Myco is a tool for bootstrapping abundance. It's an all-in-one platform for groups of people who have a shared set of goals and values— potential energy— to come together and convert that energy into real world action.

One of the central themes of Myco is collective ownership: the belief that the economic benefits which stem from work should be fairly shared among the group of people who contributed to its creation, in a way that promotes sustainable, long-lasting relationships.

While this blueprint may be applied to many different forms of organizations, to begin we are focussing specifically on what we call Digital Social Clubs: communities of like minded individuals who gather together on the internet. Our goal is to enable these groups to be anything they want to be: a community, a collective, a coop, a company.

Launching a Co

When people launch Co's on Myco, they create a new space within which a community can co-create valuable media together. Instead of us (the platform) retaining any economic rights over the media that users produce within their Co's, all of it is instead co-owned by the Co.

To achieve this, each Co is itself a company (technically a Nevada-based Series LLC), which is launched as part of every new community. These LLCs are sort of like sub-companies below our parent umbrella Myco Space LLC, which owns and operates the platform that powers these Co's. By wrapping all of the activity in an LLC structure, we ensure that contributors are protected from individual liability resulting from the actions of the collective.

Co Ownership

Each Co is also launched with its own native points system, which represent an equal share of profit rights stemming from the Co's various activities. Co's may select to have point holders participate in votes for certain decisions, as needed, but points do not automatically confer decision making rights to their holders. They are purely used as a measurement of profit rights over the activities of the Co. Because point holders are legally entitled to any economic benefits resulting from the Co, the points may only be rewarded to people who meaningfully contribute to it, and may not be sold freely on open markets. All points and distributions are 100% transparent for all members, so everyone can verify that they aren’t being taken advantage of.

Co's may reward their contributors with points based on the various roles or tasks that they fulfill. These points are minted on a continuous basis, exemplifying the continuous growing of the pie that occurs when communities endure, so that fresh contributors are always earning a fair stake in the communities they're helping to sustain. This continuous issuance provides communities with the flexibility they need to learn and grow, while also ensuring that individual contributors need to stick around if they want to retain a given percentage ownership stake in a Co. Unlike other forms of companies, we do not believe that digital communities should reward orders of magnitude more ownership to people who launch a community vs those who stick around. Communities aren't like technology companies; you can't just deploy them and forget about them. They are people businesses, and they require continuous nurturing in order to succeed. We believe that the individuals who do this continuous nurturing should be fairly rewarded for it.

Points are minted and distributed through a variety of methods: they’re distributed monthly to the individuals who inhabit different roles, on an ad-hoc basis to individuals who perform tasks, and automatically to the people who perform different actions within the Co itself. Points may also be tipped between members, and members may also be given a balance of points which must be rewarded to their peers. By bringing all of the Co's activities into one platform, it becomes even easier to distribute rewards in new and unique ways based on the needs of each Co.

By letting Co’s reward people with ownership points before they’ve made any money, groups can form and bootstrap value creation, powered by their shared belief that their project will succeed— a self-fulfilling prophesy of abundance.

Co Roles

Each Co has its own unique set of roles, which should be crafted based on the specific goals and activities of that group. By default, each Co comes with two basic roles: Creators, and Members. Each role comes with its own set of permissions within the Co (ie things that those individuals have control over), as well as a monthly salary of points that all individuals in that role will earn on a monthly basis. Although Creators will by default have all possible permissions in the Co that they launch, they are encouraged to create new roles and to confer new permissions onto them as their community grows. This allows Creators to have complete control over how centralized or distributed their decision making is, and more importantly, enables them evolve it over time as their Co grows in both membership and value.

Co's may also designate various ways to decide who may hold various roles. They may choose to let anyone join and become a member, or they may require an application be submitted for approval by others within the Co. They may also choose to gate membership in the co based on holding various tokens off-platform, such as owning an NFT in a series, holding a sufficient number of ERC20 tokens, or via membership fees which individuals pay on a monthly basis. These roles are meant to be as flexible as each Co's Creators want them to be, and may also be used to define and reward activities that happen off-platform, in the real world.

