The Rome Incentive Structure

As with Sparta, Athens and Acropolis we plan to pay users in monero (XMR) to participate on our upcoming testnet release, codenamed Rome. Our fifth testnet ambitiously introduces two new paid roles which we are extremely excited about!

Rome will differ slightly from Acropolis in that it will have dynamic incentives in order to allocate resources more efficiently, ensure good uptime for validators and storage providers, promtote responsiveness and activity by content creators and curators and to help prepare for our next testnet, which will shift the responsibility of setting rewards from Jsgenesis to the council. This means that all of the compensation structures listed below are simply the starting figures and are subject to review at the end of every pay period (usually every week).

Once Rome is launched we will create a forum post where the payouts for each role will be reviewed each week. We won't ever revise payments down in the middle of a payment period (week), but in cases where a role is unprofitable there is a chance payments could be revised up.

Rome is set to be launched on Monday 16th March. Read more about the procedure for the release here. Updated guides for testnet roles will be released on Sunday 15th March. Prospective participants should familiarize themselves with these guides before launch for the best chance of winning a spot in one of these competitive roles.

Note: We might be delayed by a couple of days relative to the dates outlined above due to illness in the Jsgenesis team.

Executive Summary

• Content Creators receive up to $0.50 per qualifying item of content uploaded
• Content Curators earn $30 per week, plus bonuses
• Storage Providers will share $120 per week, plus $0.03/GB per week
• Validators are competing for their share of $100 per week
• Council Members are paid $10 for getting elected, with a $10 bonus
• Bug Reporters can continue to earn monero for reporting and/or fixing bugs

Who, Why, What and How?

As with previous incentivized testnets, anyone who wants to can participate on Rome and earn monero, but there is some extra help and guidance for those that ask for it in our Telegram group.

The philosophy behind why was discussed in detail in a previous post. In short, we are paying to prepare active participants for an autonomous platform and test the incentive structure with "real money".

What you can do to qualify for getting paid on Rome is described below. More information, guides on how to get setup and extra support can be found in our helpdesk repo on GitHub.

Participants should also note that some important changes to the faucet will take place upon the launch of Rome. To prevent Sybil attacks, tokens will be made available primarily through our communication channels (including Telegram, Twitter and our mailing list). The faucet will continue to operate, but will offer considerably lower payouts.

Paid Roles

• Content Creator
• Content Curator
• Storage Provider
• Validator
• Council Member
• Bug Reporter

If you find one or more of these roles interesting, or want to learn about future roles on the network, we encourage you to visit the new roles section on our website. Here you can browse through them and get a sense of what they will mean to the network, along with responsibilities and requirements.

You can also sign up for role specific newsletters that will keep you updated on development and incentives!

Content Creators

When the Joystream mainnet is live, Content Creators will be responsible for creating and uploading the enormous variety of different content types and genres which we believe will allow Joystream to grow into a successful decentralized media platform.

For the Rome testnet, we will pay a flat-rate Monero reward for every piece of content uploaded by Content Creators up to a weekly limit. We will also pay a $5 bonus on top of this rate for each of the 10 best pieces of content that are uploaded every week to encourage higher quality uploads.

A separate $10 bonus will be paid for up to 10 items of quality "original"* content every week. The maximum weekly incentive pool of $250 will be divided between these two categories of incentive.

*Original here means creative work that you created yourself and own exclusive the rights to.

Prospective Content Creators should also be aware that we will only pay the item reward for content with complete metadata and which follows the set-out requirements for each content type (to be released at a later date).

Uploading illegal or copyrighted content will result in a disqualification from payouts. It will also result in the takedown of content, potentially slashing of funds, and the deletion of your channel. Multiple spam uploads which represent a burden to moderate for the Content Curators may even be penalized and result in deductions on payouts due for qualifying content uploads on your content creator profile.

We will provide Content Creators with a list of sources for safe and non-copyrighted material which can be uploaded as part of this testnet and will qualify for the payments discussed above and laid out in the table below.

Rewards based on content type

Payouts for this role will be made every Monday at ~11:00GMT.

Content Curators

Content Curators will one day be essential for ensuring that the petabytes of media items uploaded to Joystream are formatted correctly and comprehensively monitored and moderated. Our upcoming testnet allows this content monitoring to take place by giving users who are selected for the role administrative access to the Joystream content directory to make changes where necessary.

We will have five slots available for Content Curators when Rome is launched, but this may be modified depending on demand and activity. They will need to apply to the Content Curator Lead (a working group lead role operated by Jsgenesis) and will have their application assessed by this lead before being added as a curator for a default term of one week. As the network matures, the Content Curator Lead role will be delegated to a community member.

If successful in their application, curators will be rewarded with a flat reward of $30 per week, resulting in a maximum pool of $150 if all five content curators are signed up, and stays in the role the entire week.

