Market based pricing & credits liquidity

How credits are attained is a design choice. The prepayment in Nevermined process effectively credits the user and thus allows the protocol to govern access & permissioning. This purchase of credits can technically be facilitated in any currency. This permits maximum flexibility with respect to on-ramping.

We emphasize that the credits architecture provides a degree of separation between the ecosystem itself and the prepayment currencies, whether fiat, stablecoin, or other cryptocurrency. This presents the potential for the ecosystem, in time, to untether itself completely from these markets.

In order to foster ecosystem development today, the initial approach sees Nevermined provide a faucet and builders fix an exchange rate between credits and stablecoin or fiat. This price setting requirement is for ease of onboarding, bootstrapping and creating system liquidity. The fixed nature of the rate acts as a catalyst for early agent interactions. From inception, credits represent direct claims on agent services, and market forces thus have an instrument to which they can assign value. Over time, this allows a market of credits to evolve, resulting in a more efficient model of price discovery. Builders no longer need to fix pricing and transition from price makers to price takers.

Nevermined anticipates the emergence of liquidity pools for credits, and these secondary markets would become users’ predominant means of acquiring credits. At this point the protocol would automatically monetize builders’ agents by issuing and selling credits into pools, and thereby managing price and generating revenue.