Community Curation

A Token-Curated Registry (TCR) is a decentralized list where inclusion is governed by token holders. Participants stake tokens to propose, challenge, or vote on entries, creating a cryptoeconomic game where honest curation is rewarded and malicious behavior is penalized. This mechanism is used for curating trusted oracles, reputable service providers, and high-quality content feeds.

Staking requires participants to deposit and lock tokens as a bond to participate in curation, aligning their financial interest with the network's health. Slashing is the penalty mechanism that destroys or redistributes a staker's bond for provably malicious or incorrect actions (e.g., voting for spam). This skin-in-the-game model ensures curation is costly to attack.

Quadratic Voting allows community members to express the strength of their preference by allocating voting credits, where the cost increases quadratically with the number of votes cast for a single option. Quadratic Funding is a matching mechanism for public goods, where a fund is distributed proportionally to the square of the sum of square roots of contributions. Both systems aim to reduce plutocracy and amplify the voice of a broader community.

Reputation systems assign non-transferable scores based on a user's historical contributions and behavior within a protocol. Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) are a specific implementation—non-transferable NFTs that represent credentials, affiliations, or achievements. These systems enable curation based on proven participation rather than mere token wealth, fostering sybil-resistance and long-term alignment.

Delegation allows token holders to transfer their voting power to trusted experts or representatives, enabling informed curation without requiring every user to be an expert. Liquid democracy combines direct and representative democracy, allowing delegates to be changed or votes to be cast directly at any time. This creates flexible and efficient governance structures for large, decentralized communities.

Bonding curves are smart contracts that mint new tokens or NFTs at a price defined by a mathematical curve, typically increasing with supply. In curation markets, users bond collateral to signal value, and are rewarded from fees if the community agrees. This creates a continuous token model for dynamically pricing and discovering the value of curated items, from memes to data sets.

A Token-Curated Registry (TCR) is a decentralized list maintained by token holders who stake collateral to add, challenge, or vote on entries. This mechanism ensures list quality through economic incentives.

• Process: Proposers stake tokens to list an item; others can challenge it, triggering a vote.
• Outcome: The losing side forfeits their stake to the winner, aligning incentives with honest curation.
• Example: Early TCRs were used for curated lists of reputable oracles, DAOs, or news sources.

This model uses community voting to retroactively reward projects that have already provided value to the ecosystem. It addresses the public goods funding problem by having the community curate which past contributions were most impactful.

• Mechanism: A funding pool is allocated, and token holders vote on distributing it to nominated projects.
• Key Example: Optimism's RetroPGF rounds, where OP token holders and badgeholders vote to reward developers, educators, and tooling providers for their contributions to the Optimism ecosystem.

Many ecosystem foundations delegate the allocation of grant funds to community-led committees or direct token holder votes. This curates which projects receive development funding.

• Structure: A Grant Council or DAO reviews proposals and votes on disbursements from a treasury.
• Benefits: Distributes decision-making power, surfaces community needs, and funds aligned builders.
• Examples: Uniswap Grants Program and Aave Grants DAO utilize community panels to curate and fund ecosystem proposals.

Communities curate information hubs, documentation, and educational content to ensure quality and relevance. Contributors are often incentivized through tokens or reputation points.

• Applications: Curating wiki entries, developer tutorials, bug bounty submissions, or research reports.
• Tools: Platforms like Commonwealth or Discourse forums integrated with token-gating or sentiment polling.
• Goal: Creates a self-sustaining, high-quality knowledge base maintained by the most engaged users.

Protocols use community curation to create and maintain vetted lists of security auditors, bug bounty hunters, or safe smart contract libraries. This reduces counterparty risk for developers.

• Process: Auditors apply or are nominated, and their credentials and past work are voted on by a qualified community (e.g., other auditors, core devs).
• Outcome: Creates a trust-minimized registry of pre-approved security service providers.
• Value: Streamlines the search for reliable auditors for new projects within an ecosystem.

The technical infrastructure enabling curation, ranging from simple token voting to sophisticated conviction voting or quadratic voting.

• Token Voting: One token, one vote. Simple but can lead to plutocracy.
• Conviction Voting: Voting power increases the longer a voter supports a proposal, ideal for continuous funding decisions.
• Delegation: Token holders can delegate voting power to subject-matter experts, creating a representative curation model.
• Tools: Implemented via smart contracts on platforms like Snapshot (off-chain) or directly on-chain.

