it. This means that if Member A endorses Member B, then Member A is transferring currency (their reputation) to Member B, thereby increasing the value of Member B and decreasing the value of Member A. This endorsement functions as a recommendation in the network. Member A is willing to take the initial hit for the reputation stake in hopes that the recommendation will yield a future increase in reputation once members who value Member A’s recommendation decide to act on that information. In this situation, the endorsement is a new form of inviting or referring someone to a sub-community, where the recommending or endorsing party will continue to earn the incentives or rewards that result from their endorsement. As such, an “influencer” is now being fairly compensated for their role in building communities. Endorsements serve to:

Build reputation (earn currency) by providing meaningful recommendations that build trust in the network
Limit problems with untrusted endorsements (“The LinkedIn Problem”) by requiring a stake

IX. Roles

Each member can hold one of three primary role types within a community/sub-community or category/department. A single member can hold different role types in different sub-communities, as role designation is determined by a member reaching a reputation benchmark, which can be different from one sub-community or category to the next.

Reporter: A reporter in a community or sub-community is the most basic designation provided to a citizen. All reporters have the base level of access within APoll01 Nation or a sub-community. Think of this as media access.

Editor: Once a reporter reaches a specific threshold for trust (a reputation score exceeding an amount that is designated by each community or sub-community to obtain “Reviewer” status), that reporter’s role can be converted to “Editor.” An editor is a reputable member or expert in a certain category/domain or sub-community. An editor or reviewer maintains the same rights as a reporter, but that reviewer gains additional opportunities for work within the community or sub-community. These additional opportunities are task assignments to review content and/or verify the completion of tasks within the community or sub-community. This increases that reporter’s earning potential, which is equivalent to their potential to increase reputation. As earning potential rises, the stakes can rise (or drop) as well. In many instances, members with higher reputation will be required to stake less based on trust in their reputation.

Manager: The highest role within a community or sub-community is the role of manager, which is effectively the community or sub-community manager or administrator. The manager has access to all work possibilities presented to editors and reporters, while also being compensated for their role in performing administrative duties to keep the community / network (or sub-network) operating. This might include providing a final judgement on membership suspensions, revocations, and reinstatements, as well as upkeep on the community or sub-community profile (rules, links, contact info, documentation, etc.). Sub-communities can choose to hold elections for manager roles to determine a lead manager, which can eventually include additional officer positions (treasurer, secretary, etc.) that report to a lead community or network manager, establishing a board or committee. The benefits of these three roles are:

Role attainment is determined by reputation in a sub-community or category
A decentralized system of reviews and approvals, as well as a weighted voting system with domain experts (should a sub-community enable that)

X. Community Engagement

Communities and sub-communities engage with members in a variety of ways, allowing members to earn incentives and then reinvest back into the community to achieve growth. This combination creates a global accelerator to vote on and fund campaigns (petitions/proposals) for sub-communities, new features or products, podcasts, news, videos, education (courses, lessons, books), open source development and integrations, experiences/events, projects/tasks, polls, and even members that meet the needs of the community.

Polls: Community moderators create polls that members of the community answer to provide data points around individual needs. Anonymous poll results are made available to community leaders for reporting and decision-making purposes. When a member answers a poll to create a data point, that data point is stored to the member’s self-sovereign identity, after which time the member can license access to that data point to APoll01 Nation or any sub-community operating on the network. Each poll has its own profile, which allows the member to engage, learn, and discuss before submitting a response. Polls can be targeted to specific segments or portions of the member population. Polls include, but are not limited to, text, images, video, audio, documents, games, and 3D content.

Offers: Community moderators can create offers that incentivize poll responses and membership, while also creating urgency so members take immediate action. An offer can be as simple as, “Answer Poll A, receive 50 Cents,” or “Invite a new member, receive 500 Cents.” Moderators can create urgency by adding incentive multipliers during specific times, such as, “Answer 10 Polls between 10am — Noon on mm/dd/yyyy, receive 10x incentive value.”

Campaigns: Campaigns function like petitions within the community that are investable polls, as opposed to the type that are incentivized for members to earn. This allows for members to earn and then reinvest back into the community. Campaigns are proposals that are created in response to poll data signifying community needs or issues. Initially, campaigns will be for President. Additional campaigns can fund streamed debates with topics and moderators that the community votes on. In the future, campaigns will be for new sub-communities, members, products, projects/tasks, podcasts, education, experiences, and other things that are being proposed to meet community needs. Campaigns are simply a new form of poll, which means the campaign creator can include incentives to drive voter engagement.

Users without money can participate by first earning currency for completing microtasks (answering polls) and then re-investing back into community campaigns
A new petition process where members of the community use micro-funding behind signatures to get a poll distributed community-wide

XII. Community Governance

APoll01 Nation and each sub-community can elect a board of directors or officers to make up the role of moderator. This includes a President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary. These electable roles serve 4-year terms and there is a term limit of 2 full terms. Terms do not have to be consecutive and are not inclusive of interim roles that occurred as the result of taking over another member’s duties. Underneath the board of directors, we can create committees and sub-committees. Committee members are elected representatives of the parent communities in APoll01 Nation (the states) and serve 6-year terms with a 2-term limit. This is like Senate. Sub-committee members are elected representatives of sub-communities of the “states” (cities) and serve 2-year terms with a 2-term limit. This is like House of Representatives. The Vice President serves as the tie-breaking vote for the committee. The leader of the committee serves as tie-breaking vote for the sub-committee. There will be elected justices/judges throughout the system of sub-communities, headed by a 9-member committee that are voted on by peers and hold their chairs for a maximum of 8 years (2 terms).

Each community or sub-community can create its own rules. Rules should be created in “If, then” statements to define punishments. There is a maximum number of rules per community (15), after which point an old rule must be repealed for a new rule to be added. This allows the system to continue operating at the most optimal speed, while continually removing community debt (tech debt). Rules are enforced top down in the community hierarchy, meaning the rules of a sub-community cannot be in violation of the rules for parent communities within the community tree. To understand this concept, think of the rules of APoll01 Nation as federal laws, where states and cities can create their own laws. To maintain proper enforcement of laws, the laws of the city must not break the laws of the state, and the state laws must not be in contradiction to federal laws.

Voting Model(s): In APoll01 Nation, we believe in a system of one person, one vote. However, the ability to vote is determined by an individual holding the credential(s) that allow them to be in the booth to vote. When it comes to voting on leadership and community polls in APoll01 Nation, that credential is simply the member ID (a universal voter ID). This system can eventually require a person to learn and display competency before gaining access to a specific poll. Initially, members must learn and display competency of the 10 principles. Access can therefore be determined by both membership in a sub-community, possession of a credential (category), as well as ascension to a specific role type. It is likely that, as a society, we are not ready for a completely decentralized voting system without some sort of representation by individuals with high reputation — members we trust to make a proper decision. We can address this by including the following capabilities, which we will A/B test.

a. Proxy Voting

Members can choose to delegate their vote to a trusted or reputable member in the community. This is an endorsement of a member to vote on their behalf. If a member chooses to delegate their vote to another member, they will be required to stake currency — their reputation — by transferring that currency to the member voting on their behalf. This ensures that a single member will never be the only person staking their reputation within a community to complete the task of voting. In this sense, voting becomes the future of work.

b. Role-Based Vote Weighting

A community can choose to split and weight votes among different role types within the community. Each community or sub-community can choose their own percentage splits. For instance, a community or sub-community can choose to split the outcome of a vote among role types by weighting it in thirds (or any other percent per role type). This means that the members in a moderator role — let’s think of this as the leaders (people at the top of their field) of the domain or sub-community — can have a vote that represents 1/3 of the overall vote (each moderator holds an equal vote), while members of the reviewer role — let’s think of this as reputable domain experts — can represent another 1/3 of the voting (each reviewer holds an equal vote), leaving the base members of the community with 1/3 of the voting power (each member holds an equal vote).

