Community staking is the most interesting UBI experiment I've seen

by Ethan Brooks

I've backed 30+ startups as an angel. What grabbed me about MeWeBe is the inversion: instead of a few rich people backing founders, a whole community stakes together and shares the upside. If even a fraction of backed startups succeed, returns flow back to ordinary members — a UBI funded by collective ownership rather than taxation. It's early and unproven, but it's a genuinely novel funding model for the thing Tom keeps writing about. I'm in.

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Comments

Mateo Garcia 2 months ago

This is why I'm here. The upside being shared, not hoarded, is the whole point.

Tom Becker 2 months ago

It's the closest real-world test of the community-equity idea I've seen. Watching closely.

Aisha Khan 1 month ago

What sold me on the model here: the ledger is gamified today, but the muscle being built (identity, contribution history, payout logic) is exactly the plumbing a real distribution system needs. Practice like you play.

James Carter 1 month ago

Content angle: the most persuasive thing about this experiment isn't the mechanism, it's that every member becomes a stakeholder-storyteller. Nobody shares their bank's blog posts. People WILL share a league table they're climbing. Distribution is built into the incentive design.

Tom Becker 1 month ago

What I tell fellow economists about this model: it inverts the usual sequence. Instead of "tax, then distribute", it's "build shared assets, then distribute the yield". That's closer to a commons than a welfare program, and commons have a much longer track record than critics assume.

Hassan Grant 1 month ago

Game-economy designer here, so I read this whole platform like a build review. What MeWeBe gets right that most "tokenized community" projects botch: the coins are play-value, but the habits are real — showing up, backing, writing. In game econ that's the holy grail: a loop that trains behaviour you'd keep even if you nerfed the currency to zero. Tom's "build shared assets, then distribute the yield" is exactly how a healthy in-game economy sinks and faucets value without inflating it. The failure mode I'd watch: the day the number climbs faster than the contribution, you've built a casino, not a commons. Right now the staking cadence keeps the two coupled. Keep them coupled and the play-money quietly becomes a real muscle.

Hassan Grant 1 month ago

As someone who designs in-game economies, this thread is a build review I can't stop doing. What makes the staking loop work is that the coins are play-value but the habits are real - the streak, the read, the vote all happen whether or not the number means anything yet. The failure mode to watch is decoupling: the moment stake price stops tracking actual contribution, you've built a casino, not a commons. Faucets (streaks, quests) are generous, which is right for early growth; the sink that matters long-term is reputation, not spend. And from the game side: never all-in on one "boss" startup. A portfolio survives a bad launch; a single conviction doesn't.