ResearchCoin’s tokenomics

The who, what, and how much of RSC

ResearchCoin (RSC) is a digital token you can earn by contributing content to ResearchHub. Within ResearchHub RSC is used to properly recognize and reward users who help create value within our community, and in doing so, bring the scientific community together.

Here’s a link to the living tokenomics page that will be updated as we continue to build out ResearchHub’s RSC economy.

What is RSC?

ResearchCoin is a reward token anyone can earn by sharing, curating, and discussing academic science within ResearchHub.The number of RSC earned for any given action is proportional to how valuable the community perceives that action to be.

How do I get RSC?

On ResearchHub, people earn RSC by:

Sharing research paper PDFs (as long as they do not violate any copyright)
Commenting on and discussing scientific research
Peer-reviewing scientific papers
Receiving RSC tips from other users
Developing open-source features

What are the benefits of holding RSC?

ResearchCoin helps recognize and reward those who contribute their time and effort to grow the ResearchHub community. People who earn RSC are granted the following privileges on ResearchHub — based on the number of tokens they individually hold:

Access to moderation tools
The ability to vote on key decisions for the community (for example, we may ask the community to help decide whether a hub should be added or removed)
The ability to vote on the economic structure of ResearchCoin

What can you spend RSC on?

As of Today, ResearchCoin can be spent in three ways. The first is “supporting” or tipping other scientific content creators. The second is adding digital object identifiers (DOIs) to posts from ResearchHub’s ELN. The third is creating bounties for specific types of content you would like to see on ResearchHub. In the future, we plan to make the ResearchCoin economy more robust by building additional ways for users to spend the RSC they earn on the site - such as:

The ability to financially support research projects
Social features, such as badges and user profile flair
Automatically unlocked paid features at https://www.researchhub.com/ (for free!)

These additional RSC-based utilities will help people who earn ResearchCoin enjoy a more robust experience on the platform, while also entitling them to added influence and reputation within the ResearchHub community.

Supply

As of April 2022, there were one billion ResearchCoin in existence, with the following allocations:

60% for distribution to the community and users of ResearchHub
20% retained by ResearchHub Technologies, Inc.
10% for ResearchHub’s founding team
10% reserved for future ResearchHub employees

In the future, the ResearchHub community may vote to inflate the RSC supply for any of these groups or adjust RSC allocations. For instance, the community could refill the user or employee pools if they are running low. Alternatively, ResearchHub could allocate tokens to a new pool, such as for a foundation or grant-making organization.

Therefore, the above allocations may experience dilution as the ResearchHub community decides to increase the supply of RSC or re-allocate RSC over time.

Preprint

Preprint

ResearchCoin’s tokenomics

ResearchCoin’s tokenomics