VI. Token Economy
The MAIN (Main Asset and Identity Network) platform is creating a new approach to the data economy by placing users in control of their personal information. As the world’s first decentralized zero-party data marketplace, MAIN allows individuals to encrypt, store, and selectively share their data, ensuring complete ownership and autonomy.
6.1 Problem and Opportunity
The Problem
The current data economy is dominated by centralized entities that collect, commodify, and profit from user data without consent or fair compensation. This system has significant flaws:
Lack of User Ownership: Users have no control over how their personal information is collected, used, or sold.
Privacy and Security Risks: Data breaches and unethical practices have eroded trust in traditional data brokers and platforms.
Misaligned Incentives: Companies exploit user data for profit, while individuals gain little to no value from their contributions.
Low Data Accuracy: Without user consent, the data collected is often incomplete, outdated, or misrepresented, reducing its value to buyers.
The Opportunity
MAIN has addressed these challenges by developing a decentralized, user-driven data economy that prioritizes transparency, security, and fair value exchange. Some key advantages MAIN offers include:
Empowering Users: MAIN enables individuals to take full ownership of their personal data, storing it securely in decentralized vaults and sharing it selectively with trusted entities.
Building Trust: By requiring user consent for data sharing, MAIN fosters a trustworthy ecosystem where both users and companies/data brokers benefit.
Monetizing Data Ethically: Users are rewarded for sharing high-quality, accurate data – creating a direct financial incentive that aligns with their privacy preferences.
Scalable Ecosystem: The MCN token and Protocol-Owned Liquidity ensure a stable, scalable economy that supports long-term platform growth and adoption.
6.2 Purpose and Utility of the MCN Token
MAIN's innovative bidirectional ecosystem is designed to create a robust, sustainable ecosystem that balances the need for stable transactions with long-term value accrual.
The ecosystem incorporates MAIN Coins and MAIN Points to facilitate frictionless day-to-day utility, transactions, and ensure stability within the decentralized zero-party data marketplace. Users earn MCN tokens by securely capturing and storing their personal data in decentralized vaults, maintaining full ownership and control. These tokens incentivize users to selectively share their data with trusted companies and individuals, fostering a fair and user-centric data economy.
MAIN Coin (MCN)
The MCN token is the primary value capture mechanism of the MAIN platform, serving as the proxy for users to see how much data they’ve shared and incentivizing them to share more data with trusted 3rd parties, instead of the current system where there is no opt-out from untrusted parties who can act irresponsibly with consumer data. User data being commoditized requires a solid tokenomic basis and function that is easily understood by users (suppliers/product), and companies seeking to gain more valuable insights (buyers/consumers). To accomplish this, many of the MCN tokenomic elements will be abstracted and obfuscated from the front-end view, thus allowing a familiar web2-esque experience.
Incentivizing Secure Data Storage and Sharing: Users are rewarded with MCN tokens for securely capturing and storing their personal data in decentralized vaults. This approach ensures that individuals maintain full ownership and control over their information. By offering MCN tokens as incentives, the platform encourages users to selectively share their data with trusted entities, fostering a fair and user-centric data economy. MCN tokens will be distributed as a point system ratio for users who earn points by enabling various modules that allow Data Brokers and Companies to have visibility on specific user data.
Facilitating Marketplace Transactions: Within the MAIN ecosystem, MCN tokens function as the currency for transactions between users and data consumers. Companies and individuals seeking access to user data utilize familiar Fiat-based systems and rails, which are funneled to MAIN, and then MAIN will inject the fiat payments to the protocol-owned liquidity module which provides value to the MCN token ensuring solvency for redemptions by users who have opted-in to supplying specific data.
MAIN Points
MAIN Points serve as the platform's primary reward system, earned when users share verified data through the platform. These points can be converted to MCN tokens at a fixed rate, where 1,000 MAIN Points equals 1 MCN token. This straightforward conversion system gives users a clear and predictable way to track the value of their data contributions. While MCN's market price fluctuates based on supply and demand, its fundamental value is driven by revenue generated from data brokers and companies purchasing verified user data through the platform.
MCN<>Points Conversion Process
Points are earned by users as they store more data on the MAIN platform, creating a direct correlation between the volume of data submitted and the number of points accrued.
This system incentivizes users to engage with the platform actively, offering a transparent and measurable reward for their participation. Each point holds a stable, predefined conversion rate to MCN tokens (e.g., 1,000 Points = 1 MCN), ensuring users can reliably gauge the value of their contributions. This stability is critical for building trust and confidence, as users know their efforts to securely store and share data will translate into tangible rewards without being subject to surface-level market volatility.
Example: Maria earns 10,000 Points by securely storing six months’ worth of fitness tracking data. These Points are converted into 10 MCN tokens at a fixed ratio, providing Maria with measurable rewards for her data contributions.
