Thread by @nateliason

Been thinking a bit about what kind of new "employment" arrangements might exist in Web3.

Here's one I've been thinking about: Attention Bonds.

There are DAOs, startups, new protocols, etc. that need help but might not have the funds to hire people.

And there are people who want to work at these early companies, but need some degree of financial assurance.

Full-time employment might not be desirable for either / both parties.

And renegotiating every project is kinda annoying and a waste of time.

So: attention bonds.

The individual sets a value on their attention. Call it $100,000 a year.

Then they can agree to allocate it to a given project in return for a stream of the platform's tokens roughly equalling the value of their attention share.

So you might say:

"I'll commit 50% of my attention to your project for the next 3 months in return for $12,500 in tokens at current value unlocked linearly over that period."

No job title, no specific responsibility, no employment contract, just an agreement to give half your energy to wherever you see opportunities to provide value, and the team committing to reward you for that work.

What I like about this is it incentivizes the individual to follow through on their commitment because they're increasing the value of the tokens they're earning over the period.

A salary actually disincentivizes working hard.

You're going to get the salary either way.

But if you're 100% compensated in "equity," you want to do everything you can to increase the value of that equity.

This is impossible to do in TradFi because company equity is very illiquid and it's legally messy.

But it's easy in crypto world. You can trade out the unlocked tokens to ETH instantly, or hold and bet on your work paying off more later.

Anyway, just an idea. Curious to hear other takes.

This is pretty much exclusively how I wanna be paid now though. Much more fun this way.