“At the very beginning, back in 2020, the biggest thought we had was that it would be the coolest thing to build a decentralized version of the Library of Alexandria to give readers access to authors and authors access to their readers. This would also preserve all the records immutably. And that was the meme: a Library of Alexandria that Caesar himself couldn’t burn.”
Daniel has worked in tech startups but has also earned a masters of arts in applied philosophy and ethics. He is also one year into a PhD in experimental neuroscience. He has found both in his academic life and work that access to research can be very limited.
“I’ve been frustrated by the bottleneck that slows down work, especially as a professional researcher. Grant-Funded research publications should be free to read. In addition, I expected that blockchain would not only open up access to data, but also publishing, which has not happened automatically, far from it.”
Daniel’s response was to launch PageDAO as a platform to get around those hurdles. He also introduced the $PAGE token when the project launched in July 2021. There is a limit of 100 million Page tokens in total and so far, PageDAO has been issuing them to people who help build the platform. Every year PageDAO mints 10 million tokens and currently, 40M have been created of the possible 100M. Daniel has wondered if issuance will need to continue, but thus far the PageDAO has no immediate intention to deviate from its plan. $PAGE signifies effort spent developing the PageDAO or Page Open Source Project technologies, and because people value it, the organization has achieved monumental milestones already.
“In fact, Readme Books is still one of the only truly decentralized & permissionless onchain publishing solutions available today.”
The Page token is ERC20 compliant, and can only be minted on Ethereum L1. However, it can also be bridged across the Gravity Bridge to any L1 appchain in the Cosmos IBC ecosystem and has recently been mapped to both Optimism and Base via the Superchain toolkit.
“In this project the only value of the token was to the team and the community. We thought of it as a social token, a native token of the marketplace – but then we didn’t end up launching the marketplace and it truly became a social token. Over time it has grown as features evolved and today it has developed onchain governance features as well as a plan to power free open source software applications.”
Issuing the token to community members also meant some people sold their allocations immediately, which resulted in any value of the token dumping, but Daniel is pretty sanguine about that.
“It was their money, they were free to dispose of the tokens at will, but it did mean the token went to zero and stayed there for a long time. With a fair launch social token, there really isn’t a lot of value. PageDAO’s new appcoin concept will empower a community of developers to build applications that can be monetized immediately onchain and we are excited to announce we have founded the Ethical Liquidity Management DAO to shepherd future $PAGE issuance on new blockchains as an extra support measure to recruit new developers to our community. Come help us build on $PAGE.”
The ELM DAO was created on June 3rd and has been sent a total of 2M $PAGE from the liquidity management issuance pool.
Inspired by Shade Protocol, Osmosis, and other decentralized exchanges in the Cosmos ecosystem who have experimented with the mathematics of token issuance, ELM DAO is part one of a two-part application known as the PageDAO Appcoin Factory that aims to help PageDAO-aligned projects launch their own tokens.
“Having a partner to launch with helps smaller tokens bootstrap liquidity and discover price on the open market, too.”
Daniel is planning a partnership with UNDRGRND’s NFT Joe. The two founders have worked together on other projects and could see the benefits of partnering.
“Both projects get the benefits of our coordinated innovation in the decentralized FOSS space.”
Initially Daniel put his own money and tokens in the Page liquidity pool but has mostly sold out over the course of the spring. He is hoping the network effect and a strong community built around a working protocol will help grow the project and sees a bright future but takes care to avoid holding too large a stake in $PAGE.
“I’d rather have a smaller slice of a larger pie. My plan is to keep about 250,000 $PAGE staked so I can participate in governance and write proposals, but I don’t want to own so much of the supply that the ecosystem has no choice but to revolve around me. I’m just the community member who has been here the longest.”
Key to growing the community is that PageDAO has plans for an airdrop later in 2024, with a total of 6M $PAGE tokens issued for the purpose. Daniel did not discuss the plans for the airdrop in detail, but did mention that his bio could be found at https://dylan.cent.co/ and encouraged anyone interested in getting involved with the project to visit its homepage at https://pagedao.org/ to learn more.