Co Vault

Because each Co is a company, it is also able to do the primary thing that companies do: make money. Myco lets Co's earn money directly on the platform by charging membership fees, or selling products and services. All of the money that a Co earns on Myco automatically gets deposited into its Vault, and deposits can also be made for any money that’s earned off-platform, via traditional banking transfers or transfers of Ethereum-based tokens like ETH or stablecoins.

Once the Co pays for any costs or debts associated with their activities, they can distribute their profits back to their points-holders at the click of a button, thereby closing the value-creation loop, and directly rewarding the people who helped to build the Co. These profit distributions do not require individuals to sell their points, and are instead comparable to a dividend in traditional companies. This means that individuals can make money from being a part of these communities without having to relinquish the ownership share that they've earned.

As with the ownership points and roles, decision-making power over the Co's vault is controlled by a set of permissions which Creators can confer on any role they desire, including allowing members themselves to co-control the group's finances.

Co Conversations

Finally, because these Co's are meant to initially be used for digital social clubs, they need a space where information can be shared, and relationships can be built. To that end, Myco provides each Co with its own Conversation space, which can be used for both synchronous and async communications. Without giving too much away, our first implementation of Conversations is a blend between Discord, Twitter, and Reddit, along with an ephemeral chat for live conversations only.

While conversations initially supports only text-based media, Co's will also be able to communicate via audio and video channels as they please. Conversations can be gated based on various roles, or made public altogether, allowing them to produce valuable media that can be delivered to external subscribers.

Case Studies

To illustrate Myco in action, here are some basic examples of Co's which are being built on Myco.

1. An NFT-Gated Community

Lets imagine a world where you, an NFT artist and community builder, have launched a pfp series into the world. You've embedded your core values into the works, and you want to begin building a community with these NFTs as a focal point.

So, you join Myco, and launch a new Co for your community, with membership being gated via ownership of one of these NFTs. This new Co is independent from the group which initially launched the NFTs, and is meant to be the container for the new community itself, which is much larger in scope.

Then, you begin inviting your community to join and participate in this new space, and you begin rewarding your contributors with a piece of collective ownership in the community they're creating. You quickly discover which individuals in the community want to be core contributors, and you promote them into new roles with specific responsibilities based on their individual strengths.

As your community grows and thrives, it's time for the group which initially launched the NFTs to reward the Co for building a useful community around the original project, and the group begins to pay the Co for running the community (which acts as a useful and valuable marketing arm for the original NFTs). These funds are deposited into the Co's vault, and are immediately distributed to the individuals who participated and stuck around, closing the loop on NFT-community value creation.

Within months, your original NFT project has grown from being just about simple NFT PFP's into something much larger: a fully fledged media company, that’s powered by a broad swath of individual contributors who co-own the venture. Soon this company begins to create value for people even outside of the community itself, and no longer relies on profit distributions from the initial NFT sale to pay contributors. Just like that, a valuable and long-lasting company has been born, with its own value system and goals.

2. A Creator Fan Club

Lets imagine a world where you, a Creator, want to convert your audience into a community, where instead of them just engaging with your content, they begin engaging with each other about the various aspects of their existence that they have in common, the same aspects that initially attracted them to you. Maybe it's a video game you all play, a form of art you all produce, or a sport you all compete in. Maybe it's just your vibe.

So, you launch a Co on Myco, and begin inviting your biggest fans to join. You charge a membership fee, which helps to ensure that the people who join have something at stake, but it isn't so high that it stops your less-well-off fans from being able to participate as well. You set up automatic points rewards for the people who contribute to conversations and share interesting content, and you begin to see your super-fans revealing themselves as power-contributors.

Soon, people aren't just joining the club to get access to you, they're joining to be part of a network, and for the content that everyone is producing. Now, you don’t have to feel bad stepping away from the creator hamster wheel, and you can finally take a week off from posting content, since you can trust that your co-contributors will keep things running in your absence. Go ahead, you’ve earned that trip to Greece!

Then, as the Co begins to scale, you see brands reaching out for access to this community, and its most important members. Now your brand sponsorship deals aren't just about access to you, they're about access the entire group. Instead of playing the creator economy as an individual, you've turned it into a team sport, where everyone can get a fair share of the spoils.

3. Making Money with Friends Online

Lets imagine a world where you, an individual who lives in the internet metaverse, has friends. Right now you all gather in a small chatroom to share alfa or news of the day, but you get the sense that it could be more than just a passive social experience for everyone. You ask yourself: what would happen if your group chat was also a company?

