Tokenomics
$UBUNTU is the utility token used throughout the Africarare ecosystem as the basis of transactions and interactions. It is an ERC-20 utility token built on the Ethereum blockchain. It can be used across the ecosystem by creators, developers, and publishers, allowing users to exchange assets and build a user-based platform of rewards.
User generated digital assets are represented as ERC-1155 tokens. To ensure the everlasting scarcity and verifiable scarcity of non-fungible items, we use the ERC-1155 token standard. This standard allows a smart contract to track token-ownership at the individual token level. Each item has a unique identifier and, optionally, unique properties stored as metadata.
$UBUNTU tokens are an essential part of the Africarare platform. The team is working on establishing the key mechanics that intrinsically tie $UBUNTU tokens to the Africarare platform and its value. The $UBUNTU token is an ERC-20 utility token built on the Ethereum blockchain that serves as the basis for transactions within the world, which include:
- Access to the Africarare platform and the power to buy or rent all digital goods and services that become available in Ubuntuland.
- Governance: In the future $UBUNTU tokens may also serve as governance tokens that allow holders to participate in Governance decisions of the platform, using a DAO structure. They can exercise voting rights on key in-world decisions. $UBUNTU token owners can vote themselves or delegate voting rights to other players of their choice.
- Staking: In the future $UBUNTU tokens allow for staking, which enables passive revenue streams: you get more $UBUNTU by staking it.
REVENUE & TOKEN MODEL
REVENUE STEAM ALLOCATION & LOCK IN
TOKEN DISTRIBUTION SUMMARY
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TECHNOLOGY
Blockchain technology is used to record ownership of tokens and allow owners to transfer/sell/use them without restriction. Filecoin is used to store the actual digital asset and ensure the asset cannot be changed without owner permission. Three different blockchain protocols will be integrated into Africarare offering:
- ERC-20 for $UBUNTU; and $Kito
- ERC-1155 and ERC-721 for the Digital Assets storage and trading.
Why are we using Ethereum? We found many benefits of doing so, as detailed below:
- Ease of use: Ethereum has been built with flexibility in mind, which perfectly fits our use case with Asset tokens. Ethereum also has the largest number of developers, which allows for well-established standards, best practises and support;
- Robustness: It is, as of today, among the most robust blockchain protocols: its wide adoption makes the network validated by many and thus more secure; and
- Interoperability: Ethereum is a protocol, a base layer on top of which all applications can build and interact with each other.
The main issue faced by Ethereum today is often said to be its scaling issue. Blockchains are based on three pillars: Security, Decentralization and Scalability (throughput). Historically, Ethereum always put security and decentralization first, at the cost of scalability, and some technological improvements need to be made at the base layer to support traffic at scale. On most public blockchains like Ethereum, this is one of the main current concerns, and efforts are in progress to solve these scaling issues, without sacrificing the blockchain trilemma.
Ethereum is a blockchain that has proved its robustness and offers a large ecosystem, resources and support from developers.
The Africarare team is looking at layer-2 solutions that use the main Ethereum chain as an anchor for security. At the moment they are not ready for implementation or have not reached a production stage, so we cannot reliably integrate them yet. We will closely follow technical progress on this topic and decide to integrate the solution that combines the best advantages for our product, use-case and users.
INTEROPERABILITY
As we use Ethereum as the substrate of our ERC-1155/ERC721 implementation, any platform/wallet that supports ERC-1155/ERC-721 will be able to inspect and use our ASSET. This means independent developers could rely on the plethora of ASSETS our players will be creating.
The Africarare gaming environment is divided into 5 types of tokens:
- $UBUNTU tokens (our game currency used across the system)
- LANDS (Worlds in which players play that are created by the community)
- ASSETS (3d models created by players and traded in the marketplace)
- ITEMS burnt to give attributes to ASSETS. They are ERC20 tokens
- KITO burnt to mint ASSETS. Depending on their power, they allow users to associate a certain number of ITEMS to an ASSET. They are ERC20 tokens
SERVICES
There are various services on offer from the Africarare community from booking meeting rooms to your next virtual yoga session. Using $UBUNTU various people can use these services for pre-agreed rates.
