Whaleshares is a sharing economy at its heart. Taking the best of community banks, guilds and blockchain-based DACs and combining them into a sharing economy where anyone can earn tokens that represent value in the eyes of their stakeholding community of trusted friends and followers.
The Whaleshares community is not unfamiliar with the concepts of tokenization powers offered by the Bitshares DA. and potentially a broader community to elevate it and bring further awareness. This proposition is paramount in cultivating true value in the Whaleshares ecosystem. As every reward, in effect, results in content sharing, an audit trail of rewards is established and maintained for every user within his or her feed. While a minor addition, it provides a grandiose amount of value. By introducing an audit trail to log users’ rewards, users are incentivized to reward only the content they believe is adding value to the community.
For example, a whale in the community - User A - creates a second account - User B - and posts non value adding information from the account, yet rewards it to unfairly accumulate a larger quantity of WLS. In this example, every time User A rewards User B’s information the post is shared to User A’s feed, thus bringing attention to the community. The community would then, theoretically, stop supporting this whale or at the very least see through any illusions of benevolence and symbiotic intent this whale may claim.
While rewarding information directly results in sharing it, information is also indirectly shared on users’ feeds through third party consumption Whale Tokens. These tokens, which are backed by the token issuer’s locked away stake in the Whaleshares network, act as a proxy for the token issuer. Whale Tokens can be consumed by the token holders to reward and share their posts with the token’s issuer’s account. Of course, as with all utility tokens, these tokens will be traded on secondary markets with varying price levels and trade volumes. Now, as one can imagine, this presents a unique situation in which users, unbeknownst to the token issuer, will obtain the token and share his or her own information. This information may be value added to the community, but it could be non value added, or worse - destructive, to the community and/or the account owner. As such, the token issuer would not want just anyone to use his token. This is where user “following” comes into play to establish a web of trust. A proposed solution to this conundrum is to only allow third parties that have been followed directly by the token issuer to consume the Whale Token for a reward and share. Otherwise, they are free to trade the token on the secondary markets, but nothing more. In addition to rectifying the aforementioned problem, this solution also incentivizes users to build a web of trust, effective cultivating a community of value adding individuals.
Furthermore, as previously mentioned, when a user shares another user’s post, not only does it share the post to the rewarder’s feed, but also rewards the poster with Whalestake, based upon the WLS the rewarder has locked into Whalestake. This concept is similar to that of other social media networks and their use of “upvoting”. At launch of the private beta, Whaleshares will have 14 day periods set aside to claim rewards. For instance, if a new user earned 20 Whalestake on a post, that post will not pay out that 20 Whalestake until such a time when 14 days has passed from the date and time of posting.
