https://beta.cent.co/+nb1vrq

All-New Everything
After nearly a year of conceptualization and development, I am proud to announce that today we are releasing the next era of Cent. We started teasing this version late last year, and it's been quite the journey getting it over the finish line. We've gone through many iterations on the updates presented here, and we think this release represents the distilled essence of our best breakthroughs of the last 10 months.

This is the largest update in our history, and the changes are vast and deep. We are upgrading every major capability of the network, revealing several brand new features, shutting down some old ones that weren't working, launching our new backend wallet structure, and introducing an entirely new interface and brand.

Seeding 2.0
First let's start with what we're getting rid of -as of today, we are shutting down Seeding as you know it. For those who don't know it, Seeding 1.0 was the little leaf button on every post where you could give money to the post and then receive a cut of all future seeds that post receives. It was a monetization experiment we launched in 2018 and while it showed some early promise, over time it revealed itself to have limitations that inhibited it from working at the scale and consistency we originally intended.

What the game theory behind Seeding created was a situation where every post was incentivized to be seeded immediately (as we intended) but only with a very small amount of money (which we didn't intend). So nearly every post got a ~15¢ seed immediately, but the total seeded amount on each post rarely went past ~$10. The likelihood of profiting as the $10 seeder was far less than the likelihood of profiting as the first 15¢ seeder - and the $10 seeder risked (and often lost) a lot more.

Simply put, Seeding 1.0 didn't make enough people enough money enough of the time. Gradually, it began to be used by many as simply a stand-in for tipping a post's creator on the post itself.

Seed Creators, Not Posts
While Seeding 1.0 didn't ultimately work, it's recursive incentive design encouraged people to discover "undervalued" work and financially back it, thereby giving them the incentive to spread the word about that work. This core incentive insight is still solid, and has been re-engineered into our new mechanism- Seeding 2.0.

Here's how it works: you browse Cent, experience creative work, and have dialogues as you normally would. When you come across a particular creator that you think is going to create more value in the future, you seed them however much you want each month (at minimum, $1/month). As a seeder, you receive a cut of all the money seeded monthly in that creator after you. This acts as a similar incentive to Seeding 1.0, but this time places it on a more stable course of future value. In a release in the near future, as a seeder you will also receive a cut of all the money that creator's posts generate, and have enhanced access to the creator themselves.

So, in effect, Seeding has evolved to become an incentivized subscription in a particular creator. What this enables, crucially, is a consistent, simultaneous monthly income source for both creators and fans. Since money is earned monthly and consistently, this begins to truly position Cent in someone's life as an alternative to traditional employment, which has been our mission from the beginning.

Seeding 2.0 also offers an alternative path to monetization to all the creators on platforms like Patreon who are used to earning monthly from their fans, but are stifled by Patreon's reliance on altruistic giving, rather than the more durable incentives of self-interest.

This is an important point. If you look at areas of society where large amounts of money conglomerates, you rarely see it forming around structures of selfless giving. We can bemoan that fact, or we can accept reality as it is and work with it. What you almost universally see is that money pools at the largest quantities around things that potentially make people more money - hedge funds, lotteries, the stock market, etc.

For a long time I thought it was odd that there wasn't some sort of "stock market" for creators. That there should be some way to choose the next up and coming creators, and somehow fund their life in the process. After all, that's precisely how the standard stock market works. You bet on the companies you think will do well, and in the process you fund those companies.

If you strip it all down, there are two main components in a traditional stock market system: companies and investors. Investors are people with money, and companies are, at their core, value-generating entities. They are organizations that have generated value before, and that people believe will generate value in the future.

And is your favorite musician not also a value-generating entity? Have they not also generated value in the past (that dope song) and will they not also likely generate value in the future (their new release dropping next month)? On a value level, artists are essentially mini-corporations that create products, have a market, have a brand, and most importantly - have resonant belief around their productive capacity.

The key reason that so much more money enters the stock market and the early-stage funding worlds than enters the charity or nonprofit worlds is that investors are not patrons. They are not simply supporting things out of the kindness of their hearts. Rather than relying on selfless giving, these sectors of society rely on selfish giving - and consequently always are well-funded.

So, why can't there be a very similar structure on creators and their fans? Why can't fans be the financial backers of the early-stage creators they believe in? After all, there are millions of people who don't know much about startup investing or the stock market, but who do have an incredibly nuanced grasp of emerging culture. Why not let those people monetize their cultural intuitions and fund the creation of new culture at the same time? We think Seeding 2.0 does just that.

