[DAO: QmT9WrE] Revised proposal for wearable publication fees

Governance
1

by 0x9982b469910c2ee2ea566dcfcc250cdd34056397 (MrEric)

Summary

This is an updated version of a previous proposal for wearable publication fees. After receiving feedback and input from the community, the previous proposal has been updated to more accurately reflect the risk that a flood of NFT wearables poses to the platform.

Overview

The Wearables Editor will allow community content creators to upload collections of the 3D models and textures needed to mint NFT wearables. Before these wearable collections may be minted, they will have to pass through a publication process - part of which includes content moderation and approval to vet out spam and submissions that violate Decentraland’s Content Policy.

However, there remains the risk that creators will submit an excessive volume of collections, and/or that collections will be submitted with low-quality content.

This introduces several very significant risks to the entire Decentraland platform:

  • A high volume of submissions will slow the approval process for other creators
  • The Catalyst nodes that serve the content for Decentraland incur additional CPU, storage, and bandwidth costs for every wearable item added to the platform
  • When exploring the world, users must download and render every custom wearable encountered
  • Other dApps within the Decentraland platform must process every additional added item, negatively impacting their performance for users

Given the immutability of NFTs, wearables minted in Decentraland will be present forever. They cannot be removed. So, any detrimental effects they have on the performance of the platform cannot be removed.

To mitigate this risk, it is proposed that the DAO collect a publication fee for each item within a collection, regardless of the rarity selected when minting those items. This fee is not applied to every NFT minted from each item, only the item.

This fee will be transferred to the DAO and may help fund community grants, reimburse the Curation Committee for their work in vetting submissions, and other initiatives as seen fit by the community.

These fees can always be lowered or increased, but NFTs can never be removed from the platform.

Benefits

  • Disincentivize creators from submitting spam, thus increasing the rate at which legitimate submissions are approved and published
  • Promotes the submission of very high quality wearables
  • Protects the Decentraland platform from a permanent drop in performance due to a flood of NFT wearables

Specification

Each time a creator submits a collection in the Wearables Editor for publication, they must pay a fee in MANA (at the rate decided on by the DAO) for each item. These fees are charged per item in a collection, not per NFT minted from an item.

For example, if an X MANA fee is approved by the DAO, the fees would be as follows.

  • 1 Unique item - 1 NFT - total minting cost X MANA
  • 1 Mythic Item - 10 NFTs - total minting cost X MANA
  • 1 Legendary Item - 100 NFTs - total minting cost X MANA
  • 1 Epic item - 1000 NFTs - total minting cost X MANA
  • 100 MANA
  • 500 MANA
  • Other

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

2

Does this mean that a legendary item is going to essentially cost 5 MANA to mint @500? I would say that this is very low.

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So you are proposing for anybody who wants to mint any wearables they gotta pay 500 MANA.
Makes no sense, is out of range for most creatives in the space to pay those. Some of us have been avoiding to mint wearables during high gas fees, this is more of the same.
I understand your benefit points, but I would argue that performance is not an issue to point here. Eventually we want everybody to dress as they want, that means many wearables are going to be minted.

Making a 500 MANA barrier to enter to the market is placing a base price for 1/1 of around $500. Not all 1/1 are going to be $500 items.

Fees should be lowered, and the only real issue I see here is overloading the reviewing committee with spam. Which I’m not completely sure if it’s avoidable, since the fees are payed once you got approved by them.

I could understand a 500 MANA retainer that you gotta pay upfront to enter validation process and then get back the 75% to the creator once is approved, and still feels like a paywall for most.

1 Like
4

Dude, this is 500 MANA for 100 wearables or 10 wearables… or a 1000 wearables… Something does not add up here eventhough I think the proposal is not bad if it would be for a dedicated rarity type (Community rarity type (10 NFTs) for example 100 MANA) and Unique items only (500 MANA)

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@ToxSam So, the way I see the overall costs for minting a new item is this:

For the Creator:

  • Time, creativity & energy poured into crafting the item
  • Network fees (Ethereum or Polygon)
  • Wearable publication fee (what is being discussed here)

For the Catalysts:

  • Bandwidth costs each time it gets downloaded (hard to estimate)
  • Storage costs (negligible, but frequent access adds up over time)
  • Risk of logic bugs related to uploading content (super low)
  • CPU costs (negligible)

For the Curating Committee:

  • Reviewing the item, testing it against all other items (might become quadratically difficult)
  • Back-and-forth if the item has bugs/problems
  • Support and assistance with getting the item approved

For users of the experience:

  • Network cost: download each custom-made item when it needs to be rendered
  • CPU/GPU/Memory cost: rendering an avatar with a custom item doesn’t come for free

Because this fee is the only way to keep out low-quality things, that’s why I think $0 is not a good option. I see @SWISS’s argument towards “depreciation of current wearables” and that’s a reasonably good idea to increase that cost, but the #1 reason I listed here, and why I wouldn’t want to go further than 500 MANA is because artists already have a high entry “cost”, which is pouring their knowledge, creativity and effort in to create high quality items.

So I think there has to be a balance here; not really sure where that balance sits, but definitely in the vicinity of a couple hundred dollars to fend off the big aggregated cost that occurs over time over all the users of Decentraland and the servers.

2 Likes
6

500 MANA for making a unique item is really high
lets say I wanna make a set of 4 wearables 1/1
2000 MANA upfront

So, commission based market on unique items is already scrapped out of the equation., Since you would have to pay X amount to the creator and then 500 MANA per item.

Other amounts (10/10, 100/100 , 1000/100) are more reasonable the more ceros you add, but it might be a barrier for newcomers in the space.

@esteban I don’t want fees going to $0 either, not complaining about the payment but about the amount and the approach.

A retainer of 500 MANA with a 50%-75% return once you pass the quality check could be a great move, keeping spammers in the door, yet not charging the users that much to create items. But not sure how feasible is that.

1 Like
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A few additional comments:

On accessibility to finance this fee for creators: I’d be happy to see grants (both from the DAO or other private users) cover this; I think it’s mostly a financial problem, not an economic one. If you can get your hands on 500 MANA to pay for minting a legendary, and sell 20 of them at 100 MANA; you are taking home (2000-500) = 1500 MANA already (and have 80 more items to sell).

On unique items: Let’s say we’re in a party between 20 persons, each of them with ten uniques they minted themselves. Cost of it all is 100,000 MANA. 20 persons is not that much – 200 unique items also not very high – but if you think that those 3D models might weight at about 5 megabytes in RAM (I probably have this number wrong, but exaggerated it to be on the safe side); you’re looking at a huge chunk of the video memory being used up (maybe leading to crashes) because rendering this stuff takes up 1gigabyte. This is a mostly inaccurate napkin calculation; there are optimizations and things that could be added to the client in the future, but considering that the current WebGL memory limit is 2 gigabytes it could be pretty bad. And if you get a 75% rebate, the cost of this attack is just ~$15,000 USD at the current price – and you could repeat and bring this attack to all the popular events.

On the “finality” of adding items: One thing that I would hate is for the system to have to “go back” on decisions about accepting items. Once they get minted, and sold to users, it would be really bad to see my items disappearing from my bagpack. We’d have to get some kind of “return” system for the items that got sold, but what if people got it for more money in a secondary market? Well, we as a community could say “that’s on the buyer” but I think we need to try and come up with the best solution we can, a solution that gets this functionality out there, while trying to mitigate as many of these problems as possible.

1 Like