Introducing UBI: Universal Basic Income for Humans

Jimmy Ragosa -

A democratic DAO and the future of income in the blockchain age...

  • UBI, the first Universal Basic Income token streamed to on-chain verified humans is live.
  • UBI contract address: 0xDd1Ad9A21Ce722C151A836373baBe42c868cE9a4
  • 80% of the UBI genesis supply is allocated to Liquidity Mining incentives and the UBI DAO treasury to be allocated to UBI-related initiatives.
  • Any verified submission on Proof of Humanity can begin accruing newly-minted UBI tokens every second that will get streamed directly to their address.
  • UBI will also act as proposal power for the UBI DAO and quadratic voting by verified humans will be used to set UBI distribution parameters.

What is the UBI Token?

UBI is the first application to be built on top of the Proof of Humanity registry, an anti-Sybil attack tool designed by Kleros.

The UBI token will be streamed directly to an Ethereum address as long as it gets verified as a human in the Proof of Humanity registry and starts the accrual process, establishing a fair and ongoing distribution model. It will provide universal access to liquidity that serves to inhibit financial coercion of public decisions and will be tradeable in all open markets.

The ability to develop a reliable self-sovereign identity validation process brought on by Proof of Humanity has established the bedrock for the infrastructure required to make a Universal Basic Income (UBI) mechanism that can reach everyone on Earth.

Therefore, in order to consolidate the governance and financial logic able to establish borderless democratic autonomous organizations, Kleros and Democracy Earth have designed the UBI token distribution mechanism to be based on time and humanity.

The first modern reference to a Universal Basic Income was done by US founding father Thomas Paine in "Agrarian Justice" (1797). In this pamphlet, Paine proposed a UBI of 15 pounds sterling to be paid to everyone over the age of 21 and that would be financed with the proceeds of land tax.

UBI Initial Allocation

10 million UBI have been minted at genesis.

The initial allocation is as follows:

  • 20% to early contributors to Democracy Earth’s HOUR token (rebranded to UBI).
  • 40% to the initial Liquidity Mining program for UBI pairs.
  • 40% to the UBI community treasury to be used as a treasury reserve for future UBI DAO proposals implementation.

New UBI tokens will be minted each time a verified human claims his accrued tokens as described in the section below. Token quantity will be naturally regulated by population and time as Proof of Humanity is required to register and mint tokens.

Democracy Earth’s $HOUR token investors and contributors to the project that participated in a private offering held by the Democracy Earth Foundation in 2018, will get their corresponding balances migrated to the new UBI token contract.

In his 1962 book, "Capitalism and Freedom", economist Milton Friedman gave an argument for an UBI under the form of a negative income tax.

Streaming UBI to Verified Humans

Once you are registered as a human on the Proof of Humanity registry, you will be able to start accruing UBI by clicking on the “Start accruing UBI” button on your registered profile. Anyone can monitor the quantity of UBI accrued on any PoH profile entry.

Initial UBI streaming parameters are set up such as a verified human can accrue 1 UBI per hour = 720 UBI per month.

Our aim is that the ticker price of UBI becomes synonymous with a global consensus regarding how much is a human’s time worth being supported with Universal Basic Income.

Thanks to the decentralization of Ethereum, the fiat price of UBI will be equally the same for everyone regardless of the country they were born.

All UBI tokens accrued by verified humans get streamed when claimed and will be added to the initial supply of 10M UBI described above. Users will see their balance being updated in real-time and new UBI tokens will be effectively minted once transferred.

If a PoH profile accruing UBI expires, anyone can stop the accrual process and claim the remaining accrued UBI by clicking on the “Seize UBI” button that will be displayed on the expired profile. In the same way, anyone successfully requesting the removal of a profile will get its remaining accrued UBI.

If the PoH registry was to progressively reach 10,000 humans in the first year of its existence, the total supply would be at maximum 27M UBI (without taking into account any change in streaming parameters by the UBI DAO or the potential burning of UBI as part of governance activities).

