Plasma
The thought is to introduce a new concept that acts like a currency, but with a publisher's inventory, or to be more precise a publisher's publishing capacity. It is called Plasma for now, as it sorta sounds/feels like the lifeblood of production -- and yes we're talking about the plasma found in stars 😁. It can also be seen as "capacity" to publish licenses into the primary marketplace.
In order to issue a license, you need to have Plasma to do so. Every publisher starts with 1.25 Plasma and that represents a total of 1.25 Flare in total inventory that they can issue and sell. If they choose to price their product at .25 Flare (the recommended price point for product on starbeam.one) then they can start out selling licenses on starbeam.one by issuing 1 license per day for a total of five licenses across 5 separate products (i.e., 1 working week).
Note that if all a publisher's Plasma is utilized, then no new licenses can be created and issued by that publisher. The publisher will have to recall an existing issuance to regain Plasma so that they can create a new issuance and publish licenses (more below).
Every new publisher account is given a corresponding Plasma account which provides enough Plasma to sell one license at the recommended price above for five days (1 working week) or 1.25 Plasma.
For v1, the system provides a "recommended" pairing of values for both price and quantity when you make a new issuance. Both of these are determined from the average number of sales and the corresponding price for the past 5 issuances made by the publisher. For the most part, it is intended that the recommended values are used to guide sales in a gradual, organic manner. You can choose to override these based on the remaining Plasma in your account.
(Note that, in the above, some sales were previously made with a higher price, so the price is higher than the default .25 Flare.)
What happens when you run out of Plasma? You cannot issue any more licenses for sale in the marketplace. In order to do so, you will have to recall an existing issuance and release its Plasma, then use the released Plasma to make a new issuance.
For v1 of this system, recalls will not be necessary. Accounts will have a minimum value of .25 Plasma at all times, meaning with the 1-product-per-day limit they at least be able to publish at least 1 license per day at .25 Flare. This is to help out new publishers and keep them from getting "stuck" from being locked out due to issuing all their Plasma.
In future versions, recalls will be required to regain utilized Plasma if a publisher does not have enough Plasma to publish.
(Or not, maybe we'll stick with the .25 minimum!)
There are two ways to acquire plasma:
- Earn it (aka "organic")
- Buy it (future versions)
Plasma is consumed when licenses are issued and released when licenses are sold. When issuing new licenses it costs Plasma to do so. As mentioned, each publisher starts with 1.25 Plasma which means that it can issue a total of 1.25 Flare of value to the marketplace. It is recommended that the 1.25 Plasma is utilized over five days, so .25 per day for five days. You can, of course, maximize that entire amount to 1.25 for 1 day if you can find a buyer to purchase it from you. This is not recommended, however, as if you cannot sell that 1 license all of your Plasma is locked up.
When a sale is made, the amount of Plasma returned is equal to 1.1x (10% earnings) of the Flare sold.
For instance, for your first issuance where you issue 1 license at .25 Flare (for a total of .25 Plasma reserved and taken from your account), you will receive .25 Flare and .275 Plasma from the sale.
For another example: after several sales and you have enough to issue 3 licenses in a single issuance at .25 Flare each, the amount of Plasma returned to the publisher upon selling all 3 licenses is .825 Plasma (3 * .25 * 1.1).
Note that price changes impact the returned plasma. If you issue at .25 Flare and then reduce your price to .15 Flare and sell a license at that price point, you sell at a loss of both Flare and Plasma. In this case, the sale would be for .15 Flare and the returned Plasma for each sold license at this price would be .165 Plasma.
This is a future feature, but at some point, we will allow publishers to buy their own Plasma to increase the available capacity for them to publish at any given time.