How to Value Community Contributions
TLDR
- Allo.Capital contributors currently have no equity or promise of any future tokens; future ownership isn’t promised and depends on building a real business first.
- There’s no shared framework for valuing research work yet. For this liminal time, do only the work that you need to do for your own needs. Contribute at your own risk! Work on stuff you want to work on!
- A handful of experimental models for token rewards (e.g. Cookie Jars, impact metrics, prediction markets) are being tested, but clarity, scoped funding, patience are key for now.
Intro
We are building a capital allocation layer for the tokenized internet—one designed to route funding more intelligently, transparently, and effectively.
This mission demands a high level of coordination and contribution across research, strategy, engineering, and community. The outcomes here will be polycentric and plural, and thereby so must our community be practically plural. But as we grow, a difficult question has emerged: How do we value knowledge work in this liminal stage before the business has a clearly defined financial model?. When a business does have a clearly defined financial model, which of the centers in the polycentric ecosystem deserve how much ownership/credit/clout?
Recently, a contributor suggested that their contributions in the past month were worth $xx,000 and demanded payment. While we welcome boldness and ambition, the contribution was not worth this amount by my judgement I had never agreed to finance that work. This claim highlights a broader issue: there is no shared mental model yet for valuing contribution. And without one, expectations can quickly become misaligned. This post outlines why this issue matters, where we are now, and how we might move forward.
The Ground Truth: Ownership & Expectations
Let’s be clear about a few foundational things:
- Contributors currently own 0% of Allo.Capital (the company).
- Do not expect you will be paid for work unless there is a written agreement saying so..
- No contributor is automatically entitled to equity or any future Allo tokens. We have not promised future community ownership nor do we have plans to.
- Contributors have been offered the opportunity to allocate the 16ETH raised via the Patron sale NFT (what we call the Allo.Capital protoDAO) on research, software, or other outputs. There is a handful of active experiments, and maybe in the future more.
- Once the 16eth has been allocated, we may ratchet up trust by allocating more ETH to the community.
Yes, I personally hope to share more tokens with the 2025 ETHDenver-era team and the Allo community one day. But that’s an intention—not a promise. A LOT of things can go wrong: we may not find a good business that can generate sustainable revenue, maybe Owocki gets burnt out and has to take time off after 8 years in crypto, maybe the Allo.capital misses its overton window, maybe the whole crypto ecosystem is sliding into the ocean and we’re going with it. Maybe some of youdecide following Allo.Capital is not worth your mental cycles anymore. There are a lot of risks to this inchoate network!
Any ownership model will be shaped by what the business becomes and what value is ultimately created and who is contributing to it. If you’re contributing today, you’re helping build your own business, personal brand, and the story of onchain capital allocatoin—but we won’t know what it’s worth (if anything) until we can actually see what the venture scale businesses (if any) is here.
I don’t take this lightly. I understand the tension here. But I won’t be coerced into specific figures or commitments prematurely or through threats. In the meantime, please do what’s best for your own upside - and assume nothing is coming from others unless explicitly promised. Lets use this tension to drive clarity on what the actual venture scale outcomes will be one day.
Five Frames for Valuing Contribution
Here are five ways we might think about valuing knowledge work going forward. Each approach has tradeoffs, and none are final.
1. NOW - Status Quo
Today’s model relies on individual incentives, reputation, goodwill, and open dialogue. It works… until it doesn’t. Without structure, people fill in gaps with assumptions. That’s risky. But in early stages, it allows for flexibility and speed.
2. NOW - ProtoDAO experiments
A. Cookie Jar / Raids-Based Microfunding
Small, transparent grants from a shared pool—governed by lightweight consensus. Cookie Jars let contributors propose scoped work and get paid for it. Raids bring multiple contributors together for a bounty. This works best when contributions are clearly scoped and timeboxed.
See this post Decentralized Research Funding Using Cookie Jar for more details.
B. Commitment Pools
Allo.Pool.Network (APN) is a decentralized ecosystem for community-governed capital allocation, using commitment-backed liquidity pools and quadratic governance to sustainably fund real-world services like water access. Unlike speculative DeFi protocols, APN ties liquidity to tokenized commitments and regenerative economics, blending Web3 primitives with models like Waqf and Mweria to ensure long-term capital circulation. It creates a trust-based marketplace where liquidity providers, stewards, and local communities coordinate resilient, non-extractive financial systems.
See this post on Committment pools for more details
C Gardens pool - 4 ETH from the Allo ProtoDAO to launch an Allo.Capital community on Gardens, including a governance token, community covenant, and funding pools for protocol development and coordination. The goal is to build shared vision and participatory infrastructure for collective capital allocation decisions, with a 4-week completion timeline.
See this post on Gardens Pool for Allo.capital for more details.
3. SOON - Impact Metrics-Based Funding
Instead of estimating time or “effort,” we fund outcomes. This could be tied to TVF, unique users impacted, or any other impact metric. But impact is hard to measure—and even harder to measure fairly.
I recently did a first test txn for impact-metrics based funding and hope to do more later.
See this post on Network Coherence through Impact Metrics for more.
4. MAYBE ONE DAY - Prediction Markets on Future Unicorns
Each report, contribution, or strategy becomes a kind of bet on the future value it creates. You could imagine a system where contributors are staked into predictions of success—and paid out later if those predictions come true. Over time, this could flatten the feast-or-famine volatility of early-stage contribution.
A system like this would allow us to get super granular and focused on the question “what is going to be a billion dollar outcome? how do we manifest that?”
5. MAYBE ONE DAY - Formal DAO Launch
Eventually, we may formalize governance and token-based ownership. We create a legal entity and DAO governance structurre that is bound to it. That future is compelling—but premature. If we launch it too early, it may ossify before we know what we’re building.
Looking Ahead: Build revenue flow First
Before we can promise value, we have to create it. That means building a business with a durable model, revenue, and traction. Once we do, we’ll be in a far better position to reward those who got us there. We’ll also be better equipped to define—and defend—what’s fair.
Until then, the best we can do is:
- Be clear: No one owns equity at this time.
- Be protective: If anyone tries to extort value without process, we’ll respond firmly.
- Be experimental:
- Start small: Case by case we may offer to compensate individual contributors on small projects, and ratchet up trust from there.
- Be intentional: When we fund work, scope it clearly, focus on outcomes.
- Dogfood our own tooling. Use tools like Cookie Jars, retrofunding, or prediction markets to explore new models.