UBI Liquidity Mining

An initial liquidity mining program will go live March 12, 2021 4:00pm UTC at pools.proofofhumanity.id . The initial program will run for a year until March 12, 2022 4:00pm UTC and target the following two pools on Uniswap v2:

  • UBI/ETH
  • UBI/DAI

2,000,000 UBI will be allocated per pool to liquidity providers proportional to liquidity, which roughly translates to:

  • 5,480 UBI per pool per day.

As soon as the UBI DAO is live, its governance can vote to allocate UBI from the treasury towards grants, strategic partnerships, governance initiatives, additional liquidity mining pools, and other programs.

How to Mine as a LP?

Liquidity providers in the preliminary 2 targeted pools can deposit their Uniswap liquidity tokens at pools.proofofhumanity.id.

Mining will begin on March 12 2021 4pm UTC.

What Will the UBI DAO Look Like?

To prevent the danger of big agents controlling the system, the UBI DAO will mint the same amount of VOTE tokens for every verified submission in Proof of Humanity.

It will be possible to delegate your VOTE to another human verified in PoH (and to revoke it). This token will be used in Snapshots votes to cast a preference over proposals to improve other UBI token and ecosystem (such as modifying the rate of UBI minting or allocating treasury reserves to some initiatives).

This will be the first 100% democratic DAO built on Ethereum (1 person = 1 vote).

Quadratic voting will dampen “majority rule” issues, prevent polarization and empower the voices of minorities in the Ethereum ecosystem. A specific floor of UBI will need to be burned to be able to submit a new proposal to the DAO. It will use Kleros Governor to enforce the outcome of votes on-chain.

The UBI DAO is currently under development and will be launched on mainnet in Q2 2021.

FAQ

What do I need to do to start earning UBI?

You just need to submit your profile to the Proof of Humanity registry with the required information and be socially vouched for by 1 other person in the registry. Once your submission is validated, you will start accruing UBI (more details in the PoH explainer).

Where does the value of $UBI come from?

The value of UBI resides in its innovative fair distribution system based on human time. Such value is bound by two natural limiting factors: time [limited to 24 hours in a day] and population [limited to the number of humans on Earth].

This currency scales with population and is bound by the time such population exists. $UBI is a ‘missing currency layer’ necessary to put a value on time, and do so in an open, global market.

While we can't predict what the global market will determine as the fair market value of time, we can find some guideposts in existing fiat markets. For example, the minimum wage in the United States is $7.25. By transacting with UBI, you will effectively be “buying someone’s time”.

Additionally, several governance actions in the UBI DAO will require the burning of UBI, which will make sure that the model has a “sink”. Its liquidity will be sustained by the Initial Liquidity Mining program and further initiatives to be decided by the UBI DAO (token expiration / oxidation for example).

Why is the UBI token distributed on Ethereum mainnet where gas fees are high?

The UBI token distribution relies on the Proof of Humanity registry to ensure only verified humans can accrue it. The Proof of Humanity registry is deployed on Ethereum mainnet because it is where its anti-Sybil attacks properties are the most useful and will allow more dapps to use it.

The UBI token contract has been gas-optimized as much as possible to reduce gas fees when interacting with it. We are aware that gas fees on mainnet are high but we think the steady UBI distribution will compensate those fees paid by the token holders to claim it.

The contracts are ready for gasless vouching and the UI for it will be implemented soon. In the future, the UBI DAO will have the power to decide if migrating the distribution of the UBI token to a Layer 2 solution is viable.

Will the $UBI accrual rate stay the same?

The UBI DAO will have the ability to increase or decrease the accrual rate as well as adding new UBI fees and sinks in the system if required.

Additional References

Contracts

UBI Token

https://etherscan.io/token/0xDd1Ad9A21Ce722C151A836373baBe42c868cE9a4

Proof of Humanity contract

https://etherscan.io/token/0xC5E9dDebb09Cd64DfaCab4011A0D5cEDaf7c9BDb


UBI Logo

https://github.com/DemocracyEarth/ubi/blob/master/docs/logo/ubi_token.svg

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