To understand the Decentralized Autonomous Dating Community being developed by Picky, you need to understand the new paradigm of decentralized crypto-economics.

You may be thinking, “Does an online dating app really need to be a tokenized economy?”

The answer is a fundamental yes. This is because the decentralized world order of the New Internet currently being constructed on the blockchain is a world where individual behavior is governed by economic incentive and community involvement. This is a New Internet where people (finally) take responsibility for their actions. If the system is cleverly designed, desirable behavior thrives, undesirable behavior is corrected out, and the community grows positively.

At first it may seem like more hassle than it’s worth. Why would I need a whole economic system for a dating app? But when you consider the problems with current dating apps (verification of information, lack of safety for participants, etc.) you see the potential results of a system that incentivizes good behavior.

The DAD

So here it is — Picky’s Decentralized Autonomous Dating community (DAD).

It starts, like all economies, with a currency — in this case the Picky token. This is used for basic interactions on the platform like sending messages and uploading photos. As you’ll see though, the Picky token, like money in the real world, forms the backbone of the society being developed. For example, in order to incentivize good behavior, Picky users will stake their tokens before going on dates.

To understand how it works, let’s take the example of two users: Alice and Bob.

Verification

The first step is to become verified. This is important because we are talking about an app that brings people together in the real world. Having your real identity tied to the app is essential to ensure the safety of both participants.

Alice and Bob therefore must first upload passport or ID photos. Crucially they also must upload other photos of their face. Picky has developed a clever face-scan that compares live photos with ID photos. If they match, voila, Alice and Bob are verified users.

Alice and Bob are now free to find and interact with other users on the platform. This is fine, but as we know, personal identity is more than just a name and a face. In the real world, people choose partners based on things like status, likes, interests, moral views and affiliations, hobbies, and so on. The next step, therefore, is to verify this kind of information.

Categories

If they so choose, Alice and Bob may wish to add to their profiles by getting more information verified, allowing them to enter a “category” that other users may then search for. Let’s say Bob is the type of person who wishes to attract more women by including his status as a “self-made millionaire” — one of the potential categories that may evolve on the platform. In order to be verified as such though, he’ll need to upload proof. This may include things like his Linkedin profile, screenshots of his investment portfolio or his crypto wallet address, photos of him on a yacht, and so on. It’s up to Bob how much evidence he wants to present, but the decision to verify his status will be made by a jury of his peers. This process will, of course, involve economic incentive: Bob stakes Picky tokens and a team of judges — let’s call them your “DAD” — are assembled to evaluate the evidence presented. They vote and collect their share of the Picky tokens staked by Bob as reward for their work. Assuming Bob’s application was approved, he is now officially a “self-made millionaire” on the Picky platform.

"Categories" by the way, as a user initiated feature, could easily evolve to include interesting and hard-to-define characteristics like the "Nice Guy" category. The challenge of proving and deciding admittance to such a category could emerge as a particularly interesting feature of the autonomous dating platform.

The Date

To continue the story, Alice and Bob have been messaging for awhile now and have decided to arrange a date. Before doing so, they must both stake tokens — let’s call it a “date deposit.” This deposit is locked up until a (randomly decided) time after the date has been completed. If all went well (ie. neither has a complaint), the tokens staked by Alice and Bob are returned to them.

Let’s say, however, that Alice was a no-show on the date. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she decided to spend time with her friends that night instead. If she had the decency to tell Bob beforehand, Bob could choose to forget about it and not dispute the date. But let’s imagine Alice didn’t bother to tell Bob she wasn’t coming, leaving Bob standing on the corner with flowers in his hand looking like an idiot.

Bob may now choose to report Alice as a no-show on the date and, assuming she doesn’t dispute this, Alice’s staked tokens are forfeited to Bob; a minor victory perhaps for Bob, but better than nothing. If Alice did decide to dispute it though, the case would go to a jury of their peers. This “Conflict Jury” would automatically be notified that Alice wasn’t in the vicinity of the decided date location at the arranged time. To support his case, Bob might choose to upload a time-stamped photo of himself looking sad, standing on the corner, waiting for Alice half an hour after they were supposed to meet. He could also upload a screenshot of their chat in which Alice didn’t reply to his messages: Where are you??? :(

The jury might decide this is sufficient evidence in support of Bob, confiscating Alice’s tokens as payment for their adjudication.

Community Building

This system not only incentivizes good behavior through economics, it also encourages the building of a community that has the potential to grow beyond its original intent as a dating platform.

In the real-world, people do not always make “perfect” economic or even game-theoretic decisions. This is because humans are not always perfectly logical. We are emotional creatures susceptible to factors as seemingly benign as blood sugar levels, and whether or not we had a bad day at work. That's why a system is needed that in addition to economic incentives, also allows proven social mechanisms that work in the real world to play out in the digital environment.

For example, let’s say Alice and Bob do meet up, but Bob shows up perhaps a little drunk. Maybe he displays flippant or arrogant behavior. He knows he’s risking his date deposit, but he doesn’t care about that right now. Maybe he was triggered by something Alice did or said and now wants to prove a point. After the date Alice may decide to report Bob to a jury of their peers, hoping to save others from her bad experience. Both Alice and Bob will have the opportunity to present their side of the case in front of the conflict jury, using the collective to create the best possible result. It may turn out that through this process, Bob realizes he was being rude and apologizes to Alice. This could even be the catalyst for the beginning of a lasting relationship.

While having economic incentives in place encourages good behavior, the fundamentally human system of dealing with undesirable behavior that is facilitated by the DAD, ends up strengthening the community. The community is strengthened not only through dealing with conflict. The fun challenge of verifying a user’s admittance to a platform evolved category like “Nice Guy” for example, has the potential to inspire stimulating (community building) discussion.