This bidirectional structure ensures that MAIN can offer both stability for everyday transactions and potential for long-term value appreciation, addressing the diverse needs of users, businesses, and investors within the ecosystem.
6.3 Utility and Value Capture Mechanism
The MCN token derives its value from an interplay of user participation, data demand, and platform-and-company-controlled liquidity mechanisms.
User Participation and Data Sharing Activities: As users engage with the platform by storing and selectively sharing their personal data, they earn MCN tokens. This token gain is represented as a Points system which should be familiar, and act as something akin to the way incumbent data-sharing incentivization systems operate (Honey). While MCN token redemptions are functionally the primary reward mechanism at play, there are other gamified aspects of user participation such as referral systems which allow MAIN to collate data on user-to-user information that can also be used as a data source that can be monetized.
Demand from Companies Seeking User Data: Companies utilize the MAIN platform to access curated and permissioned data from users. Payments made in fiat are funneled into the protocol-owned liquidity module, which supports MCN token solvency. With the implementation of User-Consented data, it can be accepted that companies are gaining a much higher degree of truthfulness to the primary data source, and a much more persistent source of data as users will generally stay opted-in to supplying useful data to trustworthy companies while opting out of having their entire online identity leaked without their consent. While this is not a codified aspect of the benefits of the MAIN system, the sociological and psychological effect this carries will incentivize data brokers and companies to be more honest players within the broader internet ecosystem so as to maintain their reputational integrity and continue staying in business, and this in turn creates a positive flywheel from users who are more willing to opt in to supplying data to highly rated data brokers and companies.
Limited Token Supply and Liquidity Control: With a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, the MCN token benefits from scarcity. By maintaining protocol-owned liquidity, MAIN stabilizes the token economy while reducing the risks of external market manipulation. The business model behind MAIN, the relationship with companies and data brokers, and the tokenized system ensures that users and companies alike can experience uninterrupted usage from MAIN’s product offerings.
Example: A health insurance company integrates MAIN to access lifestyle data from users like Jake, who opt to share anonymized exercise patterns. The company uses this data to refine wellness programs and compensates Jake fairly for his insights.
6.4 Gamification & User Engagement
MAIN's platform incentivizes user participation through transparent data-sharing rewards. The fixed Points-to-MCN conversion rate provides predictability, appealing to privacy-conscious users seeking fair compensation for their data. This attracts businesses looking for quality, consented data insights, whose fiat investments strengthen the ecosystem through Protocol-Owned Liquidity.
Gamification is one of the key drivers of user adoption and engagement within the MAIN platform. By incorporating game-like elements into the user experience, MAIN motivates individuals to actively participate in data storage and sharing activities, while making the process intuitive and rewarding.
Referral Incentives: The platform’s referral system rewards users who bring new participants into the ecosystem. For every successful referral, users earn additional points that contribute to their overall data-sharing rewards.
Leaderboards and High-Engagement Rewards: MAIN incorporates leaderboards to recognize and incentivize active participants. Users who contribute significant amounts of high-value data or engage consistently with the platform are featured on these leaderboards, encouraging healthy competition. Additionally, top contributors may receive exclusive rewards such as bonus points, enhanced token conversion rates, or early access to new platform features.
6.5 Bonding Curve: Dynamic Token Rewards
To enhance platform sustainability and user engagement, MAIN implements a bonding curve mechanism for MCN token rewards. Under this system, users must accumulate a set threshold of MCN tokens before they can cash out their points-to-MCN rewards. This threshold, determined by the bonding curve, dynamically adjusts based on platform-wide activity and token availability in the Protocol Owned Liquidity pool.
The bonding curve encourages consistent user participation by rewarding active contributors while ensuring a steady inflow of data over time. As users approach the threshold, their potential earnings become more tangible, incentivizing further data contributions. Additionally, this system reduces frequent micro-redemptions, which could create unnecessary sell pressure on the MCN token.
This approach also creates a psychological incentive for users to remain engaged. Knowing that their cumulative data contributions bring them closer to a meaningful payout ensures continued participation, while the set threshold fosters a sense of achievement upon reaching redemption eligibility.
Stabilization Mechanism from Protocol-Owned Liquidity (POL): The integration of Fiat payments into the Protocol-Owned Liquidity module creates a stable market for the MCN token. As companies make Fiat payments for data access, these funds are converted into USDC and injected into the POL pool. Since the total supply of MCN tokens remains fixed, each injection of USDC increases the relative value of MCN tokens in circulation. MCN redemptions from users are the primary source of sell-pressure, but the points to MCN conversion ratio should offset this by ensuring that the rate of USDC inflows exceeds the MCN redemption rate. (See below in Section 6.7)
6.6 Protocol Owned Liquidity
The advantages to Protocol Owned Liquidity are deep, varied, and far-reaching. Within the MAIN ecosystem, it effectively market-makes the points redemption market while also serving as the primary source of liquidity injection from orgs and data brokers who are seeking to use the MAIN product.
