Freehold Public Townhall - November 2020

We had a great time yesterday at Freehold's Public Townhall, and thank you to all 42 folks who showed up! For everyone else, this post is for you! Below is a video of the townhall and a summary of what we covered:

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Freehold’s mission is to accelerate the advent of a user-owned internet.

In order to get us one step closer to that, we developed a model that creates communities that share value, and can earn crypto they actually use. The Freehold model aims to have more impact per dollar spent than traditional startups while creating more stakeholders earlier on.

For more info on the model, check out our post What is Freehold?

We are in the beginning stages of product development, dogfooding the experience ourselves first with the STX Freehold, which you can join by filling out the applicant survey.

Below is a summary of two products being built to help validate the STX Freehold: Hodl Score and Hodl Chat. We’ll also cover anticipating liquidity needs for future Freeholds below as well.

Hodl Score

Knowing which Freeholder earned crypto, had an impact, and held that crypto is fundamental to creating a larger, fairer Freeholder labor market.

Freeholders stand to benefit from the market knowing they are a high impact hodler. By earning tokens that sustain value and choosing to not sell, they signal to the markets that they are pro-growth and pro-wealth.

Hodl Score makes it easier to know who to work with and who to reward over time. Hodl Score should, paradoxically, lower the general cost of labor while growing the wealth of folks doing the labor.

We are beginning to develop a basic “Hodl Score” which can be used by Freeholders, starting with the STX Freehold (which you can enter by applying here).  Hodl Score is different from a Credit Score in that Hodl Score evaluates the asset/earnings side of the users balance sheet, whereas a credit score which evaluates the liability/debt side. (note for the finance/startup nerds out there: you can find a brief history of FICO on Forbes.)

We plan to officially launch Hodl Score by December 2020 and will give updates as it progresses. Meanwhile, here is a preview of some sample inputs we are thinking of experimenting with:

We will use Hodl Score to better reward Freeholders, which should enable them to earn and hodl more overtime.

Hodl Chat

Validating that communities can work together with at least as much impact as employees in a startup requires that they be connected and develop trust among each other. It would be difficult for a community to work together on collective milestones unless they are trading information with each other and not just receiving it in a top-down way.

For example, imagine the difference between doing business development with one employee versus being a part of hundreds of motivated stakeholders who agree on a plan and execute together. You can take a different approach altogether when you are operating with a community at scale. The community could even surprise itself in the speed and impact at which it can operate as a team, similar to the results of the DARPA red-balloon challenge:

Another reason Hodl Chat is important is to reduce the negative aspects of open chats like Telegram, where people who don’t have skin in the game can come in and interrupt conversations with negativity, ignorance, or malice. Each chat group is designed for different things: Slack is good for startups and small groups, telegram is good for traders, and Hodl Chat is beneficial for activated communities that have an impact, like Freeholds.

We are going to trial this experience first using Discord and continuously test new custom features to improve the experience for everyone. If there is a need to build a custom product around this, we will do so after learning what people want.

Liquidity for Freeholds

Right now we are supporting just one Freehold: “STX”, which is a protocol token connected to BTC that allows for apps and contracts to be built using BTC. Luckily STX has global exchange support and healthy liquidity. However when new Freeholds are created, represented by new ownership assets, they stand to benefit from being traded early with a healthy amount of liquidity, so Freeholders can enter and exit from their respective Freeholds seamlessly at any stage.

We plan to research this problem more deeply and arrive at a solution before new Freeholds are created.

Freeholder Feedback

We’ve taken feedback from dozens of Freeholders and are making corresponding changes to make the Freehold experience even better better.

Based on the above feedback we are building a community directory so folks can get to know each other, as well as a challenge board where work can be identified and completed done in a less time-bound manner.

Roadmap:

Lastly, we went over a high level, near term roadmap ahead for Freehold. I’m doing this to create a shared vision and to get feedback from the broader Freehold community. We have established several areas we want to focus on for the next 6 months to validate the Freehold Model and begin growing it.

With that, we hope you've been brought up to speed on Freehold and where we are going as a community. If you are interested in joining, you can apply to enter at joinfreehold.com.