The Karmic Engine
Functional Description
The Karmic Engine is the Web3 core of the Sphere ecosystem. Designed by the CurveLabs crew, its main functions consist in the governance and automated allocation of funding. It also facilitates the summoning of incoming artists & creative proposals once a funding threshold is met. Think of The Karmic Engine as both the blockchained gatekeeper of the Sphere’s Digital Soul, and the digital vehicle securing the afterlife of performances and carrying them through their transformative value journey.
To activate The Karmic Engine’s entry portal, you need to plug in with a digital wallet (and some ETH). This will allow you to participate in the game of collaborative funding, leading to the creative deployment of one or many seed performances displayed in the Metagallery. This funding process takes place on Mirror, a Web3 publishing platform that allows for the integration of different crypto-mechanisms for collection and redistribution of funding. Each seed performance will thus be displayed in the Metagallery, and also be represented by a Mirror article that functions as an informative hash of the artwork that also directly integrates crypto-crowdfunding capacities.
Embedded in each seed performance article, you will find a specially crafted NFT. This evolutive NFT will register the derivative iterations of the seed performance, and will also visually transform in the process. The NFT works as a marker of provenance: a living memory device that also potentially allows for the distribution of royalties to previous artists (and eventually also to early supporters). The evolutive NFT functions as a tangible testimony of the transformation of the artwork as it undergoes creative collaborations with new generations of artists.
Therefore: when you invest in one of the seed performances through the Mirror article, you get an amount of ERC-20 tokens proportional to the donation being made. These tokens can, at a later stage, be converted into ERC-1155 KARMIC tokens. This conversion happens on the Karmic Engine Dapp. The KARMIC tokens are NFTs in their own right. They are unique governance tokens displaying a unique and evolutive visual representation. Each seed performance has its own unique NFT attached to it.
The Mirror ERC-20 tokens function like a sort of receipt, or rather, a fully secured proof of participation. It’s only when they are converted into the ERC-1155 KARMIC token that they will grant you governance power and be turned into a visual NFT that will literally transform in your digital wallet.
The funding campaign time window opens at the same time as the Metagallery launch (March 1st). It will end 2 weeks after the Megavote comes to an end, that is, Mid-April 2022. At the end of the funding campaign, the donors may find themselves in two situations:
- 1.The seed that they funded passed the threshold.
- 2.The seed that they funded did not pass the threshold.
In situation 1), the funders will move to the Karmic Dapp – a specially designed Web3 application – where they can convert their initial ERC-20 token into ERC-1155 KARMIC tokens. This process is simple and straightforward – it’s really just a matter of a few clicks (and spending a bit on gas fees in the process). With these KARMIC tokens, funders will then be able to participate in the quadratic voting ritual governing the allocation of funding to different future proposals that will happen later in August 2022.
In situation 2), the funders have two possibilities. They can simply exit the Karmic Engine’s process and get their funding back. Alternatively, they can generously direct their fund towards the Sphere’s common pool. This choice will also allow them to redeem their initial ERC-20 tokens for KARMIC tokens and become part of Sphere’s collective governance.
All in all, the Karmic Engine opens the possibility for a wider range of actors to participate in a groundbreaking experiment in collective curation of the afterlife of a live performance and its transformation into derivative iterations.