Project tokens are a foundational piece of how the Stone Soup protocol works and enable project leaders to assign value to requested deliverables necessary to implement the project and recognize value from contributors. The tokens are inherently valueless and are not web3 ERC20 tokens but rather entries in a ledger. They can be used for different purposes depending on the nature of the project but here are some functions they serve:
- For Open Source projects they serve to quantify the value of individual’s contributions to the project and immortalize contributors on a leaderboard of value. They can also be used as a form of an ad hoc DAO structure for voting purposes on steering the project.
- For commercial projects they can serve as a placeholder cap table prior to the formation of an official entity to recognize sweat equity from early contributors. They can provide an elegant way to defer entity formation until it becomes a priority and then convert to shares in a SAFE once a formal financing round is made.
- For non-profit projects they can serve as a loose informal board voting mechanism to make group decisions on the evolution of the project.
And for all types of projects tokens are a way to align incentives and do coordinated, permissionless value creation amongst strangers. In all project types they represent a pro-rata “claim check” in the event the project succeeds in winning a bounty. You can read more about how bounty distributions to token holders are handled here.
The token treasury for a project is 100% controlled by the project’s owner for his or her duration as project owner. Should the owner go MIA for more than one month, Stone Soup will make 3 attempts via all the available channels to reach the project owner and if unable to do so will assume control of token treasury until a suitable replacement can be found to take forward the project.
Again these tokens are not on the blockchain and therefore not tradeable outside of the Stone Soup protocol. Ultimately it’s the goal to port the Stone Soup Protocol to web3 but for now it’s web2.
It is up to you to clarify with your project leader what the tokens represent within your project. Absent a specific arrangement posted on the project’s Link page to override the default behavior, tokens will have the utility listed above.