GM, friends. Welcome to the TalentLayer Token Compensation Overview. In this guide we’ll review how TalentLayer’s ecosystem allocates tokens to open-source and core team contributors who help grow our protocol together.
We also hope that other teams can take inspiration from our allocation model - bringing a more fair and transparent way of compensating and aligning incentives amongst contributors.
Why should you care about TalentLayer token allocations as a member of our open-source community? While open-source has existed since the dawn of software, token economies are a new paradigm that allows non-profit open-source initiatives to align incentives for builders and govern themselves perpetually. Your role as a member of our ecosystem is so important, and we want you to understand why and how tokens fall into this.
The tokens that you receive as allocations based on your open-source contributions will be usable in the governance of TalentLayer’s eventual decision making once we decentralize governance. This means by holding the tokens, you will have a say in what directions the ecosystem moves in the future. This is a big responsibility - we want you to actively be a member of our ecosystem in the long-term and having you contribute to governance is a part of that.
You are spending your valuable time contributing to making the vision of TalentLayer’s ecosystem a reality. This is something that you should be compensated for. Traditionally, open-source work is not compensated, and there is no ability for contributors to gain profit or “upside” if the tech they contributed to becomes widely adopted. With token economies, we are able to compensate contributors in tokens, and have the value accrual of the token increase proportionally to the adoption of the technology we build together.
Read about value accrual in decentralized protocol ecosystems here.
Back when TalentLayer was first founded, we knew we wanted to do token allocations differently; we’re an open-source movement with many contributors and a fluid work style - handling token allocations based on people’s fair market value or individual negotiation wasn’t practical or incentive aligned. The TalentLayer Token Compensation Model is based on a combination of the Slicing Pie equity model and Ethereum’s token allocation model - our inspiration.
Slicing Pie: Kirsten was inspired by experiences at her last startup, where they used an equity allocation model called Slicing Pie that compensated all team members fairly on a month to month basis based on contribution (as opposed to negotiation or salary level, as is in most startups).
Ethereum’s Model: During the founding of Ethereum, Vitalik managed ETH’s team allocation by allocating out amounts to people based on work contribution (doing work, with tokens assessed based on hours worked) or capital contribution (funding work, with tokens assessed based on dollar value).
By taking useful pieces from each model, we structured the V1 of the TalentLayer Token Allocation Model.
We also strive to manage things according to the following principles…