Station: Web3 Breakdowns Research

Author: Colin Dismuke⁠

Editor: Shiv Socrates⁠

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Primary Research Sources
 • Station Website, Twitter⁠

 • Station Blog:
 ○ Building Rails into Web3⁠

 ○ Rails, Terminals, Bazaars⁠

 ○ A New Genre of Work⁠

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 ○ We are all social oracles: An era of decentralized hiring⁠
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Summary
Station is building the infrastructure to connect talent to the right projects in web3. As contributors develop and
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participate, their work will be recorded on the blockchain, creating a log of their skills and abilities. Station is
analogous to a marketplace for web3 contract work similar to Fiverr or Upwork, however, layered on top of the
marketplace there is a system of governance, coordination, reputation, and identity. Station’s overarching, 10-year
goal is to redesign the corporation from the ground-up, examining each function of the organization and rebuilding
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it in a way that is scalable, secure, and user-centric.

The main benefit to Station’s model over a business like Fiverr is that contributors accrue value as they grow and
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curate the network and get rewarded by the native token $RAIL, as well as earning the tokens of the various
organizations they’re contributing to $FWB, $CLUB, $UNI, etc.). Since Station lives on-chain, contributions and
work will be portable to any other service a contributor might want to use or try out.

The two key components of Station are Contributors, who have profiles that enable them to showcase their work
and discover others, and Terminals, which are organizations (DAOs and protocols) that attract and engage
contributors. Station works through a system of reputation, endorsements, and rewards, and generates on-chain
revenue by charging “protocol fees” on value streamed through the infrastructure, which will flow back to the
community treasury.

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Source: Rails, Terminals, and Bazaars⁠

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The key risk for Station is that they don’t attract enough Contributors to meet the needs of the Terminals, and
more plausibly, don’t attract enough communities to form a meaningful number of Terminals in which Contributors
can participate. The supply and demand problem can be managed through thoughtful onboarding, however, at
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some point the ecosystem must be self-sustaining.

Company Roadmap
 • Phase 1.0: Decentralizing People Operations
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 ○ Enable communities to operate more effectively and reward talent more fairly to attract, onboard, and retain
the best contributors.
 ○ Phase 1.1: Hiring & Promotion
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   □ v1 Decentralized ‘hiring’ and onboarding (Waiting Room)

   • Filter potential contributors based on the opinions of relevant decision-makers and ‘hire’ in a more
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decentralized way.
   □ Endorsement-based roles and promotion (Contributor Review)

   • Promote/demote contributors based on the endorsements they receive.

   □ Initiatives prioritization

   • Manage and prioritize initiatives to meet their goal.

   □ Network-wide Initiative Board and Contributor Directory

   • Lightweight network-wide contributor and initiative discovery.

 ○ Phase 1.2: Compensation & Benefits

   □ Rewards/Payroll

   • Streamline salary and bonus payments based on contributors’ roles, initiative completion, and
endorsements.
   □ Benefits

   • Reputation/role-based premium access to Web3 services e.g. discounts for Clarity.

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

 • Phase 2.0: Scaling Talent Network and Services
 ○ Increase transaction volume and quality across the network by creating a personalized experience for
contributors and supercharging project supply by scaling and incubating new communities.
 ○ Network-wide marketplace optimization

   □ Make network-wide contributor and initiative discovery and matching more robust.

 ○ Terminal incubation

   □ Spin up an organization with Station’s talent network, infrastructure, and funding.

 ○ Multi-DAO wallet

   □ DAOs co-funding with a shared wallet that represents the joint venture.

 ○ Taxes, KYC & compliance services

   □ Automated taxes, KYC, and compliance for contributors to optimize for financial and personal security
through integrations with 3rd party services to ensure security before the network scales.

 ○ 3rd party developers experience

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   □ Empower developers to build standalone applications and services leveraging the Station Protocols.

 • Phase 3.0: Growing an Inter-Organizational Ecosystem

 ○ Empower participants of the Station ecosystem to expand their reach and impact by enabling cross-
organizational partnerships, transactions, and IRL interoperability.