Legislative Functions: APoll01 automates a decentralized legislative protocol within communities to create and/or repeal rules. Rules are created and/or removed as part of a process for presenting solutions to issues that surface in the community. The process starts with polling to understand community issues, after which campaigns (petitions) are used to propose and fund solutions to problems. In instances where the solution is the creation of a new rule (new code) for the community or removal of a rule (old code), this work will be sent through a process of reviews for reputable members to endorse and sign-off on the solution. In many instances, this will be done by a group of reviewers/domain experts. In the case of a tie vote, a moderator vote can be used. Votes can be held to officially create or repeal these rules after the final solution is formally submitted. In these instances, a role-based split vote or proxy vote can be used.

Executive Functions: APoll01 automates a decentralized executive protocol within communities for enforcement of rules. Rule enforcement starts with community bounties, which can be earned by any member of the community who “flags” or reports a rule violation. In the early stages, there will be a threshold for the number of flags/reports that must occur (10) before the review process is triggered. This number can be changed over time, and sub-communities can set their own threshold for reports. If a member believes that there is a clear violation and wants to earn the bounty, that member can choose to share the profile in question to encourage friends to earn as well. It is worth noting, however, that all will have to first stake their reputation to be considered for the bounty. Once triggered, the profile is sent to one or more members in the reviewer role, after which a citation is issued to the offending profile. If the review fails, the reporting members lose their stake. If the review passes, the reporting members receive their stake plus the bounty.

Judicial Functions: APoll01 automates a judicial protocol within communities for interpretation of rules and/or punishments. When a profile is on the receiving end of a citation, the member or community moderator can either accept or challenge the ruling. Some citation types may require the member to go through the full judicial process with no option to accept. Depending on the type of citation, different voting models can occur. Some situations will leave the decision fully in the hands of a respected judge (moderator), while others will allow for review by a committee of reputable reviewers. In many cases, however, a cited member will have the option to be judged by a jury of their peers (7 or 12 randomly selected members — peers — depending on the citation type). Polls regarding the case will be randomly distributed and accepted, after which the participating party will be compensated for their service. Some communities can leverage a system where peer votes are weighted a certain amount (i.e., 1/3), while domain expert votes are weighted another amount, followed by judge or moderator votes making up the remainder. Punished members shall maintain their right to vote in APoll01 Nation, as they are still members of the community. These functions create:

Protocols that automatically distribute and weight votes to reach consensus and govern APoll01 Nation and each sub-community
Rule limits that keep the system clear from large amounts of code that slow down operations and decision-making
Term limits for moderators or officers that help to limit corruption and/or misaligned interests

XIII. VOTE Tokens

Elections for leadership in APoll01 Nation require special VOTE tokens, which are airdropped to every member over the age of 18 to provide access to the poll. Each member receives one token which is only transferable once to the specific Poll ID, at which time the token is burned. It cannot be transferred to any other ID. There is no cost assigned to the tokens. These tokens have no poll tax, meaning there is no transaction fee. VOTE tokens provide access for a period of 24 hours to the polls on the day of an election, after which time they expire and are burned. Members who access polls will have the ability to learn (via the poll profile) and discuss before submitting their poll, so long as those actions are completed before the 24-hour time limit expires. After submitting the poll, each member will be issued a unique “I VOTED” digital collectible in recognition of that specific election. This digital asset is authenticated with an ERC-1155 token. Ownership of these collectibles can be made visible on a member profile, should the member desire to make them public. These tokens help APoll01 Nation:

Maintain anonymity at the polls, while ensuring each member can only access a poll once
Incentivize and memorialize voter participation with digital collectibles that show a member’s influence over a lifetime

