What is Strangemood?
It's a protocol! Strangemood is a collection of open protocols for buying and selling software licenses on the internet. You can use Strangemood to start your own game or app store, that will interop with every other store built on Strangemood.
It's a co-op! Strangemood funds development, servers, and other expenses via a co-op called the Strangemood Foundation. A portion of every sale goes to a community token account on the Solana blockchain, that's collectively controlled by ecosystem developers and the sellers on the store.
Get a grant! As an ecosystem developer, you can receive voting tokens in the network, as well as SOL grants to fund your development. At the moment, the best way to do this is to just tell us what you're doing in the Discord, but we're working on a more formal grant program.
Why would anyone want this?
Lower fees, a bigger marketplace, and better user experience for game developers and players. Take Steam's revenue and split it between the game developers (as lower fees) and anyone with distribution (the marketplaces).
There's plenty of people with more distribution than Steam (Youtubers & Streamers notably) who currently are making less money than Steam. Take the cut that's going to Steam, give it to those folks instead, and split the difference.
Is Strangemood "launched"?
Sure, there's a program on the mainnet on Solana. But it's not super usable yet. Most of the clients you'd need to interact with Strangemood are still under construction. You can try the demo though.
Here's some things to look at:
- The Strangemood Program's account on mainnet
- The Strangemood Foundation's Governance
Is Strangemood open source?
Of course! Find the code here.
What is a "protocol"?
It's an agreed upon way of communicating. Email is a protocol. No one owns email and you can use any email app or email provider you'd like!
Why crypto? Why do you need a blockchain for this?
Well how would you make a community treasury that's controlled by potentially millions of people? You could use a company; but that company would need to find a way to capture value, or the company would die.
Strangemood isn't "Steam but Blockchain", blockchains are just the only reasonable way to do this. If you've got a better way of cutting out the middleman, please let us know!
What about storage?
Strangemood is "storage-agnostic". In other words, it doesn't matter where the user gets the game from, the protocol only handles the licensing and sale part.
The game developer can distribute the game themselves if they'd like, though we recommend using IPFS. We're going to run an "at-cost" IPFS pinning service, paid for by the co-op, that keeps games around.
What's the environmental impact of Strangemood?
About the same as this website. In other words, almost nothing. A single transaction on the Solana blockchain uses about as much energy as a google search.
What can I do about climate change broadly?
Well, this is a weird place to ask, but sure, I'll bite.
If you, like us, care about climate change, we'd recommend you offset your personal emissions with a service like wren.co, encourage your local leaders to support car-free alternatives (like bike lanes, busses, trains, and walkable neighborhoods), encourage your college-aged friends to go into STEM fields to investigate alternatives to steel and cement, support the space industry's attempts to do off-planet manufacturing and mining if it turns out steel and cement alternatives are a no-go, and if you live in Arkansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming or Montana, call your representative in support of cultivated meat and seafood. If you live in the US, your town likely bans climate-friendly housing; consider joining movements like YIMBY action in making it legal to build cheap, low carbon-footprint buildings and neighborhoods. When you get the opportunity, pick the veggie option, the electric heater, the denser neighborhood, or the elected representative that values being a good ancestor.
Why Solana?
It's fast, environmentally efficient, and it works right now. It's fairly simple to build a bridge to other chains, so Strangemood can be accessed from any chain. It doesn't matter which chain the data lives on. If for some reason it does matter, then we'll just migrate onto that chain.
Will Strangemood work with Ethereum wallets?
Sure. We'd need to setup a bridge, but that's not that hard.
Do I have to buy the games in SOL?
No, you can buy the game with any currency, and the client can swap between your currency and SOL in the transaction using protocols like Serum swap. You can buy Strangemood games with ETH if you want. You can get from a fiat currency (like dollars) to crypto with a service like Ramp Network. You'd still need a wallet, but that wallet just becomes your game library.
Why do you keep saying "co-op"? Isn't this a DAO?
Yeah sure, but can you explain what a DAO is to your parents? Look, more people have heard of co-ops than have heard of DAOs. NPR thinks DAOs are "investment vehicles" that are literally pronounced "D-A-O". If you're outside of crypto, you only see the ponzi schemes and Bitcoin's energy usage. Most people hear about crypto from a screenshot of a Twitter post on Instagram that tells them why "NFTs are bad for the environment", or from their weird cousin who whips out his Rainbow wallet at Thanksgiving to show you some pixel art.
Strangemood isn't a crypto project. It's just a co-op. Lots of people know what co-ops are. Let's hold hands and make a cyberpunk co-op.
Is this "games as NFTs"?
No, not really. The protocol supports NFT games, because the protocol doesn't explicitly have anything to do with NFTs. It's like how email supports drinking a cup of orange juice in the morning because those silly folks on ARPANET never explicitly prevented drinking orange juice in the morning in their protocol.
Strangemood is setup to allow you to buy and sell non-transferable software licenses. It does not use NFTs, but it does issue a traditional token to a token account that's frozen upon purchase.
Can I trade the games?
Not unless the game developer lets you.
Is this "Steam for play to earn games"?
No, it's a marketplace to buy and sell games. You can put a play-to-earn game on the Strangemood protocol, it's unlikely anyone will stop you. But Strangemood isn't explicitly for any type of game.
Actually, Strangemood isn't even necessarily for games. It's a decentralized app store. But Apple and Google are picky about you creating another store on their devices, and so most software licenses are for video games.
What about browser games?
Sure, you can list a browser game on Strangemood.
What do you mean by "anyone can create a store?"
When you list a game on Strangemood, you list it on a blockchain, not on a specific store. Anyone with a bit of programming knowledge can write code that reads from the chain, and with the permission of your cryptowallet, can create a new listing on the chain.
