Building the First Transparent Pyramidal NFT

I've been so into blockchain development lately. It's the kind of technology that suddenly emerges and allows us to create things that weren't possible before. In such an initial stage, any developer can start playing with it and create useful libraries or very disruptive projects that have a big impact in the development of others.

One of the most interesting feature of blockchain projects is that we don't need to trust anyone anymore. There are no intermediaries between us and the blockchain. When we need to transfer blockchain money or use any DeFi service, it's us interacting directly with the blockchain, and no other human or authority have a say in that interaction. That's the idea that empowers Web3.

In applications based on blockchain we shouldn't trust, we should verify.

Transactions are public, so we can check the history of any address in the blockchain and review if movements seem legit. And applications are ruled by what are called smart contracts: small pieces of code that run on the blockchain and create transactions in a deterministic way.

Smart contracts are verifiable as their code is in the blockchain. When deploying a smart contract we can also upload the source code, so anyone can review it and check that it does what it says it does. For example, here's the verified code of the smart contract that rules the Theter token, a very popular stablecoin that moves value equivalent to billions of dollars every day.

The traditional pyramid scheme

So in the context of a trustless economy, we can create applications that can distribute money in a transparent way. The Tree of Wealth is an experiment to highlight what trustless means, by taking the concept of pyramid schemes to the blockchain and making it transparent.

In case you are not familiar with how the infamous pyramid scheme works (lucky you!), here’s a quick explanation:

Somebody convince us to give them money as an investment for some business, and they promise that we'll get a lot more money back. We trust them, the only thing we need to do to get rich is convincing other people to invest. In reality, there is not a real business behind, what happens is that they use the money of the new investors to pay the old ones. The promise of easy money brings a lot of initial investors and they actually get paid and share with others the great investment they have done.

But this scheme is completely unsustainable. It works as long as there are new investors, but when the investing pressure start to decrease the scheme collapses, the promises get broken and the last investors lose their money. It's called pyramidal scheme because some people get a lot of money at the top, and at the bottom there are a lot of people that lose everything.

Obviously, if this scheme was completely transparent and people were aware of what was happening, nobody would invest. So making the same system, but running on blockchain is completely off the table.

On the other hand, the scheme contains powerful ideas like the distribution of money, the need of buying as soon as possible or the engagement of the investors on bringing more investors. If we could create a transparent system inspired by those ideas, where money from new investors is distributed evenly among all the previous investors, we might get a similar engagement.

The Tree of Wealth: A transparent pyramidal NFT

NFTs are a really nice candidate to create a system that distributes money. The economy of an NFT is completely controlled by a smart contract, so we can program the contract in a way that can distribute the money of every sell among all the previous buyers.

Here we go, introducing The Tree of Wealth, the first NFT that distributes the coins of every sell among all the previous buyers.

For the sake of transparency, The smart contract is open source and it can be verified in Etherscan. The rules in the contract try to replicate a system that make the users rush to buy, and then engage them on sharing the project to get their money back. The rules are:

• The price and transactions of the NFT are controlled, owners can't sell it or transfer it freely.
• It starts very cheap (0.0001 ETH), so initial buyers can get it without risking much.
• Every time the NFT is sold, the price increases by 0.001 ETH, so it gets more and more expensive at every sell.
• The coins of every sell are always distributed among all the previous buyers. So every time The Tree gets a new owner, all the previous ones get 0.001 ETH.

The wallets owning the The Tree NFT can't decide when the token is transferred, that's why they are not really owners of it, they are called hosts. When we say that somebody buys the NFT, it's because is simpler to understand, but they are not buying anything. They are paying for becoming temporary hosts of the NFT and start participating in the distribution of the coins.

As we can see from the rules, it's not exactly a pyramidal scheme. The price of the token increases in a linear way, and there is no promise of getting rich, or even getting the money back.

But the rules and the characteristics of the NFT are designed to create a similar buying pressure and engagement:

• The price increases at every sell, so the sooner you buy it, the cheaper it will be. That generates the urge to buy it ASAP.
• The money gets distributed at every sell, so hosts start getting the money back as soon as the next sell happens.
• It’s not mandatory to bring more people to participate. Hosts will benefit from the distribution of the coins evenly at every sell, no matter if they are the ones bringing more people to buy.
• But for sure, when somebody becomes host of the Tree of Wealth, they will want to share it with others and get them into the loop.
• This system never collapses. The smart contract is immutable and will run as long as the Ethereum blockchain exists. So getting the money back should be just a matter of time.
• As the price gets higher and higher, the NFT becomes more and more exclusive and it would turn The Tree's NFT into a luxury item. Being host of The Tree NFT would be like being a member of a very exclusive club.

The potential of becoming a luxury NFT is what should bring new hosts when the prices gets not affordable for most of the people. So the NFT smart contract has been developed also around that idea:

• When buying The Tree, the host receives a second NFT. That token is owned by the host, and can be transferred or sold as they please. You can check them out in Opensea.
• That token is kind of a proof of have been a host of The Tree. It's not related to the distribution of the coins, but people can find value in them just for show.

The goal is to make the buyers be proud of being hosts of The Tree. Early hosts will be considered really good investors because they saw the potential of the project, and late hosts will just be considered rich people and institutions who buy it just because they can. In any case, they should want to share The Tree of Wealth story.

Learn more

This experiment is just a side project to explore the potential of smart contracts, so do not consider it financial advice or an investment opportunity. It's just an experiment.

But if you want to participate on it, you can visit The Tree of Wealth dapp, connect your wallet and become host.

The contract is deployed in the Ethereum mainnet at the address 0x27E1F5CcC4F184A2Ca55B12353c06dA9e1803621 and can be verified at Etherscan.

If you want a version of the contract easier to read, here's the contract repository in github. The code has interesting parts, like the way the NFT images are generated on-chain.

The decentralized application is made with React and it’s also open source, you can find the dapp code in this github repo. The dapp is the gate to use the smart contract, so we need it to be always accessible and keep the protocol available. To ensure it, it has been deployed to many mirrors including to the decentralized Arwave’s permaweb. A list of the mirrors is available at the contract repo.