The OWN protocol serves different stakeholders and use cases, all with different goals. These include artists and rights holders, record labels, distributors, publishers, music fans, investors and developers. For these stakeholders to cooperate and work effectively together toward the common goal of democratizing access to music IP we introduce the $OWN token to incentivize and align interests.
The $OWN token economic model is designed to coordinate the value creation created by bringing traditional music IP and royalty payments into the web3 world.
The $OWN token captures a portion of the value that’s created to ensure the longevity of the OWN protocol and long term alignment of interest among the different stakeholders.
It’s important to note that many of the metrics and fees discussed are not final and subject to protocol governance.
$OWN tokens serve four core utilities:
- Payment of transaction fees on the OWN Protocol
- Governance representation
- Staking for fraud prevention
- Building communities of fans and creators
Using the protocol requires paying an $OWN fee or staking $OWN as collateral.
Activities that require staking include:
- Creating an Original Works Record
- Issuing a unique License for that Record
- Minting a Royalty Token (RT) to monetize this license on-chain, splitting royalty payments, claiming royalty splits, unlocking private information or generating proofs.
Stake is used as collateral to ensure that data created and maintained is correct and up to date. If a Royalty Admin does not fulfill its obligations, a fraud proof claim can be submitted and accepted by protocol governance, causing their stake to be partially slashed.
Activities that require paying a fee in $OWN include:
- Sending royalties on chain to a RT
- Using the protocol Defi Interface Contract for artists to receive advances easily
- Creating and sending payments to a Royalty Token Pack
- Making a fraud claim
The fees charged are used to reimburse network participants such as Royalty Admins for their contributions to the network.
The OWN protocol is governed by network participants. Their voting allocation is apportioned by the value they add to the network (for example stake provided by Data Providers, Artists and Payment Providers will have more governance weight than purely financial stake), which among other things also takes into account the amount of $OWN they have staked.
In the future, we see $OWN tokens unlocking other use cases for artists and fans such as: connecting $OWN holders to artist tokens and communities, purchasing partial ownership in indexes that track artists or music genres, and special drops for artist features.\