Despite the bear market and the recent events that have happened in the NFT space, the Autonomies team has decided to go through a soft launch this summer. We are launching a marketplace, a DAO infrastructure and a reward program for our early adopters, artists and collectors. People will now be able to purchase exclusive electronic music from carefully curated artists, while earning the AUT token: a token critical to the development of the project.
The Autonomies project distinguishes itself from other NFT music initiatives by delivering a fair and decentralized ownership structure of the marketplace straight from launch. At Autonomies, we believe that shared ownership of the platform is the key to sustainable and fair value creation for creatives.
While Web 2 music platforms such as Bandcamp initially championed closer relationships between artists and fans and allowed musicians to be fairly compensated for their work, the company has recently sold for an undisclosed amount to Epic Games, without sharing any of the upside with artists and fans. Streaming platforms such as Spotify, on the other hand, do not even attempt to hide their unscrupulous compensation practices, often requiring artists to sign draconian T&C’s in exchange for visibility on their platform.
These examples further highlight the need for building software infrastructure that does not only support digital music distribution, but that also embraces the features of transparency and shared ownership web3 offers. Autonomies just does that. We are building the first digital cooperative for musicians.
This article recaps the pillars of this launch, including the AUT voting token, the token distribution and the Autonomies governance structure.
The AUT token is the token used for the governance of the autonomies ecosystem via the Autonomies DAO. The AUT token allows its holders to write proposals and to vote on how to manage the project’s budget and develop the ecosystem. Artists, collectors, and contributors can all use the token to write proposals to get funded in either USDC or AUT, or update a parameter of the software.
At launch, aside from being used for raising proposals, the AUT token will also be governing the marketplace fee (set to 10% initially) and other infrastructure related parameters. As we further grow autonomies, we plan on adding utility to the AUT token, including the ability for its holders to earn passive income from the USDC treasury by staking it.
It’s important to note that the AUT token will not have a financial value right at launch, but will only be tradeable for other assets once its holders are confident the token captures enough value and has sound tokenomics. The token follows the ERC20 standard and is deployed on the Polygon network. The only way to acquire AUT is to buy content on the platform.
We’ve decided to put 909,000,000 AUT tokens in circulation, in reference to the Roland TR-909, a drum machine that has been massively influential to the electronic music community for its sampling and MIDI capabilities.
The token contract address is 0x1E3A1edD81Ff576Bf9f71c3806293CDAdEc057
Its owner, holders and deployers can be checked online directly via Polygon’s block explorer Polygonscan.
To get details about a particular address or smart contract on autonomies, simply copy and paste the address in the search bar of Polygonscan. We will add the list of reference smart contract addresses at the end of this article.
Autonomies’ genesis and launch plan were designed to provide artists and collectors with a stake equal to the one of core contributors. As such, while 10% of the total token supply is being allocated to core contributors, an equal 10% will be distributed to the early users and adopters of the autonomies marketplace, to ensure equity in the system and to avoid nepotism.
We believe in the power of the community, hence we deem necessary to give back control and ownership to Autonomies users. The remaining 80% of the AUT supply will be kept in the DAO treasury and managed by the AUT holders to foster the development of the ecosystem (fundraising, enrolling new contributors, creating events…).
The team allocation is managed through a vesting contract that we’ve deployed along the governance contracts
The vesting contract address is: 0x415B261aE9A51367e12eAf543a5dAB8c40b80A99
It will allow its beneficiaries to do two things:
This setup allows us to incentivize long term contributions from the partners while distributing enough tokens to allow for a smooth governance of the project according to the parameters we’ve set (see parameters in the voting rules section).
Our commitment to transparency leads us to display the addresses of our core contributors, whom without their effort this project would have not seen daylight.
0x1fAb667886F644615D1e3A06EC0338e95571Fb9C
0x0738CD6669778e59BD9e7AA43b07eC6c35384c14
0xdA0d1B72cdEE830a1Fc56aD61f813841EC80f55a
0xa9ddE3e08dE2710E9c4f611fBaa78c679934C03E
0xdE5731BB994B585F872EF52aE70FE7b59CD21A9f
0xA6c05c840F68727Ec84142Bf13241AE95F555999
0xfC8D3F68591e8F1Ac3E045731978ccB0CfA20EfC
0xd38E05BF31d3cF477dC8D260d2Fb7a93Fb0e51FB
0xA10227fa9b394223D925DdAABEe69DfC322Fdc20
0xAd66810a7358ad499C611d50108D0E0A8733E913
0x9dA74c7E577bE6b2b595A5Ce1B63F3277aaAab79
0xb63940A6ca0A1AF608a78fcEe8905a78bB39be4D
0x37116b36e5434Bff03F4aCE974F1458d1cC2463d
0x2A8df0092C7B2A1B34EE78145394D753e72BBB67
0xAB92E2F84A894F632C4B0Ace22F48b5006Eb0540
To incentivise usage and distribute AUT tokens to the artists and collectors who join the project early, the team has designed a contract that will send AUT tokens to both collectors and artists based on the USDC spent by collectors on each NFT(0xc9cA66dD0587d4aa3Bf2e093e0D776e942629C78).
