Introducing $IMO — 2/2/2022

This is a big one. We’re launching BOTH our token, AND a simpler, more universal Ideamarket primitive that’s free to use.

1. Introducing $IMO

   1. Distribution

   2. Retroactive airdrop

   3. $IMO Rewards

      1. Locking listings

      2. Staking $IMO

      3. Sushiswap LP

      4. Verification rewards

2. Roadmap

   1. URL Market

   2. Ghost market

   3. Ideamarket User Accounts

3. Blockchain of opinions

   1. Auditable consensus

   2. Bounties for celebrity opinions

TL;DR:

1. $IMO is Ideamarket’s governance and utility token. It stands for “in my opinion,” and it launches 2/2/2022. 

2. Make a list of the most attention-worthy URLs in the world. High-risk, high-reward information. You’ll be able to list them for free on 2/2/2022.

3. Set an alarm for 2/2/2022 9am PT. Claim your airdrop and earn $IMO rewards!

Introducing $IMO — 2/2/2022

The process for creating public knowledge has not changed in centuries: “an authority manufactures certainty, then enforces it.” Ancient kings and emperors. The church in Galileo’s time. The media and scientific establishment today. They all fit this pattern of manufacturing certainty, and then enforcing it with top-down power.

Ideamarket reframes public knowledge as a risk management problem — not the manufacture and enforcement of certainty by a powerful few, but the honest management of uncertainty by the global public.

Using markets to decide what deserves public credibility makes credibility increasingly expensive to fake. Markets — in short — “make lying expensive.”

Markets also accelerate the distribution of the world’s best knowledge. The world’s best knowledge is already accessible on the internet, but today’s authorities shame and persecute its advocates. Ideamarket aims to make them wealthy and influential instead, and capture the value of obscure genius for all mankind.

Our story

I’m Mike Elias — a musician and psychology writer, and Ideamarket’s founder.

Alexander Schlindwein built the smart contracts from the ground up, and did a spectacular job — they passed Quantstamp audits with minimal friction. (Alex would go on to win 3 of the largest bug bounties in the history of Ethereum.)

We launched V1 in February 2021, attracting over $1 million in deposits and earning coverage in NASDAQ, Vice, Yahoo, and CoinDesk. But high gas fees stunted growth, so we migrated to Arbitrum as quickly as possible.

Mac Dziedziela, our new CTO, led development of Pottermore, the Harry Potter game with over 150 million pageviews per month at its peak.

We’re live on Arbitrum, and our community has grown to include thousands of Propheteers across Twitter and Discord. We’re about to launch products anyone can use to change the way the world creates shared truths.

And now, our token is imminent.

$IMO

IMO stands for “in my opinion,” which, in my opinion, all human knowledge inevitably is.

$IMO is Ideamarket’s token for governance, which you can use to create and provide feedback on proposals in our Commonwealth.im forum. We will gradually introduce more governance features into the Ideamarket ecosystem, beginning with Snapshot governance and a multisig. In upcoming releases, $IMO will also be used to reduce trading fees and to pay bounties.

$IMO goes live on Wednesday, 2/2/2022 at 9am PT. The token contract address will be provided at launch.

Distribution, Airdrops, and Rewards

• Early investors — 10%

• Team (present & future) — 18%

• Strategic partnerships — 10%

• Retroactive Airdrop — 5%

• Ecosystem & Treasury — 25%

• Community rewards — 32%

  • Listing Token staking — 5%

  • $IMO staking — 3%

  • Sushiswap LP rewards — 5%

  • Future rewards programs: 13%

  • Community airdrops — 4%

  • Verification rewards — 2%

All $IMO allocated to Ideamarket team members are subject to a 2-year vesting schedule — a 1-year lockup, plus a 1-year linear unlock. 85% of investor tokens are subject to the same schedule, with 15% unlocked immediately to provide liquidity on Sushiswap.

With $IMO comes a retroactive airdrop and FOUR rewards programs.

Retroactive Airdrop

We’ve reserved 5 million $IMO (5%) to reward our early users with an airdrop. If you used Ideamarket before noon PT January 17, you should be eligible. Eligible users were given a point score based on whether you performed these actions:

• Listing

• Buying

• Locking

• Verifying

If you used Ideamarket before our Arbitrum launch, your score is doubled!

Rewards (updated 1/24)

Listing staking rewards

• We’re awarding 5 million $IMO over the next 3 months to users who buy listing tokens on the URL market and lock them. You can lock listing tokens for either 1 month or 3 months. The 3-month lock will increase your rewards by 25%. Staking rewards will be distributed monthly.

IMO staking rewards

• We’re awarding 3 million $IMO over the next 6 months to users who stake $IMO tokens.

Sushiswap liquidity provider rewards

• We’re awarding 5 million $IMO over the next 12 months to Sushiswap LPs on the ETH-IMO pair

Verification rewards

• Twitter users with over 2,000 followers can claim an airdrop by creating and verifying an Ideamarket User Account, which involves sending a Tweet and leaving it up for at least 24 hours. Rewards per follower tier are as follows:

Roadmap

2022 is a huge year for Ideamarket. We’ll be releasing multiple products that help measure the value of the world’s information, including several on $IMO launch day (2/2/2022):

• The URL Market (2/2/2022)

• Ghost Market (2/2/2022)

• User accounts (2/2/2022)

• Blockchain of Opinions

The URL market

Ideamarket V1.5 is a simple, universal primitive: a market where any URL can be listed on-chain and traded.

If Uniswap is “where you put ERC20s to make them tradeable,” Ideamarket is “where you put URLs to make them market-curateable.”

We can then categorize links by platform (Twitter, YouTube, etc.) off-chain in the front end, using subgraph data.

This drastically streamlines Ideamarket’s approach to curating the internet.

Given most websites and URLs aren’t designed to be immutable, we expect successful listings will gradually trend toward more permanent content types, like Waybackmachine, IPFS, Arweave, ENS Domains, Mirror blogs, and so on. The URL market is designed to let these trends evolve naturally, based on market preference.

Ghost Market

The Ghost Market is a web2 layer of Ideamarket. Anyone can create a listing for free, and cast free upvotes. The ghost market provides a free signal about what the public finds important, which the crypto-savvy can convert into an on-chain listing and trade.

User Accounts

One of the major critiques of Ideamarket V1 was that having different markets for each platform made it unclear where to invest in a creator’s online identity. (“Elon Musk has a Twitter account, but what if he joins some new social platform?”)

That’s why in V1.5, we’re launching Ideamarket User Accounts — one identity, native to Ideamarket, which you can connect to other social accounts so people can find all your work.

We will soon launch a market for Ideamarket User Accounts — this is *the* place to invest in a creator’s identity on Ideamarket. (If you bought a Twitter listing expecting it to serve this purpose, we’ll provide a way for you to bridge your holdings into Ideamarket User Accounts later this year.)

Interest distribution

All listings with deposits in them automatically generate interest through lending protocols.

Interest distribution is paused until more DAI lending protocols become available on Arbitrum (such as Yearn). Once it resumes, interest generated by deposits on the URL market will be sent to the Ideamarket Treasury. This strengthens the ecosystem, while allowing the community to decide whether to allocate interest differently in the future. Interest from deposits on the User Account market will go to the account owner.

Where all this is going: The Blockchain of Opinions

The above two markets allow the public to curate:

1. the world’s most important URLs

2. the world’s most trusted voices

The blockchain of opinions ties it all together.

For every URL on the URL market (and soon text posts), users will be invited to signal their agreement on a scale of 0 to 100. This pressures public figures to provide a clear opinion on the issues the market decides are most important. The choices are effectively “yes” and “no,” leaving no room for an orgy of euphemism.

By creating an immutable track record of personal judgments, we can distinguish leadership and foresight from propaganda and status mongering.

• Who was early?

• Who was right?

Everyone will know, forever. 

Auditable public narratives

The intersection of ‌

• the world’s most trusted voices, and

• their most confident opinions, on

• the most important issues

‌creates a publicly auditable consensus mechanism for public knowledge and other mass-subjective judgments.

An alternative Public Narrative that’s

• provably fair,

• credibly neutral, and

• backed by skin in the game.

‌If the we don’t like the current state of “consensus reality,” we have two paths to change it — replace the top-ranked people, or replace the top-ranked URLs the market pressures them to evaluate.

Bounties for celebrity opinions

Users will be able to create and crowdsource bounties to solicit on-chain opinions by prominent people. For example:

Offer [Joe Rogan] $40,000 to rate [URL or text post] on-chain, on a scale of 1-100.

Bounties will be paid in $IMO.

Filtering

Users will be able to search and filter Ideamarket users: “Show me only users who expressed over 90% confidence in [URL about how COVID leaked from a lab] before [date].”

Or by judgments on any other issue, at any other time since launch.

With filtering and bounties, the Blockchain of Opinions allows you to press society’s leaders through a gauntlet of your own design, and to discover obscure geniuses who were right before everyone else.

The Blockchain of Opinions launches Q1 2022.

Set an alarm for launch day — 2/2/2022 — and BUY on the RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY.