The OCIF Protocol: Permissionless Funding for DAOs & Creators.

InvArch
10 min readDec 31, 2022

The OCIF protocol is a revolutionary staking & crowdfunding mechanism implemented on the InvArch Tinkernet, providing community-directed funding support for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) & creators building on the InvArch Network.

The OCIF protocol stands for On-Chain Innovation Funding, and it is designed to service a plethora of forms of creation & development. Whether one or more individuals are seeking to develop a technical product or tool for the ecosystem, launch a digital marketing DAO, or fund community service efforts, the underlying design of the OCIF protocol allows all of these endeavors to be serviced. Furthermore, the logic & features of the OCIF protocol can be tapped into by developers, allowing them to feature their own unique or custom instances of the protocol in their applications.

At a lower level, INV-Cores are the actual on-chain primitives which receive funding through the OCIF protocol. INV-Cores are powerful NFT-based primitives that provide individuals with general-purpose legos for building on the InvArch Network & its dApps.

INV4 Assets are designed to act akin to general-purpose & programmable building blocks for structuring tokenized IP & decentralized organizations as on-chain primitives. — The INV4 Protocol: The Core of the Creator Economy.

Due to the native features focusing on multi-party ownership & governance, INV-Core NFTs actually serve as the perfect primitives for building complex DAOs. Just as a business is able to be defined, hold assets in various forms, and have identified roles, payroll, & governance structures, INV-Cores are able to emulate these features & act as trustless on-chain entities; true DAOs.

There will be several evolutionary phases of the OCIF protocol. At its start, OCIF will be a simple & streamlined channel for receiving funding, governed through staking with minimal benchmarks. In the end, OCIF will feature several different funding models. Streamlined funding via staking governance for kickstart funding, milestone-based funding tracks for large funding support, funding provided through a combination of farming & governance, & the ability to provide on-chain donations to projects either directly with individual funds or indirectly with staking rewards. Also, an SDK will be provided at some point after the completion of the OCIF protocol that will allow developers to easily plug in implementations of the protocol in their dApps & provide channels to its services in their products.

If a project is interested in building a community presence, getting feedback, & establishing enough income to steadily fuel development or cover its initial startup costs without asking individuals for their money, then OCIF Staking is the way.

If a project & its mission isn’t necessarily focused on community building, such as research & non-profit initiatives, but believe that it requires a larger amount than OCIF Staking can provide within a respective timeframe & are not in a position where it makes sense to establish a market for liquidity or users, then seeking OCIF Donations is the way.

If a project is interested in building a community presence and getting feedback and needs to establish a market of users, testers, and voting members or wants to decentralize ownership over their project in exchange for said users contributing a stake towards the project, then OCIF Farming is the way.

This versatility will allow the benefits & opportunities of the OCIF protocol to fit the needs of more users, fund more projects, & have a positive impact & reciprocal impact on the network by acting as a value-producing service.

Version 1: Streamlined Staking

During its initial release, OCIF will demonstrate the basic & foundational features of the protocol; simple OCIF Staking. While these features are innovative in their own right & they provide the minimal benchmarks needed to prevent systematic abuse of the protocol from bad actors, they lack more advanced milestone-based protection to allow for more elaborated funding possibilities. Instead, the first version of the OCIF protocol will demonstrate the ability of the InvArch Tinkernet to act as a powerful funding portal & provide a low-level funding system to build on.

In this version, there are two core features: registering INV-Cores & staking TNKR tokens towards registered INV-Cores. Combined, these two features are used to determine the distribution of TNKR funding dedicated to supporting creators on the network. Those who stake TNKR tokens will receive the same yield ratio as all others who also stake TNKR; however, INV-Cores will receive varying funding depending on the amount of support they receive compared to other registered INV-Cores on the network. If INV-Cores do not receive a minimum threshold of support, then they will not receive any rewards at all.

Example Annual OCIF Distribution Cycle

In the example above, a hypothetical although still proportionately accurate breakdown of how OCIF Staking rewards would be distributed to network participants can be seen.

If you were to reflect on the annual results of a hypothetical OCIF simulation period using the information above, then the breakdown of rewards would work like so: 1) 10% network inflation would produce 1,170,000 new TNKR tokens over the course of a year. 2) 80% of these newly minted tokens, a total of 936,000 TNKR would be delegated toward the OCIF staking participants over the course of a year. 3) 60% of these rewards would be directed toward supporting registered INV-Cores on the network & the remaining 40% of these rewards would be directed to incentivize network stakeholders to stake their TNKR. 4) The share of rewards received by each registered INV-Core is proportionally determined based on their share of support compared to all other registered INV-Cores. 5) Those who stake to the network will receive a consistent APY rate no matter how much they stake or which INV-Core they stake toward & support.

Version 2: Donation Support

To enhance the OCIF protocol further, the ability to donate staking rewards to INV-Cores will become an available option on the network during its second iteration. By adding this feature to the OCIF protocol network participants will have the option to delegate either a portion or all of their staking rewards toward projects or initiatives that they support. On the same hand, registered INV-Cores will have the ability to start accumulating donated staking rewards as soon as TNKR is staked & the donation percentage(s) are delegated by network participants.

Taking things a step further, token holders will have the ability to stake TNKR using OCIF Staking to support registered INV-Cores on the network while also using OCIF Donations to delegate & donate any portion of their staking rewards to support additional initiatives on the network. OCIF Donations seeks to enhance the OCIF protocol so that it can become a decentralized portal for earning rewards & funding support.