Purchase your piece of Ubuntuland and create your own application on top of it. Inspired by traditional African architecture which often employs circular enclosures to house communities and secure wealth.
Create your own unique avatars that can be traded, along with unique skins such as hats, jackets and even shoes. Enter Africarare as an African art creature called a gogga (South African slang for a bug or insect). Avatars are NTfs and travel through Africarare. Purchase unique items for your avatar in the marketplace.
Various Africarare NFT collections have been released, starting with the kito™ collection.
Once you have purchased either an avatar skin, NFT, land or token, you will immediately be upgraded to a status-level Ubuntulander and a member of the tribe. You will have access to private discord channels, discounts, cutting edge news and upcoming events taking place within the Africarare platform. This is a nation of sharing after all.
In future, $UBUNTU holders may be able to participate in governance of Africarare via a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), where they can exercise voting rights on key decisions of the Africarare ecosystem. This is one of the advantages of being in an environment that operates along the lines of true-ownership, digital scarcity, monetization capabilities, and interoperability.
UBUNTULAND SALE
In the short term, we are launching the first public land sales and metaverse. This will be complemented with the $UBUNTU public launch. As such, we expect to have $UBUNTU available for individuals and corporations in order to increase the liquidity and availability of it, with the main purpose being to collaborate with the community growth and ecosystem flow.
In relation to the proposed $UBUNTU token offering, the community of creators and players will need to get access to $UBUNTU. We plan to make it accessible to the community through multiple ways, with controllable supply mechanisms.
As the community and number of creators and land owners increases, there might be an increased need for $UBUNTU tokens within the ecosystem. Therefore, while the total supply of $UBUNTU tokens is fixed, the initial amount of $UBUNTU tokens offered provides a scarcity effect that reduces the $UBUNTU tokens available per capita and therefore fostering demand.
By registering every asset created as an NFT, Africarare allows creators to retain copyright and ownership of everything they create and can sell and trade items while receiving all the benefits for their work. Aside from addressing all of these issues, Africarare aims to bring even more value to the crafted items of creators. For the first time ever, creators are able to see how their uploaded assets come to life when they see them used in a land as part of great experiences.
WALLETS
We minimize the security risk on our backend by reducing the responsibility of hot wallets that are only used for referral and whitelisting. The other wallets are cold storage wallets that hold responsibility for updating the platform with new contracts and new parameters. These could later be part of a governance mechanism.
For these cold wallets, we use a 2 out of 3 multi-signature wallet. (https://github.com/gnosis/MultiSigWallet) and all of the owners of those multi-signatures are three hardware wallets. This wallet has the ability to upgrade our $UBUNTU tokens, as well as the ability to extend functionality via super operators.
In relation to the methods of payment, if the user wishes to pay with:
- an ERC-20 based token (ETH or USDC), it will then be processed by a smart contract on-chain and the user shall receive the $UBUNTU directly into his wallet; and/or
- BTC, credit card or fiat payment, it will then be processed by a third-party service merchant solution, whereby upon confirmation by the latter, the $UBUNTU will be released.
SECURITY
Africarare marketplace is relying on the security of Ethereum for the functioning of its smart contracts.
The only wallet that can affect the logic of our smart contract is our multi-signature wallet which uses the gnosis MultiSig wallet backed with three hardware wallets.
On our backend, we use a database that caches the smart contract events to keep track of ownership. Our backend also stores temporary assets. On that side, its responsibility is thus minimal.
As for fiat payment hot wallets, we are designing a daily auto-refill to ensure that only a minimum amount of token is present, minimizing the consequence of a breach.
Our team leverages best-practice for software development management and for the software development lifecycle. This includes taking the approach of the principle of least privilege, best practice in managing passwords/secrets, and constantly working to decrease system surface-area.
Last modified 9mo ago