For players, that means you can buy the game anywhere, and it will appear in your wallet. For game developers, that means you can list your game anywhere and it will show up on many stores at once.
How do you prevent people from uploading someone else's game?
The game itself can validate whether or not someone purchased it through Strangemood. It can show a QR code that a user scans with the same wallet that they purchased the game with.
How do you protect a developer's IP?
The co-op has the ability to ban games from the network if it votes to. It can also delegate this power to an "IP protection team" that can be funded from the community treasury.
Is Strangemood a company?
No, it's a protocol.
Wait, I thought Strangemood is a co-op?
Okay, fine, you got me. The Strangemood protocol puts money into a co-op's token account upon purchase.
Every game on Strangemood (or "listing") belongs to a co-op. When someone sells a game, that goes into a community treasury controlled by the co-op. The co-op is made up of that particular group of people.
The initial co-op is called "the Strangemood Foundation" and is made up of everyone who's selling on the network, and the ecosystem projects that support them.
Why would there be multiple co-ops?
Imagine you're participating in the Strangemood Foundation, and 60% of members want to do HORRIBLE_AWFUL_THING. Now you, a reasonable, sane, person; literally an actual angel decended from heaven, could not possibly continue with this co-op. After all, they want to do HORRIBLE_AWFUL_THING!
You, and the other 40% of people can just setup your own co-op, move your games over, and say "respectfully, peace out" to the other 60%.
But you can continue to use the same Strangemood protocol without needing to make a code change or redeploy the program. So all the apps you're using can continue to work, for the same reason that your browser will continue to work if you switch your website's hosting provider.
Because anyone can create a co-op, it prevents anyone from gaining 51% of the co-op and using it to raise fees. If that were to happen, developers could simply spin up a new co-op without the person who controlled 51%.
What's an ecosystem project? Are they part of the co-op?
The "ecosystem" is made up of developers, designers, community managers, and so on who make marketplaces, software packages, back-office tools, wallet integrations, and other things useful to game developers.
They should be part of any healthy co-op. The Strangemood Foundation allocates 20% to 40% of the vote token distribution to ecosystem projects, and the rest to game developers.
If Strangemood isn't a company, who are you? Who makes this?
Oh, I'm Evan, hi! I hope your world's going well.
Strangemood is made by the Rebase Foundation, which is a company (sort of). I know, another confusingly named organization you've never heard of. Rebase is a little research lab that makes automated co-ops and then becomes a member of the co-ops.
A lot of folks are trying to automate away the worker; the Rebase Foundation automates away the owner. We spin up competitors to existing companies as automated co-ops & protocols, and split it between the customer, the worker, and the vendors. That makes prices go down and wages go up, making everyone richer.
We're pretty sure this is the point of crypto and anyone who's not trying to do this has their head on backwards. If you're into increasing prosperity for more people, like thinking about incentives, and have a properly aligned head, come join us.
Does Strangemood make a profit?
No. Strangemood is a protocol. If you and your friends got together to plan a party, and you wrote down all the things you'd need to get at the store on a piece of paper, did the piece of paper make a profit?
The money in Strangemood flows to game developers and folks that build the ecosystem that supports Strangemood.
This is hard for people to wrap their brain around, because it's the really the "new thing" that blockchains provide: escrows without a third party. Everything else in crypto, from currencies to DAOs, is a derivative of that concept.
When you buy a game on Steam, you're buying from Steam. Steam takes the money, holds the cash and the game in a sort of "escrow", and then it gives some money to the game developer and gives you the game. But when you buy a game on Strangemood, you're buying from the game developer. A little bit of money is also going to the storage provider, the folks that make the website, and all the other "expenses" that are needed to run the network. But you're also paying those people directly.
Strangemood is just a set of agreed-upon rules on who gets paid for what.
If Strangemood doesn't make a profit, then why create Strangemood, what's in it for Rebase?
The same thing that's in it for the other members of the co-op. If you take Steam's revenue, split it beteween the ecosystem and the game developers, then you make money by building the ecosystem and games.
Rebase creates Strangemood, and ends up with about 5% or less voting power in the co-op, and becomes one of many ecosystem vendors to the co-op. If the rest of the co-op doesn't like Rebase, it can always stop paying Rebase, or just start it's own co-op.
Because the vast majority of the voting power of the co-op is in the hands of not-Rebase, Rebase can (probably) not become a centralized power on the network. In other words, Rebase needs to compete to provide reasonable goods and services on an open market.
Can you explain more about what community funds go to?
The primary purpose is to fund public goods and expenses in running the protocol. A public good is something that doesn't have a clear business model, like open source libraries or indexes of games. In other words, the community can "hire" maintainers of the protocol (like Rebase), or help kick start ecosystem projects.
The secondary purpose is to prevent the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. This is a strategy where a corporation adopts an open source protocol, adds extra features, and then it becomes impossible to use the protocol without using that company's "version" of it.
In the past, a protocol has no way of competing, because the protocol doesn't have a long-term funding model to match the corporation. Building in a community account allows for the protocol itself to be competitive with corporations. But because Strangemood is controlled, in majority share, by game developers, they can prevent it from charging any more than is necessary to fund development and maintenance. And because it's controlled in minority share by ecosystem projects, who can receive SOL grants from the protocol, they are still incentivized to make the protocol useful and good.
Why 5%? Why not 10% or 2%?
Well, to some extent you just gotta pick a number to start with. Because the number is controllable by the co-op, it doesn't really matter what number you start with. If it's too high or two low, the co-op has the power to fix it. But we tried to pick something that was low enough that it was competitive with other marketplaces, and high enough that it could pay for unknown expenses.
As the marketplace gets bigger, it's likely that the contribution rate will get pushed down quite significantly.