Economic Incentives
Intuition uses a market-based system of fees and rewards to encourage valuable contributions and establish consensus around data structures. By offering economic incentives, the platform motivates users to adopt widely accepted identifiers and data formats.
To foster engagement and promote the creation of high-quality, standardized data, rewards favor creation and contribution interactions with data that is:
- new or early
- useful to the most people
- aligned with commonly accepted standards
- likely to be used in the future
Fees & Rewards
Every interaction with the knowledge graph action in Intuition comes with a small fee, similar to gas fees in blockchain systems. Users pay a fee when interacting with or creating data in order to gain partial ownership of that data. These fees go towards:
Rewarding Prior Contributors
Part of the fee is distributed to all existing owners (prior contributors). This encourages early, meaningful contributions, as users who add valuable data will continue to be rewarded over time as more people engage with that data.
Protocol Fees
A small portion of the fee goes to the Intuition treasury for future platform improvements. Ultimately, this treasury will be community owned and managed.
Reducing Fragmentation
In many systems, user-generated tags and classifications, known as folksonomies, can lead to fragmented and disorganized data. Different people might use different labels for the same thing, making it hard to gather or analyze information effectively. Intuition solves this by encouraging users to converge on a common set of identifiers.
Intuition uses a market-driven consensus model inspired by blockchain technology. In systems like Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), participants are economically incentivized to act in ways that benefit the network. Users are motivated to use established and widely recognized identifiers because doing so increases their potential rewards from future interactions.
Incentive Driven Consensus
As users interact with and endorse certain identifiers, Intuition naturally creates a token-curated registry (TCR)—a list of popular, widely used identifiers and data structures. These identifiers become the standard, and the system self-regulates based on user interactions and rewards, ensuring only the most valuable data structures rise to prominence. This economic incentive drives standardization, reducing data fragmentation, and making it easier to search and analyze information. This model mirrors the behavior of prediction markets and automated market makers (AMMs), where participants align with the most trusted and valuable options due to market incentives.
Intuition also applies the Keynesian Beauty Contest concept, where users are rewarded for choosing options they believe others will choose. This drives consensus on data structures and identifiers, as users are motivated to align their actions with the choices of the broader community, ensuring the most popular and widely accepted options become the standard.
Early Adopter Advantage
Users who are quick to interact with new data—whether it’s creating or endorsing an identity or claim—are rewarded more as the data gains traction. This system encourages users to contribute and adopt important data early, creating a race to establish high-quality, valuable information that others will rely on. The earlier you participate, the more rewards you can earn over time as others use the same data.
By integrating these economic principles, Intuition creates a dynamic, decentralized ecosystem where users are continuously rewarded for valuable contributions, and the community naturally converges on high-quality, standardized data structures.