Don't Tip Me - Spot Me
As mentioned earlier, one of the most consistent user behaviors we saw was the use of the Seeding 1.0 mechanism as a way to simply tip the creator of a post. The problem with this was that Seeding 1.0 was not designed as a tipping mechanism, and didn't function well as one (a good portion of the tip did not go to the creator of the post).

Since all major networks have some form of "click to appreciate" on each post (Instagram likes, Twitter hearts, etc.) we felt that this was an emergent and natural internet behavior, and that we needed our own version of it that spoke to the soul of what we are. We call it a Spot.

Very simply, now under each post there is a button to Spot the post, which means to give the post the ETH equivalent of one cent ($0.01). So…click click click…and you've Spotted the post's creator three cents. It's simple, it's intuitive, and it's actually the idea that put me on this path towards creating Cent nearly a decade ago.

1,000 Likes is 1,000 Likes. 1,000 Spots is $10.

Bountying Simplified
Last but not least, the feature we launched Cent's beta with back in 2017- Bountying. As a feature, Bountying continues to be used at ever-increasing rates (in the last year alone usage has increased +526%), but there are still some aspects of the experience that have grown cumbersome.

First, the word itself. Within the technology world, the idea of "a bounty" is not a foreign idea. But to people outside the tech world, it's an odd term, with the only other connotation being the Wild West. When explaining Bountying to people over the years, we nearly always explain it as "a financial reward on a post to the best responses" and people seem to get it. So in an effort to make Cent simpler and more immediately understandable to a wider audience, a Bounty will become a pre-determined Spot attached to a post. That Spot is then rewarded to the best response as chosen by the post's creator.

You read that right. We have changed the system from rewarding the money to multiple responses, to always being offered to one response, and that response being chosen by the post's creator - making the old "sorting" process obsolete. This change was precipitated for two reasons. The first is that the reward amount would often get split into such tiny slices that the amount earned by each response would be negligible. The second is that it created an incentive for low-quality responses because opportunists (often bots) were simply putting their hat in the ring to potentially get a small slice of the reward money for no effort.

Now only the best response wins, and it wins big. It reintroduces a true competition to each post that has a Reward, and we hope it will create a nice competitive incentive for the best comments to appear.

A New Look
And of course, we now have a whole new look and feel. All colors, fonts, spacing, and layout have been reimagined to work better, be easier on the eyes, and above all, let the content you create take center stage.

Our new logo represents a stylistic shift, and is inspired by the way old typewriters displayed the Cent symbol on keyboards for many generations. In the same way you can look at the Apple logo and instantly see it as "an apple" without knowing the brand name Apple, we wanted our new logo to be more easily understood as "the cent symbol" without having to already know the brand name Cent.

A key feature of the logo is the diagonal slash through the center of the "c". Most modern renditions of the cent symbol show the line in a straight up-and-down orientation, but we felt the diagonal slash was a nice allusion to the concept “up and to the right” — or the way graphs showing monetary amounts should ideally be. Given that Cent is a place to earn an income, we felt this was an apt metaphor.

Additionally, usernames on Cent have been changed from being traditional at-names (@names) to being what we call slash-names (/names). This change not only makes it obvious throughout the web that you are referring to a user’s Cent handle (rather than their Twitter or Instagram handle), but also more accurately matches our URL structure — beta.cent.co/username is how you link to a profile.

More Secure Login & Auto-Wallet
You may also notice that the way you log in to Cent has changed. After partnering with the team at Fortmatic, we now offer what is commonly called a “magic link”, which just means an email sent to you with a link to login after you put in your credentials. This increases our security, and makes it so you can feel more comfortable moving money around on Cent.

Additionally, much of our backend wallet infrastructure has been updated. Rather than having to manually create or connect your Ethereum wallet like in the past, a wallet is now automatically generated upon signup. This makes it so that every user that joins Cent is financially engaged from the start and pushes us ever closer to mainstream viability.

The Road Ahead
As I said, this is a massive update. Literally everything is new, and with that there will surely be kinks to work out. In the first few weeks of this new era, be sure to reach out as you use the network and tell us if something isn’t working, if something is confusing, or if you just have a cool idea of how it could work better.
From this point forward, we are going to return to more regular updates. We appreciate all your patience while we got this out the door, and I want to thank the entire Cent team for pushing through all sorts of obstacles to make this happen. We’re so excited this is now live, and we sincerely hope it becomes an enjoyable and profitable part of your daily life.

-Max