 
 ○ Token swap
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 □ Help DAOs align incentives with complementary projects, diversify treasury, and solidify contributor
demand-side synergy.
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 ○ Decentralized Merger/M&A

   □ Execute fair and transparent transactions by aligning interests across shareholders and implement
balanced TWAP strategies for the assets involved.
 ○ dApps marketplace
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   □ Support an ecosystem of applications to serve organizations on the Station network.

 ○ Streamlined KYC/AML
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   □ Enable smoother partnerships with IRL organizations through KYC/AML certification.

Key People
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 • Tina, Conductor

 ○ At Cornell, Tina was the president of the Medium Design Collective and co-founder of BKYD.

   □ The Medium Design Collective was the first design collective at Cornell and resulted in numerous
projects being launched, 30+ partnerships with other organizations, and events engaging 2,000+
students.
   □ BKYD was a community for launching side-projects on campus.

   □ Tina also did short stints as a product designer at both Grubhub and Facebook while she was there.

 ○ Joined NEA because she’s “always been interested in how the Internet enables the long tail of creators to
coordinate, organize, and create the cities and ecosystems we see on the Internet. And how those people
are never fairly compensated for the work that they do.”
   □ Focused on growth, creator driven software, and developer tools.

 ○ At Pace Capital, alongside Jordan Cooper and Chris Paik, Tina is focused on investing in web3 networks
and tokens.

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

    □ Blockchains as a technology have existed for a while now but it’s not until recently that the tools and
token economies have begun to mature and enable the coordination and compensation that Tina has
been focused on.
 ○ Building Station while still actively investing with Pace.

 ○ Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack⁠

 • Core Team:
 ○ Conner, Co-founder & Smart Contracts Architect

 ○ Mind, Co-founder & Product Architect

 ○ Kristen, Front-End Magician

 ○ Calvin, Token Economist

Business Model & Secret Sauce

 • Value Proposition

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 ○ From Station’s vision, (emphasis mine)

  “To create a network of fluid organizations, we can no longer rely on traditional enterprise software with
rigid permissions control and a centralized database. Jumping on a project on the decentralized web
shouldn't be gated by a "manager", but with rights to participate earned based on one's on-chain

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reputation and contribution history. For people to self-govern, we need to build the tools and
mechanics that make mutual collaboration and reward second nature. By critically re-examining the
atomic units of a corporation, we distill the most valuable features and turn them into scalable, secure,
and user-centric products and services.”
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 ○ Station's goal is to redesign the corporation from the ground up - they're starting with the HR function of a
corporation first. Allowing decentralized teams (Terminals) to onboard, engage, coordinate, and reward
contributors.
   □ They eat their own cooking - Station is being built with Station.
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 ○ According to Station, they solve four problems:

   □ Fragmented reputation: As one moves from community to community, there’s no standard that allows a
contributor to prove their legitimacy.
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   □ Inefficient coordination

   • The web2 software stack is not built for contributors to move in and out of fluidly.
 
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® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

    • Station seems more centralized than some of its competitors, however, this does solve part of the
coordination problem if all interactions take place within Station.
   • There’s a fine line that Station, and web3 services like it, might need to walk between complete
decentralization, which is usually user-hostile, and centralization, which makes things easier but is
the status quo.
   □ Misaligned incentives: While highly beneficial to the recipient, LP rewards and retroactive airdrops can
incentivize short-term, opportunistic trading.
   □ Inability to retain and engage contributors: The unclear path towards participation, unintuitive or hostile
UX, and anon/pseudonymous culture in web3 make it difficult to retain high-quality contributors.

 • Core Units
The core units of Station are Profiles, Terminal, and Contributions.
 ○ Profiles

   □ Each person on Station will have a profile that aggregates their Contributions across the platform, their
on-chain activity and interactions, the different groups they represent and contribute to, and their

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collaborators.
   □ For more details on User Journeys and Onboarding, see Station’s post on Building Rails into Web3⁠

 ○ Terminals

   □ Terminals can be projects, DAOs, companies, or protocols that are actively looking to attract and

 
onboard Contributors.