Example split distribution using OCIF Staking & Donations

At this stage, network stakeholders can support projects either at no opportunity cost lost to them by using OCIF Staking or by donating & providing more direct funding support to registered INV-Cores. Registered projects can earn support from either community-driven staking rewards provided by the network, or they may receive more direct & potentially faster or more generous funding through delegated donations.

Version 3: Farming Options

The third & penultimate iteration of the OCIF protocol will introduce the ability to support projects by delegating their TNKR & staking rewards similar to the same way stakeholders may already participate in OCIF Staking & Donations; however, they do so in exchange for rewards provided by registered projects in the form of INV-Tokens, fungible & multi-class tokens that are native features designed within INV-Cores.

Whether the purpose is simply to provide a more direct incentive for funding support or to use this mechanism as a method for distributing ownership & establishing a decentralized body over an INV-Core, OCIF Farming provides a trustless environment for network participants to support a project & gain direct rewards in return. These rewards could be INV-Tokens representing reputation points within a DAO, governance votes within a DAO, experience boosters for a game being developed using the INV4 protocol, or any other utility token associated with an INV-Core.

To protect network participants from contributing towards projects that turn out to have lackluster community support or potential bad actors, a trustless & immutable vault & threshold system is deployed to handle & safeguard rewards until the respective project achieves a minimum threshold of support & within a certain amount of blocks. The intention behind this design is to ensure that a registered project receives a minimal amount of community interest & pledged funding support to act as a screening process.

Additionally, if the minimum support threshold is not reached within a certain amount of blocks, then the staking rewards & OCIF Farming contributions accumulated in the vault will be directed to respected original owners.

This way if a project ends up lacking sufficient support, those who staked their TNKR will still receive rewards as if they had been staking the entire period instead.

Version 4: Optimized DAO Staking

The fourth & final iteration of the OCIF Protocol will evolve the OCIF protocol into a more mature funding gateway optimized for DAO Staking. Several new & custom Substrate Pallets will be implemented in Tinkernet & will introduce a suite of protocols focused on on-chain identity profiles, reputation systems, DAO entity registrations, automated payroll tools, & milestone models.

Combined, these modules will be used to enhance all previous features of the OCIF protocol: Staking, Donations, & Farming. These enhancements will see the institution of increased screening features based on the reputation of DAO members behind a project being supported. They will also allow for the development of building reputation & verifiable on-chain resumes.

Milestones can be implemented to ensure that projects are active & up to community standards with the ability for community oversight & scrutiny, judged after a predefined amount of blocks. Milestone frameworks can be customized & their agreement is determined by the community through staking governance. Milestone successes & failures can also shape on-chain reputations. Additionally, processes such as automating payroll or even registering DAOs as legal entities can be provided as milestone requirements — and these services can all be & provided, tracked & verified on-chain.

Tapping into additional products built on the InvArch Network, such as GitArch, on-chain repositories can be provided, reviewed, & verified by OCIF community members. INV-Cores can consist of a hypothetically infinite arrangement of file organizations & data structures, allowing them to store their digital assets within them just like a physical company is able to do with their physical assets. This also verifies the ownership rights of content & works produced by a project, which allows them to be submitted for milestone reviews & provides trustless proof of work to the community & those reviewing milestones.

Participation in milestone reviews is streamlined through OCIF governance, milestone reviews are able to be staked as a sign of approval; however, they may also be staked against & require a small deposit in TNKR by the project to prevent the spamming of poor submissions. Instead of voting either “aye” or “nay” on a proposal, individuals are able to stake towards them as an “aye” or “nay” vote & are incentivized for participating in the process.

In its final form, the OCIF protocol is intended to become the ultimate financial launchpad for spinning up, operating, & growing DAOs. The OCIF protocol can then act as a financial underbelly of the InvArch Network economy that kickstarts DOAs & also sustains or subsidizes DAOs for their services to the Network. This also turns the OCIF protocol into an autonomous & self-sustaining economic bloodline for a new DAO-based economic system on the network.

A Foundation of OCIF to Support the Future.

In the end, an entire economy of seemingly permanent & intentionally temporary DAOs deployed on the InvArch Network will be connected to an underbelly of financial support. The value of TNKR is driven by its utility as the financial medium of the InvArch Network which is used to power DAOs & across multi-chain dApps & its power to drive permissionless funding to projects.

As the InvArch Network evolves & a network effect of reach & growth takes shape over its economy, OCIF will be able to both stimulate & subsidize economic growth while also increasing the economic stake of regular individuals all around the globe; creating a compounding positive effect.

A more organized vision could include ecosystem DAOs focused on areas such as marketing, development, education, investments, & research that all provide services that grow the network itself & are all funded through the OCIF protocol. With this, the InvArch Network itself could become a multi-bodied & self-sustaining DAO comprised of SubDAOs, providing an array of job opportunities to individuals around the world for their contributions toward the network & truly becoming a network owned by the people.

It is also envisioned that the OCIF protocol & its underlying design could one day be used & deployed by larger government & business systems to act as a financially incentivized tool for driving communities of users to voice their opinions through voting & helping to produce products & services that are more aligned with their interests.

In its final form, OCIF will be able to fund projects registered across a multi-chain environment & act as not just a resource for the InvArch Network, but as the permissionless funding network underpinning the entire blockchain industry.

This is one of four papers that are collectively known as the InvArch Papers.

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InvArch

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