XIV. Decentralized Data Storage

Poll cards and digital assets are encrypted and stored to IPFS. When a member signs the poll card with their self-sovereign identity, a hash is created with a timestamp to represent that unique version of the asset or data point. As we continue to break down data points, we are creating a massive tree and root structure — data structure — for the overall community. Individual sub-communities and members have their own versions of the tree that overlay on components of the larger tree for APoll01 Nation. Each data component is like a node. Over time, as that node is broken into sub-nodes, a true valuation can be assigned to that parent data set based on independent valuations of the child data set, and the child data sets of those (now parent) nodes. This creates a network where members are fully monetized to the smallest data point — an ION. As the value of parent nodes increases, that node becomes more trusted within the system. This parent-child relationship is the most standard relationship that should exist, as it allows for a complete family tree to be created. When product data and user data are structured in this way, the highest value matches between the two data sets can occur.

As data points break down into smaller pieces, a child node might have numerous parent nodes throughout the root structure — they are a common ingredient to different parts of the community. As child nodes continue to break down, they become more and more common, eventually becoming so common that they are commodities. The value of the data points at this level is so low that the community offers them for free. If properly sequenced and spaced at the smallest ION levels, APoll01 Nation will one day be capable of providing free, openly accessible education at a global scale by bundling these commodities in a structured way for learning. At the completion of this process, every member will realize that they are comprised of the exact same data points — the exact same IONs — as every other member in the community. This is the community root system, which is the foundation on which a member’s root system is built over the course of their life. In short, every member or sub-community is a hashed version of different nodes within the community where they operate during their lifetime. What makes each member unique is the rate at which they were able to increase the value of parent nodes in the structure by leveraging community resources to increase upward economic mobility. With proper incentives, we can encourage the most valued members in the community for a specific node (a sign of domain mastery) to transfer that value to other members of the community as teachers, which creates a parent-child relationship in their teaching tree — their tree of global influence and impact.

XV. Smart Contracts

APoll01 Nation leverages the Ethereum blockchain for smart contracts and ERC-1155 tokens, which authenticate assets that are changing place in the community. For instance, the exchange of a concert ticket in the community would be tracked with an ERC-1155 authentication token in the same way that currency is being exchanged through the same token vehicle. In that situation, both the currency and the ticket are traceable forms of currency. Initially, smart contracts are used for acceptance of community rules. Before becoming a member of APoll01 Nation or any sub-community, the member is required to accept each rule in the form of a poll. When the user accepts that poll, they are signing and accepting with their self-sovereign identity, which creates a hash and timestamp of the poll. Eventually, smart contracts will be used for all kinds of agreements in the community that are member to member, member to community or organization, or member/community/organization to poll, which is a point of escrow and agreement. This works well for employment agreements and rental agreements, among others.

XVI. Currency

APoll01 Nation uses a stable coin that is pegged to USD. This coin is backed by a vault with fiat, equity, and eventually cryptocurrencies that were used to transact within the network. APoll01 Nation leverages ERC-1155 tokens to represent both fungible (community tokens) and non-fungible (digital asset tokens) use cases in the system. Initially tokens can be purchased with fiat, but eventually we will enable transactions with Bitcoin and Ethereum. After that point, we can add new currency types through community campaigns/petitions. If/when additional currency must be minted to support community operations, those needs will surface through polling, after which those holding Treasurer roles/credentials in APoll01 Nation will convene and propose a solution that the community can vote on.

The base token for APoll01 Nation is the CENT. The CENT can be bundled into the following amounts: CENT (1x), Nickel (5x), Dime (10x), Quarter (25x), Dollar (100x), Five Dollars (500x), Ten Dollars (1,000x), Twenty Dollars (2,000x), and Hundred Dollars (10,000x).

Each sub-community that lunches in APoll01 Nation receives its own ERC-1155 token with a unique name that shows up on leaderboards. This utility token represents transactions within that sub-community. Think of this as the states and national parks that are minted onto quarters — it’s still a quarter, but it is representative of a part of the United States. In this case, it is representative of a sub-community in APoll01 Nation.

