Octobay Token

[mktcode]

Octobay will have its own custom token. Legal and regulatory questions need to be answered and they also depend on the token's utility which we can discuss here.

Some general advantages of a custom token:

• independent of failures in other systems
• can be chain-agnostic
• can be tailored to incentivize good behavior
• can have completely unique characteristics built into the token contract
• ERC677 standard with transferAndCall allows for payments and contract calls in one transaction (in the case of Chainlink: requesting and paying oracles) like natively with ETH

Additional ideas:

• Charged services where paying with the token gives a discount:
  • Premium bounties with special promotion/placement
  • Promoting bounties/joboffers/devs/etc. on our social media channels
• Technical benefits (transferAndCall)
  • Octobay Tokens (or other ERC677 like LINK) as the bounty itself, can be done in one transaction (other ERC20 deposits will require two transactions)
  • Marking bounties as "being worked on" or "reserved" (maintainer could set required amount in Octobay Token)
• other
  • Staking it, to increase your limit for "Bounty Promises" (where you don't need to deposit anything upfront but can still get your "bounty" listed/promoted)

More ideas? Also suggestions for a name/symbol are very welcome. OBAY? (OCTO is unfortunately already taken.)
Squid rings? Octobrrrr? Or with a rocket scientist's creativity.... Octobay Utility Token (OUT) 😄

[alo9507]

I like OBAY!

I always wonder when I see certain projects running on utility tokens and think "What's the actual utility of this utility token, and why not just use Ether, or Link if you need transferAndCall functionality?"

I'm not sure I see why the escrow and project reserves couldn't just be in Ether? I know it ties us to the ups and downs of Ether, but issuing our own ERC20 token will lead to even more volatility often seen in newly issued penny-level alt coins. This could deter adoption as people may work for OBAY today, only to see it drop 80% tomorrow.

It also paves the way for other projects to do exactly what OctoBay does, but pay in Ether.

Putting myself in the shoes of a new dev just coming across a funded issue bounty on the OctoBay Twitter, I'd rather be getting Eth or Link, rather than a speculative new token I'd have to learn about.

But perhaps we just have yet to uncover the killer feature for why a custom utility token would actually be needed. If we just need transferAndCall, why not use Link?

Or I may just be being dense! None of these questions posed here are rhetorical - I'd actually like to hear why I'm wrong.

[mktcode]

The token should not be enforced upon users, sure. Anything can always be done purely with ETH, as a minimum default implementation. Then optionally anything that has to do with tokens. In terms of the medium of bounty value ERC20 just needs to be implemented in the existing process contract and UI wise.

On top of that, any gas fees occurring in the system can be "abstracted away" by using relayers and we can have "custom gas fees" which ERC677's transferAndCall is best suited for. (We can also refund relayers from the existing deposits that are moved.) But we can only support tokens for gas payments that have a market value and liquidity. So we need to have some form of whitelist. Could be governance driven. LINK and OBAY for the start, as accepted currencies, and a standard ETH transaction as the "always there" fallback.

Having our own token just gives us the freedom to implement it how we want and to address token holders more explicitly. We can build functionality into that token that we can't build into an existing one or ETH. Let's say, just as an example... moving the token to an address that is not connected with a GitHub user account through Octobay, could cost a fee that is distributed to token holders that actually are registered on Octobay with that address. This would require an adjustment in the token's 'transfer' function.

[rickkdev]

Let's also start including our Tokeneconomics to get a better understanding how our Token is designed by default:

15% - Founding Pool distributed to Team Members and Advisors
10% - Foundation / Treasury for grants and other things expanding the Octobay ecosystem and helping others working on similar Open Source solutions
5% - Partnerships
10% - Private Token Sale
10 % - Reserve
3% - Investor Pool
4% - Public Token Sale
1% - Liquidity

45% - Contributor Network Rewards

The 45% Contributor Rewards are distributed to future Octobay Bounties. They are not pre-minted and distributed on the spot.
Users that get freshly minted OBAY tokens have three options.

1. They sell them on Uniswap or any other DEX with OBAY pools
2. They HODL
3. They use their OBAY token to set up their own bounties. Setting up their own bounties with freshly minted OBAY tokens will be cheaper than our 8% fee only if the owner earned it through Bounty Mining. Those "freshly minted" OBAY tokens will be burned by the Octobay Protocol. That way we will always have enough Contributor Rewards for our Bounty Mining.

In Addition to the mentioned burning mechanism, we will support various perks for OBAY token users on our marketplace.

• Every Bounty paid with OBAY tokens (only the bounty fee needs to be paid with OBAY the bounty itself can contain any ERC-20 that way users won't face any kind of volatility since we can use DAI Stablecoin or others) will automatically feature you on our social media pages and website
• Every tip that was sent to a GitHub User will directly trigger notifications via Email / Twitter or GitHub notifications to notify the receiver that he got a tip in case he is not already registered @octobay. In that case, the tip can also contain ERC-20 but needs to be charged with OBAY.