Pseudo Finance

Pseudo Finance
8 min readDec 26, 2020

An Altruistic Foundation to Grow Sustainable Value

Core to $PSEUDO is the altruistic value of giving to projects which either help those outside the ecosystem who are in great need and fulfilling humanitarian goals or help donating to public goods such as grants on platforms such as Gitcoin in order to further grow the space, and thus further grow our own crypto’s values through the value gains made from the funded efforts. $PSEUDO isn’t solely about altruistic values but also self sustainability. By growing the treasury through the token’s use and pseudo-burn mechanics, the protocol can grow its reach, benefit, and value to all holders symbiotically.

Welcome to Pseudoabflationary Economics

Deflation occurs through value gained. Inflation occurs through token value being lost. Often these are confused with supply increases where a token supply increasing thought of inflation and supply decreasing is thought of as deflation. While these conceptions are slightly different, comparing what economics consider inflation versus the common notion of inflation being supply-based, the outcome is the same: does the value go up or down?

What we are proposing is both in one system abstracted to the end user. It’s called ab-flation because, while the supply is deflationary, the deflation is abstracted. 0.5% of every transaction is burned that burn fee is then distributed fairly to all Pseudo holders, instantaneously and without requiring gas-driven claims. They’ll just show up in your wallet of choice. Burned tokens are returned to all of the protocol’s holders invisibly, instantly, and can be displayed as simple growth in holdings.

By making a small part of every transaction attract a burn fee, the supply is slowly decreased with the more the protocol gets used the higher the rate of burned tokens, reducing the supply. And by reducing the supply, Economics 101 says that the price should go up with the supply drop if demand stays the same. But this may not always happen as markets like to do technical analysis around prices and so the supply may not always be accounted for.

But what if the burn was distributed back to all participants in the network and they actually gain the value destroyed in tokens directly? We believe this is a good model, as it allows people to actually see their value increasing while the supply doesn’t actually change. Given constant demand, the price doesn’t change however their holdings in the form of (token x the price) will go up slowly. This is an abstraction of deflation. Because this would require airdroppping all holders’ tokens or messing with balances, gas costs usually would be sky high which is why this system hasn’t yet been seen in the wild on Ethereum. So instead, we’ve designed a simple and efficient system which costs 0 gas. This abstraction of the deflation which occurs gets abstracted through us representing the balance of the user as the

Balance = balance * totalsupply / (totalsupply — burnedsupply)

Let’s imagine there are 2 holders of $PSEUDO with 5 tokens each, and 20 tokens in existence. If — through a lot of use by the other parties in the system — all of the other parties tokens get burned and the supply reduces to the 10 tokens held by those 2 holders, then the balance of the 2 holders will actually slowly increase to 10, which together will allow for the supply to always be 20 tokens of balances while the underlying supply is able to be burned. This allows for holders to benefit in the same way most PoS systems work but with 0 risk trying to use contracts to stake their tokens and without any active management. The burn benefits the holders directly with every burn transaction. This is an invaluable part of the design as it allows for all including the dao to benefit from increased usage, motivating people to grow the system.

The DAO Contribution

What if we could take this even further? What if part of the burned fees instead went to the DAO, which is managed by the token itself? This would allow for holders to not lose value that they could gain from the burns as their tokens would now be able to govern the same value that they are not capturing directly through the abstraction but they also now are able to collectively vote and fund proposals which sole participants otherwise couldn’t which would grow the system far more than just holders gaining passive value. Like if an audit for a new system were to be needed then the DAO would be able to vote to fund it, which after completion would make the system much more secure and attract many more people into the system. This would not be possible from sole participants as the costs would be too high for a small number to pay for it and unfair as the whole system would benefit, and so by making it part of the burned funds not only do holders gain passive value they are able to gain value from proposals from the DAO and actively help to manage the protocol and grow it.

The Pseudo token contract has been conceived with a minified, inbuilt governance protocol alongside the separate treasury DAO. On the surface level, a majority of holders can quickly and efficiently update their votes. And if the majority all vote for a new treasury address, then the 0.5% DAO contribution (from the 1% tx fee) will be rerouted to the new treasury address the moment the treasury gets updated.

But we also chose this unique governance mechanism for two primary reasons.The first is that of upgradability in regards to the DAO governing the treasury. Innate governance permits not only updates to the DAO without affecting the underlying token contract (and its security), but also serves as a failsafe in case the DAO contract breaks. In that unlikely scenario, the token will continue to work without any interruption or intervention needed.