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 □ Terminals use grants, RFPs, and bounties to attract high-quality Contributors.

 ○ Contributions
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   □ Work done by individuals for Terminals that increase their reputation and enhance their Profile.

 • North Star Metrics

 ○ Increase the number of productive contributors in the network (”Demand”)
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   □ Number of contributors actively engaged in value accretive activities (e.g. working on a project,
participating in a p2p reward schedule)

   □ Number of new contributors onboarded

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   □ Amount of token rewards distributed

 ○ Increase the number of value-generative decentralized organizations (”Supply”)

   □ Number of new jobs created ("job" is defined here as an income-generating opportunity)

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   □ Total amount of treasury under management

   □ Number of revenue-generating projects created

   □ Total amount of fund raised for projects in the network

 • Economics

 ○ Revenue stream

   □ Station generates revenue by charging “protocol fees” on asset value streamed through the
infrastructure, which will flow back to the community treasury. Value streamed includes:
   • Token distribution for rewards and bounties (i.e. when a contribution to Friends with Benefits occurs,
the reward or bounty could be paid in $FWB).

   • Any Terminal treasury management that takes place (investments, partnerships, community financial
services).
   □ Station distributes Terminal Operating Licenses to communities who stake $RAIL. As the number of
members in a Terminal increases, a greater amount of $RAIL needs to be staked.
 ○ Cost structure

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

   □ There are currently 6 part-time contributors. It's not clear whether they’re being compensated in $RAIL,
$ETH, or otherwise.
   □ To date, Station has received $255,000 in grants from Uniswap, Compound, Algorand, and Aave.

   □ Standard development and team costs

 ○ Tokenomics

   □ Station has a native token, $RAIL, that serves several purposes:

   • Governance of the Station network

   • Incentive and reward for network participants, both individual contributors and Terminal partners.
   • Can be staked in a pool to refer new members to the network and influence the reputation of existing
contributors.

   □ $RAIL is distributed on a weekly basis to members of the contributor network from the Contributor
Network Treasury.
   • The amount of $RAIL token rewards sent to a contributor is a function of the relative reputation the

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contributor has accrued along with a qualifying threshold of interactions with the Network. Basically,
the more active you are within Station, the more you’ll be rewarded. Interactions include:

   ○ Endorsing existing contributors

   ○ Referring other contributors to the network

 
 

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 ○ Staking of $RAIL tokens on behalf of Terminals contributors wish to empower

 □ Terminals are created by communities staking $RAIL. As the size of the Terminal grows (by adding
contributors) more $RAIL is required to be staked.

 □ Contributors accrue $RAIL by building/contributing or by growing the Station Contributor Network.

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   • Contributors stake $RAIL to participate in the network. Staked $RAIL allows contributors to:

   ○ Gain network influence

   ○ Reward other contributors for their work

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   ○ Vote on new Terminals

   ○ Refer new contributors

 ○ Protocol Mechanics
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   □ Station operates separate protocols that govern how influence and value get distributed across the
network.
   • Decentralized reputation protocol: how influence gets distributed across the network
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   ○ Contributors are continuously issued Endorsements which can then be used to increase another
contributors reputation and/or eligibility in the network.
   ○ The greater the Reputation, the more power the contributor has to:

   □ Refer and “hire” contributors

   □ Reward and promote contributors

   □ Create or participate in projects

   □ Influence governance proposals

   • Contributor rewards protocol: how value gets distributed across the network
   ○ The protocol incentivizes contributors to act productively and allocate more ownership towards
contributors who bring the most value to the network.
   ○ Contributor rewards incentive contributors to:

   □ Participate in productive work

   □ Grow and improve the network

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

    □ Give and show appreciation to other members

   □ Define how power is distributed across the network

 • Distribution

 ○ Onboarding existing self-governing communities onto Station in a three-step plan:

   □ Start with smaller communities with highly engaged participants (Friends with Benefits, DeveloperDAO,
Nouns DAO, Poolsuite, Seed Club).
   □ Expand into larger web3 communities and protocols (Sushiswap, Uniswap, Compound, Aave, Algorand,
and more).
   □ Finally, move into existing developer or open source communities, consulting agencies, activist groups,
etc.
 ○ Web3 Marketing

   □ Each contributor who joins Station, receives a NFT that can be viewed by anyone looking at a
contributors wallet.