APoll01 Nation uses a similar token distribution model as Handshake[iii], although it is not an exact replica. The initial currency supply will be 15,000,000,000 CENTS.

Financial Donations (7.5%) — APoll01 Nation will run a campaign to raise a total of $11,250,000 to price the initial valuation of 7.5% of the total currency supply, which is valued at $150,000,000. APoll01 Nation is a charitable organization, so this is a donation by members.

Pre-Launch Development (7.5%) — This currency is used to fund all contributors since the inception of this project, leading up to our launch.

Members (68%) — The majority of our tokens will be allocated and distributed to our members as payment for their work in growing the community. Initially, this work is the completion of microtasks (polls) to create data points, as well as incentives for inviting new members. We will continue to use these funds to fund open source development in APoll01 Nation, which includes paying reputable people for their time in both developing and signing off on work in the decentralized network.

Sub-Communities (12%) — To start building APoll01 Nation, we need communities to move their operations onto the incentivized operating network provided by APoll01 Nation. We have allocated coins to a fund that will give these communities a starting budget to poll their community members. Target communities include:

Political Candidate & Political Party Communities (3.5%)
Associations with heavy initial focus on teacher (including PTA), physician, nurse, and social worker communities (3.5%)
Neighborhood and HOA Communities (2.5%)
Nonprofit Communities (2.5%)

Blockchain Projects (5%) — There are several key projects that will require funding to upgrade before integrations can happen. These are not just large, public blockchain projects, but also knowledge management, learning management, and task management systems. We would like to set aside funds to incentivize those projects to collaborate and work with us on this mission.

XVII. Market Size

The initial use case is for Presidential candidates. Political candidates are expected to spend over $10B in advertising spend during 2020. We believe that APoll01 Nation provides a new way for candidates to engage with constituents, while providing important data for optimizing campaigns to focus on issues that matter the most. In addition to political candidate spend, the 2020 Census is expected to cost over $5B. This is a very simple use case for APoll01 Nation to handle with APoll01, and it can be completed for pennies on the dollar. This would be an ongoing thing in APoll01 Nation, which means the census for sub-communities will be dynamic and automatically updated as members move from place to place.

APoll01 is a peer-to-peer money (data/fiat) transmitter, meaning currency is exchanged between members, polls, and/or communities/organizations. This currency is exchanged as value is created, whether it is through completion of micro-tasks or licensing of data. This functionality disrupts the payment processing market, which includes PayPal and Stripe, among others. APoll01 disrupts the market by providing a solution that is 65% cheaper per transaction — 1 cent per transaction plus the liquidity fee (VAT) for each community/sub-community. The value of that market is around $3.5T, but it is expected to grow rapidly, reaching upwards of $7.6T by 2024.

As a wedge into the transactions market, APoll01 is focused on data licensing, which is a cornerstone of the online currency exchange. A company like Facebook, for instance, makes approximately $60B per year by licensing user data and selling advertisements around that data. Other tech giants, like Google/YouTube ($289B /yr), Apple/iTunes ($422B /yr), and Amazon ($122B /yr) are making extreme profits by leveraging licensed user data. Unfortunately, the user has been left out as a key player in this operating model. By taking 1 cent + 1% on the transactions involving our member’s data, there is a market opportunity that exceeds $10B per year.

This market size, however, increases significantly, as campaigns allow for members to re-invest back into the community through campaigns. Some of these re-investments can be to launch new organizations (DAOs), among other fundraising options. The global crowdfunding market is expected to reach $28.8B by 2025, growing at a rate of 16%. With the inclusion of organizations, this becomes a new form of venture capital for blockchain companies that allows anyone in the world to participate, as it creates penny stocks when enough members participate (in reality, the minimum cost would have to be 2 cents, as there is a 1 cent transaction fee). The US venture capital market surpassed $130B in 2018.