A Token-Curated Registry (TCR) is a decentralized list where inclusion is governed by token holders. Curators stake tokens to vote on submissions, earning rewards for correct votes and losing stake for incorrect ones. This creates a cryptoeconomic game where rational actors are incentivized to maintain list quality. Key mechanisms include:

• Challenge Periods: Any listed item can be challenged, triggering a vote.
• Skin in the Game: Curators must stake to participate, aligning incentives.
• Example: AdChain used a TCR to curate a list of non-fraudulent digital advertising domains.

Curation markets are prediction market-like systems where users signal value by bonding assets (e.g., tokens) to outcomes or content. Popularized by the bonding curve model, early curators buy in at lower prices and profit if later participants join. This creates a self-reinforcing discovery mechanism for valuable information. Core concepts include:

• Bonding Curves: Define the price of a curation share as a function of total supply.
• Exit Tribute: A fee on withdrawal that rewards remaining stakers.
• Application: Used by platforms like Radicle for funding open-source projects.

A primary security challenge is preventing Sybil attacks, where a single entity creates many fake identities to manipulate outcomes. Curation systems combat this through costly signaling, such as staking valuable tokens. However, collusion among large stakeholders (e.g., whales) to control the curated list remains a risk. Mitigations include:

• Progressive Decentralization: Gradually distributing governance tokens.
• Conviction Voting: Voting power increases with the duration of a stake.
• Futarchy: Using prediction markets to make decisions based on projected outcomes.

Poorly designed incentives can lead to tragedy of the commons or extractive behavior. Common attack vectors include:

• Bribe Attacks: An attacker bribes voters to list a malicious item, potentially profiting more than the staked penalty.
• Free-Riding: Users benefit from a curated list without contributing to its maintenance.
• Information Cascades: Voters follow early signals rather than independent evaluation. Defenses involve careful parameter tuning of stake amounts, challenge periods, and reward slashing to ensure the cost of attack outweighs the potential profit.

Futarchy is a governance model where decisions are made based on prediction markets. In a curation context, markets are created to predict the outcome (e.g., 'Will this project increase ecosystem value?'). The market's price becomes a collective intelligence signal for what should be curated. This substitutes direct voting with speculative truth-seeking. Key elements are:

• Market Resolution: Tied to a verifiable, objective metric.
• Trading Incentives: Profit motives drive participants to reveal accurate information.
• Example: Gnosis has explored futarchy for protocol parameter decisions.

Several blockchain projects operationalize community curation with distinct security models:

• Ocean Protocol: Uses curated staking for data assets, where stakers signal quality and earn rewards.
• Gitcoin Grants: Uses Quadratic Funding, a mechanism where the weight of community donations (a curation signal) determines matching fund distribution, resistant to whale dominance.
• Kleros: A decentralized court that uses juror staking and appeal mechanisms to curate lists (e.g., a TCR for tokens) and resolve disputes, with security based on game-theoretic jury selection.

A collective decision-making process where voters allocate a budget of voice credits, with the cost of additional votes for one option increasing quadratically. This reduces the power of wealthy individuals and captures the intensity of preference.

• Formula: Cost = (Number of Votes)².
• Use Case: Used in Gitcoin Grants to fund public goods, allowing communities to signal strong support for specific projects without complete dominance by large holders.

A non-transferable scoring mechanism that tracks an entity's historical contributions or behavior within a protocol. Unlike fungible tokens, reputation is earned, not bought, and is used to weight influence in curation tasks.

• Key Property: Soulbound or non-transferable to prevent sybil attacks.
• Example: SourceCred algorithmically distributes "cred" based on contributions to open-source projects, influencing future reward distribution.

An actor (individual or bot) who identifies, signals, or stakes on high-quality content, data, or subgraphs within a network. Curators are often economically rewarded for their early and accurate work.

• Role: Perform the discovery and validation work for decentralized applications.
• In Practice: On The Graph, curators signal on subgraphs by depositing GRT tokens, guiding indexers and delegators to valuable data sources.

A mathematical curve that defines the relationship between a token's price and its supply. It is used in curation markets to automate pricing and mint/burn tokens based on community demand.

• Function: Price increases as supply grows, rewarding early curators.
• Application: Curation markets use bonding curves to allow users to mint shares in a curated topic; the earlier you mint, the greater the potential reward as later buyers enter at a higher price.

The defensive property of a system that prevents a single entity from creating many fake identities (Sybils) to unfairly influence governance or curation outcomes. It is a foundational challenge for decentralized community processes.

• Solutions: Include proof-of-personhood, stake weighting, reputation systems, and social graph analysis.
• Importance: Without Sybil resistance, token-curated registries and quadratic voting can be easily gamed by attackers.