What is Member Guarantee?
Our Member Guarantee is a concrete representation of ownership intended for readers and holders to participate and benefit from our ecosystem. It is to be considered the absolute, irreplaceable and undisputed right to participate in our subscription, publishing and investment ecosystem. We expect this right to be widely held and executed as we progress into higher stages of our roadmap.
Who is Commonwealth Foundation?
We are a peer-reviewed, non-profit scientific publisher that aims for the welfare of the most. The company is registered and regulated in Singapore as a Public Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG). Meanwhile, we distribute the Member Guarantee to authors, editors and reviewers by the quality and difficulty of their work. Our ultimate goal is to make the journal (The Commonwealth) as profitable as Nature and Science, but distribute 100% net profit back to the contributors instead.
How is a scientific publisher 'of the people, for the people'? It's been a highly profitable business.
We are a humble team in the scientific publishing world. Out of 1 billion total supply, the team reserve 20% and foundation owns 30% Member Guarantee, most of which will not circulate in the near future. The rest are reserved for our investors. The team's Member Guarantee is locked for 5 years upon inception, and will release 20% per year. This ownership value will be a representation of publication / e-print quality, website traffic and foundation growth, from which all owners benefit. Every Member Guarantee holder is the owner of the full ecosystem.
As the ecosystem grows and becomes self-sustainable, we will slow down the distribution of the foundation pool gradually, and donate the majority of profits after fees and operational costs to advance researches in multiple frontiers, including but not limited to fundamental and social sciences, and dedicate to building a safe, just and open-source digital world with the blockchain. We partner with professional hedge funds to grow our assets.
The terms and conditions currently on our website are NOT final and subject to minor changes until we release an official whitepaper. We welcome feedback from the community and will gladly improve our ways to operate upon valuable suggestions toward our community's favor.
What's your roadmap?
We are planning on five stages. 1. Private sales. 2. We develop and host a website like ArXiv.org, advertise and solicit e-prints for some years to give the peer-reviewed journal a head-start. This will commence after the private sale. Compensation in Member Guarantee will start when the website is ready and has some active users. 3. We invite active scholars on the website for assistance in journal operation, and polish the economics, in particular the ownership distribution rules until it's ready. 4. Journal inception. We publish high quality articles like a for-profit, and design rich use cases for our Member Guarantee.
Please see our roadmap for details.
Why does Member Guarantee have value?
Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2). The circulation of our Member Guarantee will keep climbing as there are solid use cases and genuine needs to acquire it.
Is your Member Guarantee safe to store and transfer value?
Yes. Mainstream digital wallets including MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, imToken, TREZOR, Ledger, Mist support it.
Why would I need this Member Guarantee?
Our Member Guarantee will be highly sought in our subscription ecosystem and expected to become scarce. Our goal is NOT to grow the capital we hold, but rather to distribute it in a good way to encourage more smart people to stay in academia. Meanwhile, as we establish more consensus in academia, more scholars will join and our capitalization will keep growing.
How much is your Member Guarantee then?
Why would I submit articles to you?
One could edit the article, generate the PDF online and submit the work at ease. Your submission would be committed to a traceable, immutable, transparent blockchain, which effectively and indisputably announces the originality of your work to the world with the latest digital technology.
Furthermore, you would get a compensation in Member Guarantee for high-quality e-prints or publications, which is formulaic and contingent on your impact factor, the article's citation, reviewer's opinions and many other factors.
We encourage you to publish with us early, as a large part of the compensation is lagged - the citation and the importance of your work may take some time to manifest.
What's your article adoption standard? Do you review them before publication? How do you assure publication quality?
Yes. We will invite experts in multiple disciplines including finance, economics, math and statistics to serve in the editorial board, which is responsible for reviewer and article recommendations. No peer review is required for the e-print posting, though. The authors of e-prints would acquire compensations in Member Guarantee too, but significantly less than those of the journal publications.
Please refer to our long-term quest page for details.
Is it worth it? How much is your Member Guarantee? What's the total supply and release plan?
The total supply of the Member Guarantee is 1 billion. 20% is locked in the team's pool. 30% is the foundation pool, and 50% is the investor's pool, reserved for investors and active for sale in tiers. The team's Member Guarantee is locked for 5 years upon inception, and will unlock 20% per year afterwards. We welcome the community to monitor these addresses closely. We will announce any major transfers pro-actively.
The mining rate on the foundation pool decays exponentially every time 50% of foundation pool is mined. I.e. every time the reserves drops by 50%, all remunerations and quest rewards drop by 50% too. Early participants benefit more in any and all contributions.
We’d like to minimize the risks for all prospective early investors, and will minimize the Member Guarantee sale until we establish a functional ecosystem prototype.
How can I become a partner?
The partnership program is our peculiar way to look for partners. We can’t emphasize more the importance of publication along the course if you are interested. We want to hear your thoughts and are looking for scholars alike. The best way to communicate with the brightest minds in this world is to publish and let your voice be heard.
All our partners will receive an additional percentage of Member Guarantee from the foundation, to be decided on a discretionary basis depending on the nature of your contribution. The natures of partnership include but are not limited to: author, reviewer, editor, translator, administrator. Bonus rewards in each category only applies within that scope. However, one can obtain partnerships of multiple natures. Long-term, high-quality contributors will enjoy higher compensations.
To qualify and apply for the partnership program, please keep contributing to our project and document all accomplishments and timestamps. Your efforts will be recognized and compensated.
We cordially invite you to participate in quests actively and apply. We do review all applications, but the availability will be highly limited. Your existing contributions are retroactive and qualify for the partnership bonus too.
Loss of partner status: if a partner stops contributing to the project for over a year of certain nature, he/she will lose the partner status therein automatically. Any further contributions will not receive the partnership bonus, unless you reapply and are deemed qualified again. However, the locked Member Guarantee remains unaffected and will still release as planned.
The terms for loss of partnership is applicable to all contributors including the founder, who enjoys NO additional privileges and will be mining the foundation pool as everybody else.
The team keep a hefty 20% ownership to themselves? Looks a lot to me.
It is a lot of work to organize everything and make it functional. Our team take the Member Guarantee as the sole compensation in the initial stage of the publisher, which is a great sacrifice for their family and themselves. A reasonable holding structure encourages the team to work hard and maximize the community's interest continually.
The foundation and investor's pools will be allocated or sold at a discount to our community contributors. We would like to benefit our community as much as possible while growing the project. The team's Member guarantee will be locked for 5 years, to be released 20% a year upon project inception.
How do I know if you are not a Ponzi Scheme?
Follow our progress closely. Attend our presentations. Interact with us in emails and quests. Discuss with community members and learn more about who we are and what we do. Read our FAQ / whitepaper (to be finalized soon) and decide if it's unique and professional. Monitor our wallet addresses. More importantly, read our publications and decide if they seem interesting and worthy to learn from. You will see our determination and professionality to make all these happen.
Are you regulated?
We are fully compliant with SEC Regulations D and S in private sale solicitation. The US investors must follow the SAFT protocol to participate in the private sales. All our employees and core decision makers will be requested to disclose all their wallet addresses for close monitoring. Insider trading as is defined by SEC regulations is strictly prohibited, including but not limited to Securities Exchange Act of 1933 and 1934, Form 3-5, Rule 10b-5. Violation of the prohibition on insider trading can result in termination of employment, a prison sentence and civil and criminal fines for the individuals who commit the violation.
Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Foundation is fully regulated as a Public Company Limited Guranteed (CLG) , by legal definition a nonprofit registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Company (ACRA) and governed by the Singapore Companies Act. The Foundation carries out non-profit making activities that have basis of national or public interest.
What are the potential risks involved?
We are a partially centralized publisher as all other publishers. Our Member Guarantee serve as means to allocate ecosystem ownership, to store and transfer value, and to facilitate our daily operations especially in the early phase. However, it is critical for you to understand that our Member Guarantee is technically decentralized, but operationally centralized in mining mechanisms, distribution rules, asset management, etc. Certain risks are involved.
Why are you doing all these? What do you want and what’s the point?
Humanity is sometimes overly obsessed with power and lucrative businesses, at a cost of looking less upon the sky. Competition is deeply rooted in humanity and fine, this is how we evolved and became who we are, but more and more participants in the endless zero-sum games raise our concern.
On the other hand, our world is not without problems. Humanity was, is and will be facing threats from weather, food / water shortage, poverty, regional wars, weapons of massive destruction, disease, human right abuses, technology revolution, and arguably the worst of all, A.I. singularity. Every and all of them pose unprecedented challenges and escalate as civilization scales. If we don't unite and take measures wisely and proactively, another Malthusian catastrophe may be awaiting us in the near future. After all, the humanity has the one and only common enemy: the second law of thermodynamics.
The Simons foundation offers a paradigm consolidating resources from the hedge fund industry to academia. Unlike most other zero-sum participants, they trade and profit for a solid purpose. Most other hedge funds focus solely to amass wealth and gain relative advantages over peers, whereas they have been supporting academic projects in a wide range of fields, which amounts to a third of research grants in selected programs. Our ultimate goal is similar. We seek to advance researches in multiple frontiers, including but are not limited to mathematics, fundamental and social sciences, and dedicate to building a safe, open-source digital world. With the new technological revolution at dawn and forthcoming developments in multiple frontiers, we see great opportunities to strive for our dream and make it come true. Knowledge distribution in publication is the supreme form of negative entropy production. We shall start from there.
Make love, not war. Destroy power, not people. Decentralize in value and technology, but centralize further in collaboration as a united civilization. This is how we humans differ from other species on earth and stand out. As the undoubted leader of planet earth's biosphere for the time being, our civilization can, should and is obligated to achieve much more.
What do you think of crowd operations and consensusualism in consequence of the blockchain technology?
How would you decide if a startup project is legit and worthy?
Dig deeper until you find out exactly how the team profit. Sometimes they don't even disclose full details. Decide if it is acceptable, compliant to regulations and beneficial for the team, the ecosystem and the investors. More importantly, the more it benefits humanity the better. Ask good questions - is there anything they are trying to hide? In the circumstances when crowd operation is optional and serves as a way to raise fund and improve production relations, can they make it with good capital but without crowd's assistance anyway? Are they experts in that industry already?
And what of the forthcoming digital era?
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of Light, it is the season of Darkness, it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair, we have everything before us, we have nothing before us, we are all going direct to Heaven, we are all going direct the other way - in short, the period is so far like the past golden periods, that some of its noisiest authorities insist on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
OK, how do I get your Member Guarantee?
Follow our campaign page and forum posts closely. New quests will be announced there if any. Participate in our long-term quests, including publishing, reviewing and translating articles. They are important keys to our survival and success. Buy from existing holders. We will announce when every new tier of the investor's pool is available for sale. Currently, we are collecting investment commitments for the first of the series (5%) at 100,000 USD for 1%. Please contact us if you are interested.
