How TEA Project TApps Benefit Everyone
The TEA Project aims to host a large variety of rich dApps running secure and decentralized on its network. Called TApps in the TEA ecosystem, any TApp’s success depends on the interplay of how well the application is designed and how much consumers demand its use case. A TApp might be great, but it needs to be seen by consumers for it to succeed. That’s where curators enter into the equation. A curator is incentivized to help boost the reception of TApps for the benefit of both developers and consumers. We can better understand the TApp platform by seeing how each participant benefits from TApps on the TEA network.
How the TEA Project Benefits TApp Developers
Developers will only develop their apps for the TEA network if the reward is worth the effort. Lucky for them, the TEA Project has designed a variety of support mechanisms for TApp developers. For fundraising, the TEA Project’s app store, known as the TAppStore, provides every TApp with the option of a bonding curve for minting its own tokens. This helps developers turn future app revenue into early investment support.
Through the TApp’s bonding curve, investors and early adopters can purchase tokens unique to the project and earn dividends as consumers use the TApp. Part of the usage fee paid by the consumer is used to buy tokens on the TApp’s bonding curve. Because these unique TApp tokens follow a bonding curve, an investor’s TApp tokens will go up in value every time someone purchases more. We’ll cover this revenue stream for a TApp’s token holders more in the example below.
The early investors in a TApp’s bonding curve could be crypto enthusiasts looking for the next hot project or fans of the platform who elect to become TApp curators. Consumers experienced with using TApps may wish to find more promising TApps that are waiting to be popularized. These consumers-turned-curators are incentivized by the bonding curve mechanism promote early-stage projects. If the TApp becomes popular, a portion of the consumption fees are used to buy more tokens on the bonding curve for distribution to its holders. It’s also likely that more people will want to invest in a popular TApp’s tokens, pushing the bonding curve up and to the right. Recall that an incrementally larger supply of tokens following a bonding curve means a concomitant bump up in the token’s price.
An Example TApp Use Case Where Everyone Wins
The TApps are designed to be useful to consumers; that’s how they make their revenue. TApps exceed other blockchain apps by being much faster. The TEA Project’s design lets its slower layer-1 blockchain deal with economic incentives that help keep the network secure. TEA’s layer-2 can perform calculations at speeds much faster than typical layer-1 blockchains. This is how TEA Project TApps are able to offer security and decentralization that’s beyond traditional internet apps while being just as fast.
Another feature of the TEA Project is how everyone benefits from the system. Let’s imagine a use case where:
- Photographers upload pictures to the network.
- App developers send their apps as compiled WASM code to the network.
- Miners help distribute the data, secure the network, and execute the WASM code logic.
- Consumers use the apps on the network to achieve their desired result.
This complex interaction is visualized below:
This example shows a photographer taking pictures that a Tensorflow AI app analyzes. The person at the bottom of the picture is the consumer, an AI researcher that’s interested in seeing how the AI app parses the photographer’s images. Now let’s see how everyone benefits by participating in this transaction.
- The photographer earns a portion of the fee paid by the consumer (paid in TEA tokens) for providing her photographs as data. These are uploaded encrypted to the network and distributed among IPFS nodes for storage.
In the example above, we could imagine the photographer becoming good at taking pictures that are great candidates for AI algorithms. To be economically rewarded for her photography skills, she could use a bonding curve to be fully compensated for her picture taking service. Similar to how the Graph Token’s users are incentivized to index Web3 data, the TEA Project’s users could buy tokens from her bonding curve.
As new AI researchers use her datasets, a portion of their fees will go back towards purchasing her unique token off of the bonding curve for her service.
Let’s imagine the current fee for using any of her picture sets is 100T and the bonding curve for her pictures has a theta (reserve percentage) of .6. As an AI researcher pays the 100T fee, this sets off a chain of events:
- A portion of the payment received goes to fund the reserve of the bonding curve: with a theta of .6, 60% is used to buy her token off the bonding curve, 60T worth. The payment of 60T is used to fund the reserve of the bonding curve while the tokens that are bought are distributed as a dividend to existing token holders. These token holders include early investors and curators who hope to gain by publicizing the photographer’s datasets.
- The other portion of the payment (40T) is used as project funds for the photographer. This can help her buy new camera equipment or even pay for a trip that allows her to take even more pictures.
2. App developers are rewarded for providing code that the consumer eventually executes. The code is ultimately data, so it stays stored (encrypted) on IPFS nodes until needed.
The TApp developers are incentivized to make useful apps that meet consumer demand. Only those TApps that satisfy consumers can win over investors and curators as well as consumer payments. As long as the TApps are useful, consumers will use them for getting content or a service by paying TEA tokens into the bonding curve as a “consume action.” In turn, their payment will be distributed to the TApp token holders, both to investors and to developers. These can be thought of as similar to dividends paid out to the project’s token holders.
Another portion of the usage payment above the reserve amount of the bonding curve gets placed in the developer’s fund. They can use these funds to help defray development costs as they add new features to their TApp.
The TApps round out the “consume action” by burning fuel and supporting the host miners.
3. Miners receive a portion of the consumer’s payment as a fee for providing the hardware infrastructure of the TEA network.
4. Consumers get the benefit of the app. In this case, the consumer uses this TApp to do AI research on images. If we look at the example above, we see that this consumer has paid into two bonding curves: the one for the TApp, and the other for the photographer’s curation service. These payments in turn automatically buy and distribute more of the unique tokens in each of their bonding curves, benefiting their token holders. Every TApp consumer is thus helping incentivize participation in the TApp ecosystem that goes far beyond the TApp developer and data provider.
TApps will have a user interface similar in quality to existing cloud apps with one huge benefit: they’ll run decentralized on the TEA Project’s network. Imagine if only 1% of cloud-based web apps migrated to the TEA Project platform … the market size of these migrated apps would be tremendous in size. And all the early TEA Project adopters would greatly benefit from it. That makes the TAppStore not only an app store, but also a community that connects developers, miners, curators, and consumers in a way that benefits everyone.
