Restructuring Wearables Submission Fees

by 0xfe91c0c482e09600f2d1dbca10fd705bc6de60bc (Yemel#60bc)

Linked Pre-Proposal

Halt the implementation of the Governance Proposal to adjust the creators fee to reflect a set fiat value of $500

Summary

Set the wearable submission to $150 USD worth of MANA and set the curators compensation to $50 USD per item reviewed.

Abstract

This proposal aims to align the DCL community about how the wearable submission fee should be structured. The proposal gives more context about the history, motivations and economics of the fee and also proposes a new scheme.

Motivation

The Wearables Marketplace was originally launched on June 1st 2021 , with the goal of empowering a creators economy by giving users a wide variety of choices to express themselves and giving creators the tools to monetize their work.

Every creator that submits a new wearable to the marketplace is asked to pay a fee in MANA (Wearable Submission Fee). This fee is necessary to:

• Cover the compensation of the curator that will review the submission to ensure technical soundness and protect against IP infringements.

• Limit the cost of perpetually hosting the wearable in the Catalyst Decentralized Network.

• Foster the continual growth of Decentraland platform and its community via giving those fees to the DAO and funding the Community Grants program.

The wearable submission fee was originally set to 500 MANA, with a MANA price of ~0.8 USD. However when the MANA price reached the $2 USD mark the community raised their concerns via a proposal to automatically adjust the fee to a fixed amount of 500 USD payable in MANA was voted.

The proposal noted that pegging the publication fee to USD was healthy for the creators’ economy. It allows the creators to better budget their projects and market their services without exposing them to the fluctuation of the MANA price.

The proposal was raised to the Security Advisory Board and decided to lower the wearable submission fee one-time to 100 MANA as a temporary measure in the waiting for an automated solution. This change was announced in the DAO Committee Report #12 .

Since then, the price of MANA has come down to the $1 USD mark and the current fee seems too low. The curator committee is getting 10 MANA per item review and it doesn’t seem up to the responsibility of the role. At the same time, going back to a 500 USD fee is shocking for new creators in the Decetraland community.

This proposal aims to restructure the current wearable submission fee to a more sustainable framework. The goal is to keep the fee at minimum while still covering the expenses for the marketplace to work.

Specification

Below is the specification of how the Wearable Submission Fee should be structured:

• The fee amount should be set at a fixed USD price, but paid in MANA.

• The fee should cover the work of a curator to review the submission.

• The fee should support the catalyst network.

• The fee should support the DAO to continue investing in Grants.

The first item has been addressed by the Decentraland Foundation team by creating a new version of the marketplace smart contracts that uses a Chainlink oracle to get the current MANA price. This way the fee is paid in MANA but the amount is set in USD.

Regarding the compensation of the curator for each review, a price of $50 USD per item reviewed seems fair. The curation might take between 30 minutes and several hours depending on the feedback cycles with creators.

The catalyst network is currently formed by 11 servers that hosts all the content of Decentraland’s world, including wearable 3d models, scene content and avatar selections. Half of the Catalyst servers are runned by Decentraland Foundation and the rest by individual community members.

The cost of hosting a Catalyst server is ~600 USD per month. The total annual cost to run the 11 servers is ~$80,000 USD. At this moment this cost is paid by catalyst owners and is not subsidized by the DAO, but it totally should, and part of the Wearable Submission Fee should be allocated to subsidize catalyst owners.

In the past year 5,530 wearables have been submitted to the marketplace, so if we maintain this publication rate, a fee of 15 USD per wearable should be enough to account for catalyst expenses for a year.

And finally, the DAO should get a fee to continue investing in the Grants Program, fostering the development and growth of the platform. A contribution between 50 and 100 USD should be allocated for this purpose.

Wearable Submission Fee = 150 USD

• 33% = 50 USD go to the curator
• 10% = 15 USD to supporting catalyst servers
• 57% = 85 USD goig to the DAO to support the Grant’s Program.

Conclusion

This proposal aims to set the wearable submission fee to a USD value in order to better support the creators economy, derisking them from market volatility, enabling to budget projects and market their services at a expectable rate.

Economics considerations have been made to ensure that a fee of 150 USD can cover the compensation of the curators, a subsidy to the catalyst network and keep reinvesting in the growth of the platform.

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO