Contributing
Joining the Stellar Product Coop
How to earn a stake in Stellar's commercial successes
Joining as an Earning Contributor
Our commercial path is still building, but we are building for organizational health and finanicial sustainability.
We aim for all members of the Stellar Product Cooperative to have opportunities to earn a cooperative share.
How it Works
Every participating contributor will be expected to directly contribute some kind of value to our community and our cooperative venture. This is no place for you, if you expect to profit without contributing effort. Even investors should expect to be involved.
Normal cooperative mechanics apply; we will likely have at least two different classes of members, including those who are contributing:
- capital and capacity
- code, and other contributions of long-term value
- (future) short-term operations for serving short-term sources of revenue
Each of these classes of contributor will have its own pool of contribution-credits.
Profits ("surplus", in the parlance) will be allocated between these classes, and the allocated surplus will be divided within contributors of each class, pro-rated according to the amount of their contribution credit.
Contribution Credits are for Accounting
Contributors will receive native tokens minted by the Stellar Product Cooperative. They will not be transferrable and are not to be considered a store of value. They're just for coop accounting.
Profit-sharing will use the accounting records connected to these native tokens. Contributor-credit holders have the right to call for a profit-sharing event when there is a surplus.
Our allocation plan for surplus from recurring revenue for these classes will be subject to a governance process, but is currently slated to cap out at 30% for capital-and-capacity contributors and 50% for long-term-value contributors, with 10% allocated for distribution to short-term operations staff and 10% retained in the operations treasury.
Surplus allocation from short-term revenue activities such as consulting and training is slated for an inverted surplus allocation, with 75% to short-term operations contributors, 5% to capital contributors, 10% to long-term-value contributors, and 10% for retention in the operations treasury.
All short-term service-contributors participate in surplus allocation from short-term revenue, regardless of whether they contributed to a specific program that creates short-term revenue.
Services-for-pay (aka short-term revenue) always include direct compensation to contributors who are enabling those services. These are "cost-to-serve", paid at a fair market rate before "gross profits" are computed.
Prior to achieving financial equilibrium, gross profits will be used to support general contributors. Also, all contributors (even short-term operations staff) will receive "long-term contribution" credits.
The operations treasury will be subject to governance, with the intention that it will pay essential costs of operations, bounties for key one-off contributors, and, when it is of sufficient size, basic income for formal contributor roles.
Together we make, together we benefit.
Join in and become part of we.