There will also be two bonuses of $20 and $10 per week for the two most active curators respectively in terms of monitoring the items in the content directory for compliance with our metadata, category and content rules. These bonuses will be awarded by the Content Curator Lead. In total, during a typical week, Content Curators will be competing for their share of $180 in XMR.

Inactive and/or malicious curators will be booted, and potentially slashed by the Content Curator Lead.

Payouts will be made every Monday at ~11:00GMT.

Storage Providers

Unlike Validators that can come and go without too much friction (at least for now), a new Storage Provider replicates the entire content directory. As a consequence, the platform needs some stability for this role to avoid a poor user experience, or worse, loss of data. After migrating to the Rome testnet, the users that currently hold the role will get "kicked" out, and will have to sign up again if they still want to keep their role.

Up to eight Storage Providers that keep a full copy of the content directory and provide continuous service for at least 24h will compete for $120 per week. In addition, you will earn $0.03/GB/week (of data in the content directory) calculated on an average basis. You will also need a domain to point to your node, so unless you already own one (that you don't mind using), you will need to buy one.

We will be closely monitoring Storage Providers for Rome (more so than we did for Acropolis) so make sure your node is performing optimally to avoid being booted. Storage Providers should also be aware that the variable part of the compensation structure is likely to be reviewed after launch (up or down) to make sure that providers are fairly compensated for their efforts.

Payouts will be made every Monday at ~11:00GMT.

Validators

In proof of stake systems, block producers, or Validators, are typically paid a fixed amount for each block produced. For Rome, the payout pool will remain the same at $100 per week shared between all Validators on the network.

blocktime = 6
weekly_reward = 10000
seconds_in_week = 60*60*24*7

blockreward = (weekly_reward * blocktime)/seconds_in_week
print(blockreward)

----

0.10

The number - 0.10 cents per block - seems a bit underwhelming, but validation requires little effort for the user after setup, and blocks come in every 6secs. With armv7 binaries or low-end VPS nodes, it should be cheap to run! A detailed guide to setting up the Validator node and settings will be made available shortly.

After migrating to the Rome testnet, the users that currently hold the role will get "kicked" out, and will have to sign up again if they still want to keep their role.

Payouts will be made every Monday at ~11:00GMT.

Council Members

Council Members are elected by the stakeholders in the system to act in the interest of their constituency. Somewhat simplified, the Council will allocate the platform's resources, and hire executive personnel to run the day to day. We are looking at how to best incentivize them to act in the platform's long-term interest.

If during your term a proposal to upgrade the runtime is submitted by the sudo key, anyone that votes yes will receive a bonus worth $10. A detailed explanation the election cycle and responsibilities can be found here.

During the Announcement and Voting stage, you should include some information about yourself, and why you should get elected in your memo field. If you do get elected, make sure to change the memo field to your monero address in order to get your reward.

Payouts will occur at ~11:00GMT the day after the election/vote.

Bug Reporters and Builders

Unlike the Validators and Council Members, the bug bounty payments will be somewhat subjective. Long term, such decisions will be resolved by the platform, so in future testnets these payouts will at least partially be made by the Council.

We also have a bounties repo where you can find specific tasks and their rewards, and we will add more bounties and evolve the system as we grow. In addition to the bounties we propose, we are always looking for suggestions for bounties from the community.

If you find a bug, potential improvement, or just an idea, there are a couple of ways to earn your reward:

Report a software bug

Go to the applicable technical repo(s), eg. node repo, Pioneer repo,  storage node repo, runtime-repo, etc. and make an Issue. You will be compensated based on the importance and "quality", the latter of which is measured from the level of details in general, like how to reproduce, pasted log outputs, etc.

Errors in the helpdesk guides (or a non-code repo)

If you find something missing, inaccurate or poorly described, either report an Issue, or even better, make a Pull request in the helpdesk repo.

If what you have found is from another non-code repo, eg. landing repo, communications repo,  bounties repo, etc. it will most likely be covered by this bounty. Note that the bar here is quite low (grammar, dead links, etc.) so more significant findings can lead to a lot larger payouts.

Fix a software bug, or add/improve a feature

If you want, you can just make a PR directly, and your contribution will be compensated. If it's an extensive job though, it would be best for all parties if you propose a bounty yourself as outlined here. We can then agree on terms in advance, so no one will be left disappointed.

Collect your bounty

The contributor must include either their Joystream or monero address when submitting the issue/PR. If you choose the former, you must then make sure the add your monero address to the memo field of your Joystream address.

Disclaimer

All forward looking statements, estimates and commitments found in this blog post should be understood to be highly uncertain, not binding and for which no guarantees of accuracy or reliability can be provided. To the fullest extent permitted by law, in no event shall Joystream, Jsgenesis or our affiliates, or any of our directors, employees, contractors,  service providers or agents have any liability whatsoever to any person  for any direct or indirect loss, liability, cost, claim, expense or  damage of any kind, whether in contract or in tort, including negligence, or otherwise, arising out of or related to the use of all or  part of this post, or any links to third party websites.