After the incentives v1 update, subnet 0 will be the only subnet where generality is technically possible. This is because Yuma Consensus is enacted on all other subnets, forcing them to specialize on a focused mining competition. Giving subnet 0 a unique and important role in Commune as the "general subnet".
However, without Yuma Consensus we are vulnerable to malicious actors and hence are introducing the Module curation DAO to continuously filter and cleanse them from the system. This blog will dive into the details behind this change, the power of the general subnet and the role and functioning of the s0 curation DAO.
Yuma Consensus prevents selfvoting and ensures honesty is the optimal strategy for participants, it is a vital tool to create healthy and effective subnets and in retrospect its implementation will likely be viewed as a pivotal moment in the history of Commune.
However, it comes at the cost of flexibility. If you want the protocol to incentivize something, you first need to design a robust autonomous validation system around it and create a subnet, rather than just straight directing the incentive towards it. This limits and slows the protocol's ability to incentivize and support things it needs especially if they are difficult to represent in the form of a mining market. For example an individual making valuable community contributions through educative content, a helpful discord bot or contributions to the core codebase.
The general subnet is unconstrained in its ability to incentivize things on the fly. Anything can be associated with a module and registered to the chain. It could be a collective initiative to fund a public good such as a website, exchange listing or public tool, or it could be someones niche text2image model with a frontend. Whatever the incentives of yuma subnets cannot reach, the general subnet can.
The approach to mining on the general subnet will be very different from yuma subnets. Weights are allocated manually and linearly by the Stakeholder community, so you are rewarded to the degree that the community understands your value either to them personally or to Commune as a whole. Meaning whatever you do will depend on getting the attention of the community. This makes marketing of varying forms a core component of s0 mining and should accelerate community growth.
If you are not producing a public good for the ecosystem benefitting Commune as a whole, you are offering a certain utility such as access to a private model, API or tool. For those, the standard business model will likely become granting access only to users who have set a certain minimum stake-weight on their module and the more stake-weight the higher the rate-limit for user requests. Creating a direct relationship between the organic user demand for a Module and its reward.
So to mine on s0, ask yourself, what does Commune or the people of Commune need? What can I do for Commune? What would be interesting and useful for Commune as a whole or its individuals? Then provide it, register it as a Module and start advertising it to the community to bring their attention towards it. Naturally, those who also advertise Commune itself and regularly provide good content to the community will have an advantage in getting its attention and favor.
You see, mining on the general subnet is open-ended and leaves all the room for ideas and creativity. It will be interesting to witness what people come up with and what succeeds over the coming months.
Now of course, everyone could just register a useless module and start setting weights on themselves. We have no Yuma Consensus stopping that. But the power of having a general subnet is so vast, that its worthwhile to look for alternative solutions that work in its context. This is the role of the s0 Module curation DAO.
The DAO continuously curates a whitelist of legit modules that have a clear value proposition and reason to exist. Every existing and new Module will have to apply to this whitelist and get approved by a 2/3 majority agreement of the DAO. Similarly the DAO actively critically evaluates whitelisted Modules with help from the community to remove them if any malicious behavior or loss of value is detected.
To learn more about the functioning and process of the DAO take a look at the 2.2 section of the Incentives v1 proposal. After the whitelist is populated enough, it will become a condition to be registered on subnet 0, making it impossible for valueless Modules to gain rewards.
The DAO is experimental, but if it works well we can expand its functioning towards wider protocol incentive curation, as well as giving weight penalties on s0 incase of obvious mispricing of Modules. In the future, the DAO should have its own embedded incentive structure to drive participation rather than relying on contributors.
The general subnet has the potential to bring incentive to things we previously could not reach, that are greatly beneficial for the growth of Commune. It allows non-technical members of the community to monetize their contributions and puts no constraint on creativity of what those contributions could be. We will see individuals making great profit by adding value to Commune which previously was not considered as something that could be rewarded financially. Once this is deeply understood, we should see a vast increase in community contributions.
onwards 🫡