XVIII. What’s Next

The first order of business for APoll01 Nation will be to understand what members need. We will then propose and fund campaigns for President of APoll01 Nation, which will align with the largest needs in the community. As previously mentioned, there will be campaigns to fund streamed debates where the community votes on the moderators and topics. In addition to Presidential campaigns, we will also include campaigns to build and fund community projects, such as a community art car that will travel around the United States while live bands play to raise funds in support of active campaigns in APoll01 Nation. These performances will be streamed through social platforms, like Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook, creating a modern-day live aid for a global population to vote on and fund solutions (in the form of campaigns) to the biggest issues facing our world, like climate change, cancer, or vaccines.

XIX. Conclusion

APoll01 Nation is the new “face of the internet” with properly aligned incentives and a universal basic income through data licensing for all members. Through the user interface, members will seamlessly funnel in and out of organizations for all aspects of life, including education, work, and healthcare, while receiving highly personalized experiences. APoll01 Nation creates a free universal passport linked to a Voter ID, which allows a member to freely move within sub-communities without having to start over and rebuild their identity — create a new profile — at each stop. Using APoll01, each member can build and manage a self-sovereign identity that allows for a single sign-on to the digital nation — the internet — while maintaining strict controls over privacy and security. APoll01 is a single UI for community and organizational engagement, while empowering each member with the ability to vote, sign-off or agree, and transact from a mobile device.

APoll01 Nation addresses the biggest issues facing social platforms today, including Facebook and Reddit. Those issues include member activation, security, privacy, education, compensation, trust, and self-sovereign identity. In addition, this solution addresses the challenging problem of community governance through role definition, protocol design, campaign financing, and a poll distribution method that enables private and secure voting from mobile devices. This not only creates a way for a global group of people to tell us what they need or want, but also a way for those same members — members who might start without a single penny to their name — to earn and reinvest back into community campaigns that help meet those needs with minimal costs and fees.

APoll01 Nation and its incentivized operating network creates a new way of operating. This is not a re-creation of today’s system, which has shifted to valuing the voice of an organization over the voice of an individual. It does, however, incorporate executive, legislative, and judicial functionality within the community and sub-communities, allowing for a hierarchical decision-making process to take shape. Communities only function when each member feels valued. When each member creates and builds value, the value of the larger community will increase. As such, the operating model used today needs to shift to a member-centric model, which is more responsive than predictive. A model where people first tell us what they need and then, as a community, we respond with a solution in the form of a campaign. Over time — once members establish roots in the community by training their own AI and generating clean data — member data can be anonymously licensed to the community or sub-community with compensation to inform a community AI, where future decisions can be predicted with high accuracy. Since APoll01 Nation operates as a global accelerator, this will allow us to vote on and fund what we will need so it is already here by the time we need it.

As a community technology stack starts to be built around the APoll01 kernel, which will include learning management, knowledge management, and project management capabilities, in addition to the existing campaign management, offer management, access management, resource management, and digital asset management capabilities, the incentive for organizations to move their internal operations onto the network increases. These integrations create a fully functional education system and work system in APoll01 Nation, while having trusted members use APoll01 to endorse and sign-off on courses, credentials, and work. This will be happening in parallel to trends towards remote and decentralized work at corporations, which means there will be a seamless transition for these organizations to become Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in APoll01 Nation.

When new sub-communities are voted on, funded, and launched through APoll01 nation, members are pollinating their community with new value creation opportunities. At the same time, members can vote to remove sub-communities that are no longer serving a purpose. This creates a regenerative economy. As members get what they need, their ability to create value increases, which increases the value of the community. Once the AI becomes more trusted, the ability to predict this pollination cycle — predict what sub-community will be needed next — becomes automated, leading to self-pollination or “apollination.” This level of automation starts with members of the communities answering polls to train their own AI, and it ends with a global set of users voting in “A Poll” as “01 Nation” to determine their leaders in APoll01 Nation. APoll01: A (citizen)ship for everyone. A mission for 01.

Citations:

[ii] http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2016/04/the-path-to-self-soverereign-identity.html

[iii] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt