Most of you likely have heard of Smart Media Tokens (SMT) White Paper by now.
It is quite long and technical.
I read it, glancing over some of the math formulas that were hurting my brain :)
It could have been made more readable by splitting technical details from high level description.
Yet, the paper contains some hidden gems that may have been overlooked by those who only read extracts or summaries.
Here are some, I found particularly interesting and important.
Fiat Gateways
To buy or sell SMTs people will need gateways for their domestic fiat currency.
To solve this problem and to add liquidity to Steem and SMTs, white paper introduces Simple Derivatives (IOUs)
Page 11
Let’s examine an instance in which an entrepreneur is looking to provide liquidity in the Steem ecosystem. The entrepreneur can issue an SMT without inflation properties, and imply that they will provide structure to peg it to USD (or any other debt, contract, or asset), making it like an IOU or basic derivative.
The structure they provide to the asset includes buying and selling it near $1, similar to Tether. The entrepreneur sets up bank wire capabilities for buying and selling, and takes a small % on each transaction. The derivative trades against STEEM, and also brings capital into the ecosystem to be used across all tokens.
Delegation of SMT Power
Page 42
delegate_vesting_shares_operation : Supports all SMTs that support vesting.
This is a big one.
Just like Steem, some of SMTs will support vested (Power) tokens,
and SMT Power wil also be delegatable.
Think of the possibilities!
Community Building with Paid Positions
Page 52
SMT communities may be bolstered with paid positions, guild roles, or jobs that are defined in programmable, native smart contracts and matched with continuously elected participants. Rewards received through the elected position come from some portion of the token’s Founder allocations or donations that are sent to a paid position contract.
Paid position contracts may be defined for length of position, frequency and volume of payments, particular token used for stake-weighted elections, percentage of the token required for a participant to be elected, and how tokens in paid position contracts are socialized or forfeited given no participant is elected.
The paid roles may be leveraged to support various applications, games, and businesses built around an SMT. A contract for a paid position, the postion’s reward schedule, and the voting thresholds required to elect an account into a paid position may be created by anyone for a fee. To establish the purpose of these positions, job descriptions or constitutions that encourage adherence to performance expectations may be established by the issuer or the token’s community. There can be an unlimited number of paid positions, and paid position contracts can receive any amount of a token’s Founder allocations or community donations. The types of paid positions that may be employed includes everything from front end developer, to evangelist, including educational content creator, business development representative, and many roles that have yet to be imagined.
Secondary ICOs for Contiguous Fundraising
page 53
Entrepreneurs leveraging SMTs to finance ventures may want to have the option to perform token auctions after the initial launch of the token. The entrepreneur can reserve Founders tokens at launch and earmark them for later sale, however, they may want to auction these tokens rather than sell them into Bid/Ask order books or sell them OTC.
To enable secondary auction-style ICOs, a secondary auction contract may be established. This contract requires definitions for when an ICO begins and how long it lasts, as well as lockup periods for the tokens purchased. The lockup period allows the tokens to be sold at a discount to the open markets and attract investment capital that would otherwise stay out of the market. The entrepreneur will send tokens to this contract prior to the beginning of the auction and the tokens will be distributed to the auction participants immediately following the close of auction period.