Today on the stablecoin info channel on Discord, adamrncf#7964 asked, “Other than getting to vote and speculating on price action, is there an incentive to own FISH?” This prompted my lengthy reply because I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Here’s my response after reading some of the conversation there:
This is an extraordinary question though… for our DAO. It’s sort of a reflexive question. What is the incentive to hold FISH? Since we’re a DAO, the value of our governance token is largely correlated with sentiment, participation, and confidence in the underlying community.
Most of us have very big dreams for what this community can & should be. So dream big, suggest the most sustainable & practical way to reward FISH holders & we’ll put it to a vote ASAP when our governance UI goes live. So there will be immediate functionality with FISH token to direct the protocol’s decisions & express your preferences.
But I wouldn’t expect everyone to pay gas to vote & get nothing in return. Although IMO it would be unsustainable to reward FISH for governance participation. Eventually the protocol would have to start repurchasing FISH to issue to governance stakers, which is no bueno IMO. I prefer a model which rewards the BabelFish community and governance stakers through the BabelVerse & NFT economy we’re developing there.
BabelVerse is in rapid prototyping phase, but we’ve already got a winning recipe ( also IMO 
). So, consider yourself one of us. We’re the earliest to the party here. We’re the testers & innovators contributing to this shared vision. So what should we get for holding FISH? What should we get for voting with our FISH (& spending rBTC gas to do so) ? I think the answer is that we should get rare NFT avatar items for BabelVerse which give special access to parts of the world that are locked to others.
The solution for sustainable governance rewards model (again IMO) is to generate a parallel economy with “Non-Fungible Utility Tokens” (NFUTs). That’s what I’m working on at the moment with my friends, a combined team of 7 of us:
NOVAX - BabelVerse Project Manager
DAK - BabelVerse art director, game design, game mechanics, & UI
GalacticCyclist - BabelVerse Lead Dev, Blockchain Implementation
DefiDragonBro - BabelVerse Unity developer, mini game developer, pixel artist, & 3D designer (3D texture maps, 3D objects, 3D game mechanics implementation)
DeFiYogi - 3D design guru. High Poly Models and 3D animations
JettManas - Vector Graphics, level art, & parallax backgrounds.
D’Art Vader - Music production & audio engineering
So we’ve got a solid full-time indie video game design studio building out amazing stuff + we’re incorporating the art from the story school artists in our 3D gallery space (will be connected to an auction future). We’re reviving all of the old game mechanics from classic arcade style atari days & playing the old atari emulators a bunch for inspiration!
I suggested during the community call yesterday that the grant proposal to fund BabelVerse should be structured with 50% vested FISH & 50% liquid rBTC from the funds raised via the token sale. This gives us the ability to liquidate some of the compensation for expenses and onboarding but also incentivizes the team to build in a direction that grows the BabelFish community, increases DAO participation, & ultimately generates value in the FISH economy.
We’re exploring scope & discussing costs at the moment, so we expect to have a grant proposal ready shortly. Please share your thoughts and desires for the grant proposal here so we’re sure to consider all perspectives.