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   □ Newstand

   • Newstand is Station’s publication that focuses on “the possibility of work in an era of hyper
connectivity and fluidity.”
   • Currently resides on Mirror, but could be standalone or built into Station in the future.

Competitive Position
 • Industry
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 ○ The DAO tooling landscape is still nascent but growing quickly.
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  Source: Nichanan Kesonpat⁠

 ○ In the Contribution & Reputation area above, Station has several main competitors: Rabbithole, Layer3, and
SourceCred. Not shown, Talent Protocol is working to build something similar.
   □ Rabbithole

   • Rabbithole’s mission is to onboard the next wave of Ethereum/DeFi users by, essentially, gamifying
interacting with various protocols, dApps, and DAOs.

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

    • Like Station, there are several components: Projects, Quests, and Skills that users complete to earn
XP (native to Rabbithole, tokens, and NFTs).
   ○ Projects include interacting and learning about Uniswap, Compound, ENS, etc.

   ○ Quests include using and interacting with PoolTogether, ENS, and Uniswap DAOs.

   ○ Skills include verifying identity using a variety of different methods.

   • In addition, and more directly competitive to Station, Rabbithole believes that Web3’s building blocks
can be organized in a way that fundamentally reshapes the future of work and talent organization.
   ○ Based on interacting with Rabbithole and completing Projects, Quests, etc., the user may be
classed as advanced or an expert in certain areas which projects, protocols, etc. can use to locate
the best participants and/or contributors.
   • In keeping with the web3 ethos, Rabbithole’s reputation system is interoperable with the rest of the
network.
   • Raised a $3.6M seed round in June led by Electric Capital.

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   □ Layer3

   • Layer3’s goal is to make it as easy as possible to “trade off-chain activity for ownership in the crypto
economy”. They're doing this in three stages:

   ○ Near-term

   □ Create a marketplace of micro-tasks that are primarily social to contribute to different web3

 
communities.
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 □ After successful completion of a task, the contributor is rewarded in the communities native
token ($OHM, $INDEX, etc.) and/or a NFT.
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   ○ Medium-term

   □ Additional tasks of varying complexity (blog posts, tutorials, videos) and technicality (bug
bounties, front-end work) will be added.
   □ More communities and protocols will be onboarded.
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   ○ Long-term

   □ “Once the marketplace is humming — across many communities and task types —the
community will take full control. Through a novel incentive mechanism, anyone can use the
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Layer3 platform to create a task and verify completion in a completely trustless, decentralized
manner.”
   ○ Raised $2.5M in October from ParaFi Capital among others.
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   □ SourceCred

   • From their documentation, “SourceCred is a technology that makes the labor of individuals more
visible and rewardable as they work together in a project or community.”
   • SourceCred uses an algorithm to determine how much value a contributor added to a project and
assigns an amount of “Cred” based on that.
   ○ You can not buy or sell Cred, it is only a representation of where value has been created in the
network.
   • “Grain” is a project-specific digital currency that is minted and distributed to contributors who have
Cred in that project. As you earn Cred, you also earn Grain. Unlike Cred, Grain is a form of currency
and is meant to be transferable both inside and outside of a project. A few examples of how a project
or individual might use Grain:
   ○ Paying contributors with grants or funds it already has based on Cred/Grain.

   ○ Creating an internal currency that could be used solely for governance or to show support for
features/idea.

® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

    ○ Selling Grain back to the project in exchange for money from the project’s budget (essentially
wages you can claim by selling your Grain).
   • SourceCred has more OSS ethos and is not a centralized platform. Any community who uses it runs
their own instance of SourceCred and chooses where to store the data.
   • SourceCred is being built with SourceCred and they currently have 1,940 contributors, all-time.
   □ Talent Protocol

   • Talent Protocol enables users to launch a token and have supporters invest directly in their career.
“Talent Tokens are like shares in someone's career, where talent and their supporters get paid
dividends over time. The exact amount depends on how many supporters a talent can attract and
how much they stake. Each talent has their own customized Talent Token, with their branded ticker
(example: $JOHN).”

   • For Talent users, it allows them to transform their network into stakeholders, access a global
community of supporters, and receive rewards if they’re active within the network.
   • For Talent supporters, they can use Talent Tokens to access exclusive perks, redeem them for

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services, or sell them back to the market.
   • Similar to Station, after a new Talent user is onboarded, active users of the Talent Protocol stake
cUSD (USD on Celo) to vouch for new talent and receive newly minted Talent tokens.

   • In addition to personally branded Talent tokens, Talent Protocol will have a native token, $TAL, that
serves the same purposes as $RAIL (internal currency, proof of ownership, community governance).

 • Biggest risk(s) to competitive position

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 ○ Supply/demand imbalance: There’s a risk that Station fails to attract enough Contributors to meet the
needs of the Terminals, or more plausibly, doesn’t attract enough communities to form a meaningful number
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of Terminals in which Contributors can participate.
   □ The supply and demand problem can be managed through thoughtful onboarding, however, at some
point the ecosystem must be self-sustaining.
 ○ Status quo: It will require significant energy and persistence to change a system that’s been in place for
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decades. COVID accelerated many aspects of the future of work, however, fluidly moving between
Terminals (communities), making capital allocation decisions for participants and contributors, and fostering
decentralized, virtual communities is a big leap.
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® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.

Useful Resources
Title
Tina He: The transience of
identity + finding belonging in
web3
Tina He on abundance and
scarcity in the metaverse +
onboarding in web3
Composable Membership and
its Role in Generating Social
Capital
Rails, Terminals, and Bazaars
A Novel Framework for
Reputation-Based Systems
A New Genre of Work
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We are all social oracles: An era Article
of decentralized hiring
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Type What You Will Learn (140 Characters) URL (Must be https://)
Podcast Learn about porting web2 skills to web3, the https://podcasts.apple.com
transience of identity, anonymity, and how /us/podcast/11-tina-he-the-
humans will find belonging in a digital world. transience-of-identity-
finding/id1570685120?
i=1000533927921 ⁠
Video Tina and Alisha talk narratives, technology, and https://youtu.be/Z1HBfJQn4
incentives in web3. UY ⁠
Article Essay on access, permissions, and status in https://ath.mirror.xyz/Olq6V
communities and designing a membership S57xDFWDlxRdQwBKy05xd
system in web3 that’s built on social capital. U2TJHXyk75y-ZxGNg ⁠
Article A high level overview of how Station intends to https://station.mirror.xyz/D
build the infrastructure for the future of work 0r869DJuky7fydeX6e6dR1
and collaboration. Th5ukwRa6tNw1g2fuJv0
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Article A new reputation system design based on a https://future.a16z.com/rep
pair of tokens—one for signaling reputation and utation-based-systems/
the other for offering liquidity—is explained.
Article Web3 has enabled us to reexamine the building https://station.mirror.xyz/N
blocks of an organization from the bottom-up, DGEJB_SUCUVr9ixDwby4D
and to question the relationships between
capital, contribution, and power.
Understanding these relationships will pave the
path for a fundamental redesign of value
distribution.
0p_hhwVK3IF0jlixI9B1w
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Exploration of web3 hiring and Waiting Room, https://station.mirror.xyz/8z
the first feature in the Station ecosystem that zxwnOx5XVPNxcMYFi9LWs
allows Station community members to voice VRz3lTJ9cfwaM9m9oy3w
who they would like to onboard to the
community.
® 2022 Colossus, LLC. All rights reserved.