The Autonomies DAO collects a 10% fee on transactions to grow the community’s treasury. Each time a collector buys a track, a proportionate amount of AUT tokens is sent to both the artist and the collector as a reward for their purchase. This lets them participate in the governance of the project. The more USDC is spent by a collector, the more AUT they will receive. The more music an artist sells, the more AUT artists will also receive.
We’ve set a target of $2M in USDC for the reward contract to expire and to distribute 10% of the total AUT supply to collectors and artists, reaching parity with core contributors. This corresponds to $20M in sales, or around 10% of Bandcamp’s yearly revenue.
The contract is designed in such a way that the earlier artists sell and collectors buy music, the more AUT tokens they will be awarded. We will write in a separate article the details of this reward program so the mechanism is fully transparent and answers all questions.
To participate in the governance of autonomies, users need to own AUT tokens. Any amount of AUT tokens is enough to cast a vote in favor or against a proposal. A minimum of 1% of the total AUT supply is needed to write a proposal. AUT tokens can be delegated to other AUT holders for writing a proposal.
The proposals are executed onchain, which means that each proposal must come with smart contract calls to execute the desired transactions. To have an overview of any given governance related actions, you can visit the Autonomies Tally interface, a versatile dashboard that allows members to propose, review and vote on DAO initiatives. For security reasons, always double check that the addresses displayed under “Contract Parameters” match with the addresses of this article.
To understand and participate in the governance of Autonomies, it is important that we understand how proposals and votes are effectively first created and then executed. Voting comes with a set of rules, these rules include a set of variables that the DAO has to comply with in order to make any proposal valid.
The core governance parameters and voting rules are:
Inside the Autonomies marketplace, we’ve created a simple DAO dashboard that keeps track of Autonomies DAO USDC treasury, member headcount, and other core community and DAO metrics. We will add new features to the dashboard as we grow the ecosystem.
From the application, the DAO dashboard can be accessed by clicking on “Dashboard” in the dropdown menu, then “DAO” next to the “Profile” button.
The Dashboard also links to our documentation (currently in the form of an FAQ), our Discord server, and the Tally interface. Tally is nicely documented and will let you know how to navigate the interface to vote, delegate, and write proposals. Because we wanted to guarantee the highest level of decentralization, we’ve opted for the onchain execution of proposals, which comes with a certain level of familiarity with smart contracts and governance participation.
We will create educational material and host community calls to demystify the core web3 concepts and help newcomers get comfortable with our governance structure. The best way for the community to keep up with our work is to join our Discord.
Below is the definition of the core contracts and accounts used for the deployment of the application and the Autonomies DAO. Each contract and account has a specific role within Autonomies’ set of governance contracts. Understanding them is useful to participate in the governance of the project and writing contract calls.
We distinguish between two types of accounts: Externally Owned Accounts (A) or Contracts (C). When a contract has two addresses, the first one is the proxy address, while the ones that come second are the implementation addresses.
Proxy addresses are the addresses called during smart contract calls. Proxy addresses delegate calls to implementation contracts. Results are returned to the proxy which are then forwarded to the caller.
The addresses of the aforementioned contracts are the following:
Config Contract Address
0x4d3eE1e93D3085b672b3B26545228Ed6A1eE6ea3
0x4E40e20088dF7587A998a6412aEbf1e47FBbEc02
Reward Contract Address
0xc9cA66dD0587d4aa3Bf2e093e0D776e942629C78
0xd560cf4A2ad5887d5a464A8b60D8D2967341088F
Rewarder Account Address
0x1d53f46f81bBFF3045C521f98C74521b478d6Ca5
TimeLock Contract Address
0xf7b8c5D4f68bfB197A0963C49e40b9738dBBA96f
Governor Contract Address
0xa062e4424385Fb3403322cc4760DaC4078621155
0x7a51C544980e4d16EB8836129e67d31a6a9F78c7
Proxy Admin Contract Address
0x32797952a26136DFc98A9a0Dc528bABE121A96Bf
Treasury Contract Address
0xfF6025a0cEE40A06753e4Bd2E52BB680931bD8E9
0x73B243Bc1257c7629859B328680440C3017E1246
Vesting Contract Address
0x415B261aE9A51367e12eAf543a5dAB8c40b80A99
0x9BFFC9844aEA6236EE590CB1f2D4a1078E98dDD0
$AUT Token Contract Address
0x1E3A1edD81Ff576Bf9f71c3806293CDAdEc057c1
$USDC Token Contract Address
0x2791bca1f2de4661ed88a30c99a7a9449aa84174
Deployer Account Address
0xdeadb1e21a60b9AFD84805D4fFf58743B415FBAe
The Autonomies DAO went live on the 4th of July 2022, and the Autonomies marketplace is also deployed mainnet. We are currently onboarding artists on our marketplace and will share with you news regarding the first batch of artists.
Our marketplace is ready -
Special thanks to Sebastian Gerske, Manuel Pando, Elod Varga, Esraa Jbara, Carlos López Riesco and others for their work on this project, and thanks to Miles Takes and Jesse Steele for their contributions on this article.
Written by Clement Bihorel
