GoodTokens

Good Tokens rethinks the responsibilities of owning art and the relationship between the artist, artwork, and collector. Is it enough to simply purchase an artwork and own it forever without considering its cultural and social relevance and artist's motivation, or should ownership be earned and maintained by supporting causes linked to the art or by participating in communities linked to the artist?

With new art ownership models, artworks can be more sustainable and artists are assured that their art continues to support their values, forever. Blockchain marketplaces and new decentralized ownership models make it possible to facilitate long term engagement by art owners and collectors in both primary and secondary markets.

Our protocol enforces owners of artworks to maintain token balances on contracts that are specified by the artist. Simple use cases are as follows:

• An artist wants to support a local charity, and requires any owners of their art to make a minimum donation per month.
• An artist wants to create an artwork that can only be owned by active participants in a DAO, requiring a minimum balance of governance or voting tokens.
• An artist wants to create works for active event participants so requires a minimum of 1 new POAP per month.
• An artist wants to create works for a new protocol, so requires the owner to maintain a minimum balance of LP tokens of the protocol's Uniswap pool.

Our protocol invokes the "balanceOf" function to check token balances, so is token agnostic, leading to many exciting possibilities!

Future work on the protocol includes tying required balances to real world data and impact, such as carbon emissions for environmental funds, inequality index for socially engaged projects, etc. Such funds can even act as disaster relief and urgent liquidity providers, incentivizing owners to contribute through token accumulation on the platform.

Our stack consists of TheGraph, ipfs, hardhat, ethers.js, react, OpenZeppelin contracts, and Scaffold-Eth for quick hackin'.

We are using TheGraph and ipfs to minimize on-chain storage and interaction, pulling data from emitted events as well as metadata pinned to ipfs and on-chain data. Using TheGraph's IPFS querying and block handlers allowed us to create a rich and reactive front-end without having to query chain views. In fact, user interaction directly with the chain occurs only during transactions.

Our ERC721 contract modifies the "ownerOf" function to check whether an owner has "defaulted" on their artwork and if so, their artwork immediately goes back up for sale. Essentially, your ownership is revoked if you do not abide by the rules set by the artist. Our modified contract is compatible with 3rd party marketplaces such as OpenSea with compliant metadata posted to IPFS. It is important to us that our proposed model is not only functional but adoptable and compatibiltiy with popular marketplaces was key.

Our fund model extends ERC20, allowing not only Good Token Funds to be supported and attached to artworks but any ERC20 contract such as participation token that incentivize active community involvement, governance tokens that promote active participation in the future of online platforms and liquidity providers. Artists have complete freedom to attach an artwork to any fund they want to support, making the Good Token model open and extensible.