Secondly, it allows for voters to choose to update and use a new DAO if the current DAO is not meeting the holders’ purposes. A majority can quickly elect to go from a non-profit to a profit DAO, or from profit to non-profit, or simply route the treasury payments to a completely separate system, or even just a single donation address. The protocol creates a sort of DAO-ception where a governance mechanism is able to delegate the funding of another more complicated governance mechanism to be built on top.

Horizontal Governance

By allowing for a Minified DAO to control the source and revenue, routing to DAOs can actually be sent to a contract or another DAO that allocates the funds to multiple specialist sub-DAOs in a chain. Those DAOs are then able to work in tandem to accomplish all the goals for the holders without trying to get high participation for all holders or all members for proposals they’re not interested in. This is critical to Gen2 DAOs where they’ll control and manage sub DAOs improving effectiveness and efficiency while allowing all goals to be accomplished. Vertical DAOs can now become three-dimensional, turning a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation into a Decentralized Autonomous Collective.

The Tree of Life

For a seed in most definitions, the purpose would be for growth of value — like any asset. But this growth of value does not have to be for just the value of the token holders. It can be the value obtained through a progressing society and cryptocurrency space and the technology benefiting all. In this way, we hope that the DAO will always keep its core value proposition to be Altruistic and donate to causes which do not benefit it directly in order to be not for-profit but a community driven fund that makes everyones lives better. We should not only enrich ourselves but look to how we can make the world better. However, it must be acknowledged that peoples’ underlying and strongest drive will always be greed. By exploiting this drive, designing the system to be net altruistic, and encouraging its benefits to grow alongside peoples’ greed drive and personal value, we can not only achieve full self sustainability in altruistic giving but also further the personal goals of participants.

TransferX

As part of our overhaul we looked at features fundamental to payments. As such we came to roll up 2 capabilities to 1 new TransferX fn thats backwards compatible so that the options dont break apps without the new features.

Now you can send multiple payments with 1 transaction (.5x gas cost reduction). And you can put a memo as a payment reference or just whatever you want. ERC 20.1.

Proof of Donation

Further, a part of the original allocation has been put toward a slowly price-decreasing Proof of Donation, in which a contract can be sent eth and will price the tokens you receive along

Price = 10 * (finish — start) / ((finish — start) — (now — start))

This allows for the most donation funds to be received and then reduced until 0 to make sure no funds are locked in the contract. This contract gets deployed with the addresses set that will get the funds and cannot be changed.

Perpetual Liquidity Incentivisation

Through using a drip style contract the Liquidity Provider Staking Pool gets filled every 24h with an allocation of tokens thats determined by Drip Contract Balance / 100. This allows for the amount sent to the LP pool to slowly decrease but never run out allowing for price rises to compensate for the change in amount. This allows for LP providers to be incentivized from a pool without any stop to the incentivization.

Values and Driving Goals

I feel it is important for a community for there to be a common set of values and goals. While this may change, it may be good to set a foundational basis for these values so that the community can reach a common drive at the very start. As such, I propose that the DAO and the system around it more generally value and try to achieve the following goals.

Public Benefit and Charitable Giving should be core to the values of the project. $PSEUDO is not a purely charitable project and there are financial motives as with any other project in the space, but it should always be a strong consideration.

We should always try to be as transparent as possible in our organization, decision making, and implementation of the project. All decisions should be looked at by the community before being considered final with the ability to vote on decisions, either on- or off-chain.

Altruistic Capitalism

The abovementioned 0.5% contribution (from ½ of the 1% tx fee) goes into the DAO treasury, whose address can be directed and further redirected only with the built-in Minified, Stratified DAO’s governance. We imagine things will at first go to simple charities — the Gitcoins and Giveths of the world. But Pseudo can and should be much larger. We can decide to invest in other powerful new DeFi projects or execute further opportunities to grow the DAO and reward its active members. The governance could eventually use the treasury to provide insurance, healthcare, Universal Basic Income. What if we fund multiple independent and specialist DAOs all working synergistically to grow not just $PSEUDO but common goods around the world too?

Anything is possible with Pseudo. And the mechanism that makes it all work is how whales, holders, and users alike are ALL rewarded and ALL valued on Psuedo. If money is your thing and you just want to be a capitalist, then the token’s simple abflation (and removal from public circulation by way of the treasury) means it will increase your holdings. Easy. However, if you’re like many of us, looking for ways to grow your holdings and utilize something new as well as give back to the community, you can feel good knowing you’re contributing to something greater and grander.

With $PSEUDO you might think you’re just here to make money. But we promise that thanks to its unique programming, we’re gonna make you into a philanthropist as well — whether you like it or not ;)

Discord

https://discord.gg/XdpHKfMspS

Twitter

https://twitter.com/PseudoFinance

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