Rise ROBOT Rise!

MetaFactory
6 min readOct 1, 2020

MetaFactory sits at the intersection of community, culture and finance. It is the bridge through which online experiences and identities connect to the physical world via unique apparel and brand experiences that are designed, curated and owned by the community. We have spent the last 10 months experimenting, learning and refining our mission and today, we are proud to introduce the culmination of these efforts in the form of $ROBOT, the MetaFactory governance token.

Our Digiphysical Destiny

MetaFactory is a rhizome emerging from the interconnection of multiple communities, technologies, social arrangements, contracts, people and entities — a kind of emergent nervous system without a body.

The three main nerve clusters of MetaFactory are:

  1. the MetaFactory DAO, which consists of an unincorporated association of ROBOT holders interacting through one or more specific smart contracts;
  2. the MetaFactory Entity, through which MetaFactory can interface with the off-chain fiat/physical world (e.g. paying manufacturers, receiving fiat payments, paying taxes, etc) through the government-recognized fiction of legal personhood granted to limited liability companies; and
  3. the MetaFactory BotYard, which is a multi-signature Ethereum account holding undistributed ROBOT guarded by MetaFactory community members elected by the MetaFactory DAO to implement the MetaFactory DAO’s decisions regarding the use and distribution of unallocated ROBOT.

Through the MetaFactory DAO, ROBOT holders can propose and vote on:

  • MetaFactory-branded product launches
  • uses and distribution of ROBOT
  • MetaFactory-branded commercial partnerships and strategy
  • marketing and incentive design for the MetaFactory brand
  • MetaFactory platform / marketplace features (e.g. sales mechanics, P2P secondary market, NFT standards and integrations, etc)
  • use of the MetaFactory DAO’s treasury

The entirety of the 420k ROBOT supply will be minted to the BotYard. From there, the ROBOT will be distributed based on increasing “sales milestones”, as illustrated in the table below to the following groups:

  • Buyers: proportional to dollars spent on MetaFactory Products
  • Designers: proportional to revenue generated by their products
  • Ops/Gov: proportional to the value of their contributions, as approved by the DAO, potentially using tools such as SourceCred.

TBD: by the discretion of the DAO (e.g. liquidity mining, dutch auction, reallocation to other categories, etc).

The initial token distribution of 39k ROBOT will go to the 43 buyers/designers of the MF Genesis Bomber auction proportional to their bid amount, which fulfills the first $25k sales milestone for the token distribution. From there, the ROBOT holders will vote to approve the token allocation for the ops/gov distribution (36k ROBOT).

The issuance schedule described above is only the starting state. The MetaFactory DAO can choose to change the distribution schedule through governance vote of ROBOT holders, but the goal is to respect that issuance schedule unless there’s a compelling reason to course correct.

It is hoped that the initial MetaFactory development team, which includes the MetaFactory entity, its equity holders and advisors, will receive a portion of ROBOT as a reward for their efforts. ROBOT holders will vote to determine the relevant ROBOT amounts and terms and conditions of these rewards through the MetaFactory DAO using the Governance Dashboard. There is no founder-specific premine (outside of the tokens allocated to all buyers / designers of the MF Genesis Bomber). The outcome of the vote will be executed on chain by the multisig signers.

Any longer form discussions around governance decisions will take place on the governance forums at gov.metafactory.ai, with realtime discussion happening in community calls and in the Discord server. To access the insider discord channels, members must hold at least 100 ROBOT. This threshold can be changed via governance vote.

The next token distribution that will go out after that will be for participants of the WickedSundayClub Genesis auction, completing the sales milestone up to $50k. Lastly, the data for all the shop sales and corresponding ETH addresses will be aggregated to mint tokens for the $100k milestone. All tokens will be locked for transfer until the tokens for all shop purchases before September 30th are distributed. After that, transferability will be permanently enabled. The circulating supply at this stage will be approximately 100k ROBOT.

Following that, once the claims contracts and UI are deployed, there will be a retroactive token distribution going out to all individuals who designed or bought any products from the MetaFactory store, proportional to the amount spent for buyers and amount sold for designers. The number of tokens distributed per dollar will be halved at every sales milestone (100k, 200k, 400k, 800k, etc, up to 6.4m). UPDATE: Buyer rewards changed to a percentage of purchase price by Governance on 4/22/21. The sales data will be anonymized and published to IPFS and the code to calculate the token allocations from that data will be made open source and independently verifiable. The output of that code will be a list of Ethereum addresses and their token allocation, which will be ratified by token holder vote and executed by depositing the tokens into the claims contract.

The revenue from sales will go to the MetaFactory Entity and will be used to pay for recurring expenses and production costs for goods. ROBOT holders can then vote to decide through the MetaFactory DAO how the surplus profits should be spent. For example, they could be locked in a Balancer liquidity pool to create a permanent incentive model with continuous issuance while preserving a fixed supply of 420k tokens.

“By recycling bought-back tokens into constant rewards and liquidity, we ensure there is always an incentive to continuously capitalize the system. This is great because it allows the network to leverage the benefits of issuance forever, while keeping the economic benefits of buybacks and the certainty of a known maximum token supply.” — https://www.placeholder.vc/blog/2020/9/17/stop-burning-tokens-buyback-and-make-instead

In the past year, the MetaFactory core team has spent ~$75k USD (not including time commitment/labor costs) from their pockets to bootstrap the project. The goal is to pay down this debt and then keep the operations of the LLC as lean as possible so that maximum value can be recycled back into the MetaFactory ecosystem. ROBOT holders with at least 500 tokens can get access to the detailed expense / revenue data for the LLC for the sake of transparency (subject to any confidentiality obligations or legal limitations that certain information may be subject to).

MetaFactory DAO decisions which affect the MetaFactory LLC will initially have an advisory or signaling status only — i.e., they will not be legally binding. Eventually, once things stabilize with governance and the token launch and token holders are confident in the operations / processes, we aim to put legal structures in place to ensure that the LLC has to abide by the governance decisions made by the DAO, allowing for a truly decentralized (as possible) community owned and governed platform/organization that bridges from web3 into the real world. We are building MetaFactory for the next 10 years, join us in making fun realities.

Thanks to our community for all their support and helping us to realize this collective vision!

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To learn more about MetaFactory and the $ROBOT token release, please check out the following links:

Join the $ROBOT launch party: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/metafactory-token-launch-party-tickets-123089003523

MetaFactory Shop: https://shop.metafactory.ai/

Presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e1bPYooG7cxfDt9AJvQTKRN8-RkiQAdw/view

Discord: https://discord.gg/4AuM2WZ

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MetaFactory

A marketplace for digi-physical apparel created by community-owned brands.