🔥Curation

Curators decide what art belongs in the VIBES collective. They have the ability to infuse any NFTs they own with VIBES, curating them into the network.

Infusion is a process that stakes VIBES inside of an NFT that can be mined and claimed over time by whoever owns it. This creates a circular token economy, where VIBES from curated art are mined by collectors that then get to shape the future direction of the curated network.

💎Mining VIBES

Curators are onboarded via a decentralized peer-to-peer process, ensuring that no central gatekeepers are responsible for deciding the curatorial direction of the collective.

Infusion

Infusion is the low-level mechanism that enables curation. Only VIBES Curators with Influence can infuse NFTs. What NFTs a curator infuses (and how much they infuse) is entirely up to them, but there are a few on-chain constraints:

An NFT can only be infused once. After an NFT has been curated into VIBES, it is always a VIBES NFT, even if all of the VIBES inside of it have been mined and claimed. There is no way to "refill" an NFT once it has fully mined all VIBES.

There are limits around daily rate and total amount infused. Currently, the mining rate is locked to 1,000 VIBES / day, and total infused VIBES must be between 50,000 and 1,095,000 (50 days - 3 years). These parameters can be adjusted by the VIBES multisig if needed.

An NFT must be owned by the person infusing it. The intent is that the curator must have "control" of the NFT and intersect with its on-chain provenance in order to have the ability to curate it. This constraint can be disabled by the VIBES multisig if needed.

View the on-chain parameters around infusion constraints on the Protocol Info page under the Infusion Pool section.

Influence

An address can have a certain amount of Influence, which is an on-chain value (but not a token). You can view your Influence on the Wallet Page on the VIBES site.

Any address that has more than zero Influence is considered a VIBES Curator.

Whenever a curator infuses an NFT to curate it into VIBES, their Influence is reduced by the same amount. This happens regardless of whether the VIBES come from their wallet or the curation grant pool.

In addition, a curator may transfer some or all of their Influence to another address, onboarding another curator. This decentralized and peer-to-peer onboarding approach ensures the VIBES network will foster a rich diversity of thought, taste, art, and voice.

You can see all addresses that have been assigned Influence on Curators List page.

Details

The total amount of assigned Influence is likely to exceed the amount of available VIBES that could actually be infused into NFTs; this is intentional.

Influence is not a token, it's mostly a way of decentralizing the assignment and delegation of responsibility in a crypto-native and dynamic way. Avoiding the use of a token here allows for more design flexibility in the protocol and provides a capital-independent assignment of network control.

The VIBES multisig can set or reset Influence for any address at anytime, though this will only occur occasionally and with community support (see this Snapshot proposal), or in the case of problems or abuse as a last resort.

Generally, the VIBES multisig will only perform the initial assignments of Influence to a handful of "primary curators", who can then onboard more curators in a decentralized way.