Modern currency is designed to measure an individual’s value based primarily on what they own and what an employer is willing to pay them. These are valid measures, but they fail to reflect all the other valuable contributions individuals make to society through their engagement in community, civic, and social spaces.  This shortcoming skews incentives and is a major economic inefficiency.

Umatr will change that by tokenizing human engagement through the blockchain, securing those tokens with our massive data assets, and sharing that newly-realized value back with those who created it.   

This will allow us to both harness the unrealized value of positive human engagement and increase that value by creating a liquid means of exchange for it.  And we will do all of this within a crypto-economic system that is designed to reward empathy and collaboration over vanity and hoarding, to establish selfish reasons for individuals to seek the common good.

Empathy and Connection Through Data

Scarcity vs. Usefulness as a Determinant of Value

Much of our economy is based on the value of scarcity, i.e., something has value because there isn’t enough of it to meet demand. Scarcity as a measure of value reflects the primary goals of those who first established the rules of our economic system. It has proven to be an effective means to preserve and store preexisting value. But it is an inefficient way to grow, share, or build value.

When value is measured by scarcity, we create economically-inefficient incentives for individual actors to hoard and concentrate resources based on an underlying assumption that value is determined by a zero-sum approach. It is in the self-interest of all those who hold a scarce resource to reduce the use (circulation) and availability of a scarce resource to ensure demand exceeds supply. Furthermore, if a resource is valuable because it is scarce, actors are incentivized to extract all the value they can out of it, rather than seek to grow more of it.

There is a better, if more challenging, way to collectively measure value: assigning value based on how useful something is.

We believe that scarcity is the wrong measure of true value. Instead, the best measure of value is whether it makes a difference and is useful, individually and communally.

This usefulness measurement is how most of us assess the value of the things (and people) in our lives when we are not thinking in terms of fiat currency. When we talk about the “value” of something in our life, it is not because the thing is scarce or because the person is available only to us. When we are not thinking in terms of money, most of us recognize that value is based on how useful, comforting, or beneficial a thing or relationship is.

By building an economic system based on a value-measure of usefulness, rather than scarcity, we will both utilize a more valid measure of value and one that better aligns the interests of individuals actors with those of the broader economic system.