  Token Curated Registries (TCR) are decentralized recommendation systems that
can be implemented using Blockchain smart contracts. They allow participants to
vote for or against adding items to a list through a process that involves
staking tokens intrinsic to the registry, with winners receiving the staked
tokens for each vote. A TCR aims to provide incentives to create a well-curated
list. In this work, we consider a challenge for these systems - incentivizing
token-holders to actually engage and participate in the voting process. We
propose a novel token-inflation mechanism for enhancing engagement, whereby
only voting participants see their token supply increased by a pre-defined
multiple after each round of voting. To evaluate this proposal, we propose a
simple 4-class model of voters that captures all possible combinations of two
key dimensions: whether they are engaged (likely to vote at all for a given
item) or disengaged, and whether they are informed (likely to vote in a way
that increases the quality of the list) or uninformed, and a simple metric to
evaluate the quality of the list as a function of the vote outcomes. We conduct
simulations using this model of voters and show that implementing
token-inflation results in greater wealth accumulation for engaged voters. In
particular, when the number of informed voters is sufficiently high, our
simulations show that voters that are both informed and engaged see the
greatest benefits from participating in the registry when our proposed
token-inflation mechanism is employed. We further validate this finding using a
simplified mathematical analysis.