Protocol Owned Liquidity (POL) is a module that allows for MCN tokens to be held in conjunction with a stablecoin equivalent (we will use USDC for the purposes of this paper). When additional USDC is added to the pool, with MCN quantity remaining stable, the value of all MCN goes up proportionally to the amount of USDC added divided by all MCN in the pool.
Given MAIN’s business model with Fiat payments coming in the form of parties who are seeking the data made available by MAIN’s userbase, MAIN will be injecting USDC to the protocol owned liquidity while users will be exchanging their MCN tokens with the Protocol Owned Liquidity pool to redeem their points rewards. The Points to MCN conversion rate should be governed by token holders and stakers.
Protocol Owned Liquidity also serves the purpose of being able to act as the primary source of truth for Market Makers and other parties to commit arbitrage with the “true value” based on the Protocol Owned Liquidity, ensuring an efficient market across all venues where MCN is available. By offloading a lot of the exchange rate risk and effort to an algorithmically maintained POL, the MAIN team can keep redemptions fast, efficient, while reducing costs to themselves for day-to-day processes and focus on growing the business.
Example: A major telecom company opts to pay $50,000 in fiat for anonymized user call pattern data. This fiat is converted into USDC and added to POL, increasing the MCN token value (MCN supply stays static, but USDC quantity goes up by 50K USDC).
6.7 MCN Stabilization
The Protocol-Owned Liquidity module is central to stabilizing the MCN token’s value and mitigating volatility risks within the MAIN ecosystem. By directly managing liquidity, the platform ensures a steady and predictable market environment that benefits both users and corporate participants. This is predicated on a substantial amount of the MCN total unlocked supply existing within the POL Module, ensuring that arbitrageurs use the primary contract-controlled POL as their source of truth.
Liquidity Injection and Stabilization Mechanism: POL functions by converting fiat payments from companies into USDC and adding them to the liquidity pool. This process creates a controlled reserve that helps maintain stability in MCN token value, even during periods of increased redemption activity. Unlike systems that rely on external market makers, POL is self-managed, providing greater control and reducing the likelihood of price swings caused by external factors.
Controlled Sell Pressure: The primary source of sell pressure for MCN tokens comes from user redemptions. The fixed Points-to-MCN conversion ratio, however, ensures predictability in redemption activity. With corporate fiat inflows consistently outpacing MCN redemptions, POL maintains a liquidity surplus, balancing the market and preventing excessive downward pressure on token value.
Market Efficiency and Confidence: POL also acts as a stabilizing force across all trading venues for MCN. By serving as the foundation for token valuation, the liquidity pool allows arbitrageurs to align external markets with the platform-determined MCN price. This alignment minimizes speculative price fluctuations and enhances trust among token holders and platform users.
6.8 Investor Considerations
The MAIN Platform offers a unique investment opportunity by bridging the gap between user data ownership and corporate data demand within a decentralized ecosystem.
Exposure to a User-Driven Data Economy: As the world transitions to more ethical and transparent data practices, the MAIN platform positions itself at the forefront of this movement. Investors in the MCN token gain exposure to a growing ecosystem where user data, captured and shared with consent, becomes a tradable and highly sought-after commodity.
Alignment of User Incentives with Platform Growth: The tokenomics structure ensures that users are actively incentivized to contribute to the platform’s success. By tying rewards to data sharing and storage, the platform fosters organic growth and increased user activity. This alignment guarantees that token demand scales proportionally with platform adoption. By holding the token, the scaling effects of exposure to the wide world of data sharing are felt through ever-increasing Fiat payments from brokers who wish to continue having access to user-submitted, trustworthy data.
Potential for Value Appreciation Through Increased Adoption: With a limited token supply and a well-controlled liquidity module, the MCN token benefits from deflationary pressures as adoption grows. As more companies leverage the MAIN platform to access high-quality, user-consented data, demand for the token increases, driving value appreciation. Additionally, the hybrid fiat-to-MCN model ensures a stable and sustainable economy, reducing volatility and ensuring investor confidence.
6.9 Token Distribution (Draft)
The total supply of 1,000,000,000 MCN tokens is strategically allocated to ensure balanced growth and stakeholder alignment.
This distribution model is designed to create a robust foundation for MAIN's growth while incentivizing long-term participation from all the stakeholders.
The current data economy is broken - centralized entities collect and profit from user data without consent or fair compensation, leading to privacy breaches and misaligned incentives. MAIN offers a solution through its decentralized data economy, where users maintain ownership of their personal data and can selectively share it with trusted entities. Through the MCN token system and Protocol-Owned Liquidity, MAIN creates a sustainable ecosystem where users are fairly compensated for sharing accurate data while maintaining control over their privacy.
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