So, you launch a Co on Myco, and distribute ownership to your members. Maybe you even make everyone in the group a Creator, because everyone is equally important to whatever it is you might be doing, and the level of trust between you is high.

Then, a few weeks later, someone in the chat gets a cool new idea for a small internet business that you all could spin up within a matter of days. Although most members contribute some ideas, only a few of you actually do the work to execute on the idea, so some new points are minted for those who do the work. You launch the project, and to your surprise — it actually makes money!

Soon, your group chat has morphed into a sort of internet tribe, which is constantly scouting for new opportunities in the wild, and tackling bounties together.

While these are just some of the examples of the types of groups which can use Myco, there is no limit to the various permutations of digital-native organizations that this powerful but simple platform can support.

Platform Economics

As part of building Myco in a sustainable fashion, we are launching the project with a sustainable business model that will never force us to coerce our users, sell their data, or push ads into THEIR spaces.

Myco makes money by charging a 10% royalty on all profits which the Co's distribute to their points-holders. This is the value we earn from being part automated community manager, part legal advisor, part accountant, and full-time technology provider. We invest time into every single Co that launches on our platform, and make ourselves available to advise you on how to best turn your goals and values into an actionable endeavor. This ownership stake (rather than a one-time-fee) reflects the long term orientation we have towards every single Co that builds on Myco— we are in it for the long haul, and we only make money if you do too.

This parent Myco Space LLC is also itself a Co on the platform, and every user of the platform is automatically a member. This means that Myco has its own points system, which confers the same economic benefits to its holders as the other Co's points do. These points are granted to users of the platform - both to individuals who contribute and use the platform's improvement and growth, as well as to the Co's themselves. This means that half of the economic value which is generated from the Myco project will be shared among its users, and the other half will go to the company which helps to operate the platform.

To build Myco, we've created two entities: Uni Uni Uni Inc (which is a Delaware C-corp), and Myco Space LLC (Myco) a Nevada-based LLC. Uni is the company which we work for, and the company which has received investments from third parties. This company provides a myriad of services to Myco, including building the platform, marketing it and building its community, and overseeing its operations initially. Over time, Myco will rely less and less on Uni, as it is progressively decentralized. In exchange for providing these services, Uni will get a 50% royalty of any profit which Myco earns.

Here’s a diagram which illustrates this more clearly:

We made sure that this economic model reflects our core view that there should be no separation between Myco the platform, and the Co's which are built on top of it. While these communities have the latitude to act completely independently, they may also choose to align themselves closely with the Myco community and our core values around collective ownership and fair capitalism. We want to be co-builders of the projects you launch on Myco, and similarly we want you to be co-builders of the platform too. While we haven't started rewarding any of our Myco points to users or contributors yet, when we do so (retroactively) we will be taking into account the individuals and Co's which have been most crucial in our early days, helping to give us feedback on what they want the platform to do, and participating in the network before we've achieved critical mass.

We built Myco with the hopes that it can serve as a Mycelial network for the humans which use it, providing a new substrate to efficiently transport information and nutrients between users, to help grow new ecosystems of value. We're the mycelium, you’re the mushrooms, but in the end we're all one anyway.

If you are interested in contributing to what we’re building and resonated with this post, we’re actively recruiting new team members to help us build Myco (engineers, community builders, designers, and lawyers). If you want to join us, please send a resume to arya@myco.space, and tell us why you want to join us.

We are also actively recruiting the Co's which will be our earliest users, and will help us build this platform. Myco is far from perfect right now, and there's still lots of work to be done, so we want to be intentional about ensuring that the values of our early users are highly aligned with ours, as both co-owners and as the people who will help shape the platform itself. If you are building a digital community and think you might want to use Myco, please email mark@myco.space and tell us a bit about your group and your plans for the future.

If you're building a project or platform in this space that you think we can integrate with, please email arya@myco.space and tell us a bit about what you're up to — we're always looking for new ways to expand the mycelial network and integrate with existing bodies of work.

Finally, if you’re just interested in joining Co’s on Myco and want to stay in the loop, you can follow us on twitter or join our mailing list.