On December 13th, @9x9x9eth and @The_OpenDAO released a token where every person who has interacted with @opensea, the peer-to-peer marketplace for NFTs, rare digital items, and crypto-collectibles, was eligible to receive an airdrop with a certain amount of these tokens, named $SOS.
That’s weird. How did they know if I used @opensea before?
First, let's provide some background. One of the most appealing aspects (or weirdest/worst, depending on your POV) of blockchain technology is the degree of transparency that it provides. We’re talking about a fully auditable and valid ledger of transactions. Anyone can join the network and, as a result, view all information on that network. While blockchain tech allows for pseudonyms (see: @gmoneynft, @punk6529), if you know an individual’s wallet address, you can plug it into a block explorer (For example, here is Mark Cuban’s) and see a wide array of information on that wallet.
You can see every transaction it’s ever made, whether sending or receiving. Along with dates and time stamps, it also gives you the ability to send things to their wallet (On that last part, think Venmo - whether you know someone or not, if you have their username, you can send or receive money).
With that knowledge, it's important to note that while OpenSea is a privately funded company, and most of their dealings happen behind closed doors, each time someone mints, buys, sells, or transfers anything on OpenSea, it gets written into the Blockchain. You can see OS information here. Therefore, @9x9x9eth and @The_OpenDAO were able to see who used OpenSea in the past by looking up all of the wallets that interacted with them before.
Why did they decide to create tokens based on OpenSea versus activity from other transactions across blockchains?
This is one of the most important questions to ask. But first, it's important to understand the conversations around Centralized vs. Decentralized Organizations and Web 2 vs. Web 3.
This gets a little complicated, but bear with me.
Centralized Organizations are primarily run in a top-down approach (Board, CEO, Executive Team, Employees, Investors). All decisions are made within the organization. If the company grows with users and revenue, those directly involved in the centralized organization reap the benefits.
One of the downsides arising right now is that USERS (anyone with a login) of these platforms believe there should be financial incentives to use these platform.
For example - if you're an early user of Twitter, there is no way to get "tokens" of Twitter. So, even if you are a power user of Twitter and have brought millions of people to the platform, the only thing you gain is free access to the platform. No money, nada. Depending on what side of the fence you’re on, some argue that is a pretty good deal, and others feel the opposite.
Decentralized Organizations, on the other hand, at least today, is a much flatter organization. DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are internet-native organizations that are collectively owned and managed by their members and do not have a CEO, executive team, or board of directors. The traditional construct of upper management leading everything from financial decisions to priorities and timelines simply does not exist in a decentralized organization.
Sure. Now, what does this have to do with OpenSea?
Let's tie this all together. As of December 27th, the answer below is speculation.
OpenSea is a centralized company, and even though early users of NFTs have been interacting with the platform with billions of dollars in transaction value, the only people who see the financial upside are those who have invested or have shares of OpenSea (Investors, exec board, etc.). The users of OpenSea can of course use the platform to monetize their own work, such as sales of an NFT, but they do not have any ownership of the platform.
And over the past few weeks, there has been speculation that OpenSea will issue an IPO, which would allow OpenSea investors to make money, versus the users of the platform who feel they have gotten it to where it is now. The mindset is, if users don’t use the platform, OpenSea doesn’t make money
The speculation caused chaos among OpenSea’s users, many of whom see an IPO of the platform as a betrayal to its community, instead of becoming more decentralized and offering their own token (ownership) of the company to users of the platform.
Because of this, there is speculation that @9x9x9eth and @The_OpenDAO had an idea to create a new token, $SOS, which would essentially give ownership to users of OpenSea without actually building a partnership with OpenSea (again, this was made possible by the nature of transparency within blockchain technology).
By building a large enough base of people to give the token to, they can now create a vote where the holders of the token vote build a decentralized marketplace to compete with OpenSea, and with this token, it will represent ownership in this new company. With the large numbers of people who are upset that OpenSea is staying decentralized, they could rally the market to support this new token, raise millions of dollars, and in theory, build the new platform they are building.
To break that down even further, if the token were to continue to go up in value, even just by pure speculation, it creates more incentives for developers and various teams to build a competitor to OpenSea, and in return for their efforts, get paid in compensation with $SOS Token. The token can also be used be used for governance of the organization, where tokenholders can vote on the future plans of the org.
Some of those plans could make a condition that when users buy something on the platform, instead of paying the 2.5% in fees that are currently paid to Open Sea, they would pay a certain amount in fees in the form of $SOS. This value would then go back to the market to be distributed among everyone from Discord moderators to engineers and holders of the token. This could be a core reason for people to ditch OpenSea and use a marketplace where they are not financially incentivized to do so. From there, it can get even crazier. We could then see larger institutional money invest into $SOS to really grow the market cap and get exposure to this new organization.
Slow down - have they even built this new platform yet?
Maybe, but nothing has been made public. In fact, it looks like 9x9x9 is committed to making this a DAO in its truest form, and it’s possible that they are waiting for a community vote before moving forward with building anything.
On December 25 at 6:15PM, @9x9x9 wrote in the Discord, “Why no road map? Answer: Because it is a DAO, we are undergoing set up for the DAO(getting candidates for muti-sig). It is not a company with a roadmap. Decisions are decided by all $SOS holders. (Example: I support staking over 3 years, but community votes for 1 year, which becomes the rule for staking. One day the community can vote for my expulsion as a core contributor if I’m deemed unfit for the roll. Again, no one owns OpenDAO, other than all $SOS holders)”
Essentially, what 9x9x9 is saying is that even if they had plans to build the next OpenSea, by nature of this being a DAO, the holders of the token (i.e. everyone who ever used OpenSea before and did not sell their $SOS airdropped token) would have to first vote on it. So, for 9x9x9 to say where the $SOS token will take us, wouldn’t actually mean anything.
So, they know if I used OpenSea before. How did they decide on the amount of $SOS tokens to give me?
This is actually one of the easiest questions to answer.
The following is from The Open Dao Discord channel: "The distribution is based on the total number of transactions (30% weight) and transaction volume on ETH, DAI & USDC (70% weight) on OpenSea."
Once you connect your wallet to theopendao.com, you will be able to see the exact breakout of how many tokens you have been allocated.
How many tokens are out there?
There will be 100 trillion total $SOS tokens, and the distribution is as follows:
- 50% airdrop to OpenSea users
- 20% Staking Incentive
- 20% OpenDAO
- 10% LP incentives
