Gamification of Utility-Building Public Goods

Transcript

who already knows all of this information thank you for coming at 10 o'clock in the morning yeah we're good hi thank you for being here so early in the morning this is a fantastic turnout I'm Xerox Joshua executive Steward of Partnerships and ecosystem atopolis uh merch Steward of e Denver and treasurer of sporknow and I would like to talk about gamification of utility building uh public goods because one of the things that we struggle with in the space is uh funding public goods and getting people excited about funding

public goods um the the second that you label something of public good you lose that like X Factor of uh wild speculation people like oh this is for charity it's probably not going to go up and so they don't invest and so it's like this flywheel of keeping it on the ground um but in gamification there's a few different there's two different types that we think about there's the micro and then there's the macro so on on the micro level it's like those dopamine hits and this is what most people think of um where you're like uh let's design the UI ux so that people are like oh yeah I want likes on my on my tweets or um you're encouraging people to continue

to interact with the with the app you know what I'm talking about okay um getting poapps this is another one on the micro scale but it could be on the macro when they're like oh yeah for every poapp you you have you're gonna get like an eth or something that'd be like a macro incentive I don't think that that's a especially since poapps have been farmed like crazy um like loyalty points at Airlines um when you when do you this is probably not the right room to ask this in but do you guys use cash ever I don't use cash ever because cash one dollar is worth one dollar but when you use a credit card it's one percent two percent back some credit cards are like one percent back in

Bitcoin and so the one dollar is not all it's not worth one dollar anymore it's worth one dollar plus and that could be up to like ten percent depending on what you're buying and where but the the macro in the gamification is like game design incentives uh for example at opolis we did our series seed two round last year uh it was like 5.5 million dollars zero zero dollars of voting Equity was sold during that round so this is like the macro of trying to keep incentives aligned positive some games instead of zero-sum games and then that leads to community ownership so I I mentioned Obelisk and this is where I work so this is the case study

that I was going to do and I'm going to try to wrap this up quickly because it's a workshop and I'd rather have it be more of a Roundtable discussion than me giving the same talk that I've I've given a thousand times uh so we'll we'll do our case today with Emily Emily's a software developer who's uh got six years experience she's an independent uh California spends a lot of money on a bunch of different softwares accounting [Music] um buys Private health insurance on the exchange with no no bulk discount has a bunch of different 401ks everything's kind of a mess and the the time that it takes her to keep track of

her financial life is time that she's not spending either developing her skills as a software developer finding new clients or actually working on the on the things that she's she wants to be working on um and then enteropolis this is an employment Cooperative where we help her wrap herself into an LLC uh kind of streamline all these different things into One dashboard that is expanding in utility and so now she has this one stop shop for uh her entire employment life so all of these different invoices following to one LLC uh we invoice that LLC for whatever she tells us she she wants her paycheck to be we pay social security Medicare workers comp

Unemployment uh the whole the whole nine of all these different uh uh taxes she doesn't have to pay quarter lose anymore because it's coming off of her her W-2 paychecks um and this this gives her more time to be able to actually focus on her clients and and extend um she also can process crypto payroll so what what does this mean for Emily this slide comes from uh nft NYC where we were talking about [Music] um all of the things that I just described represented as actual like nfts so these these could be uh verified it's verifiable income it's verifiable a lot a lot of different things so she can take this W-2 instead of a freelancer

where the bank is like you're a very risky person to lend to even though she has six years of relatively solid income right but now it's oh you have one paycheck okay now I'm gonna give you whatever you want it's it's a really weird uh incentive structure uh and as we we said it employment in in benefits the payroll is the killer app so the way that we we get to mass adoption is uh by if we want people to spend crypto they we want to we have to remove a step and actually pay them in it so there's not like a an additional transaction to try to get into crypto uh and so that it

through this way we're both an on-ramp and an off-ramp uh we don't have to get it does anyone want to know how this works or can I skip over this is anyone curious okay uh all right so here's the game design because and this was kind of my point this is incredibly boring stuff right it's okay you can say it I get I get very bored even talking about it um but the point is that it's it's incredibly important and people kind of under undervalue their eyes gloss over and and uh for the people at home this is exactly what happened to the audience here um what we've done is try to incentivize people to want to buy into the system uh

we have a concept called payroll mining by which we pay you to pay yourself essentially with the work token so uh every time the payroll company or the the payroll processing Grows by 10 in volume so let's say on July 1st we ran a million dollars in payroll and then the third Friday which would be the 15th we ran 1.1 million that'd be 10 growth we would mint 5 million work tokens thirty percent go to the employee members who run their payroll which is a few people in this room 30 goes to the person who referred that individual so what we've done here is we've encouraged both the person in the Dow the Dow contributor to

run their payroll through us but we've also encouraged the Dow to refer their contributors so that they stay in the in the ecosystem and when Emily has this stable setup she's more likely to stay in the Dow longer because she's not looking for oh where am I going to get my health insurance and then 20 goes in the stake and contract and stuff uh this is the visual representation of the thing I just said and then eventually we'll get to the micro stuff where we build this all into your into your dashboard uh uh yeah we don't need to talk about this either um okay so three three three great

examples uh that I want to point to before like we get into the discussion um is the the give economy um they've taken something that is already kind of exciting uh yield farm and and they've they've added a like public goods component to it or whereby a percentage of what you're putting in is being automatically like given to um good causes Charities other things that sign up through through giveth um uh moonshot Bots and rainbow rolls here are two examples of things that kind of worked to a degree but then stopped and then this is kind of one of

the things that I wanted to talk about with the group so the moonshot Bots if you're not familiar with was a was a kind of get coin Dow offshoot thing where they sold nfts on a bonding curve and it was great gamification for the first people who bought into the system because they were buying it at fractions of an eth and then it kept getting more expensive more expensive more expensive some people who were like really friendly to the ecosystem were like yeah I'll buy one at five eth and the current one and one hasn't been minted in a long time I think like four or five months and I went to go grab a screenshot and the website was actually down um which I think they're fixing uh but it's like 30 East to Min the next one but the floor price on open C is like two

something three something so what's the game mechanic is is kind of broken that like the flywheel we fell off of it um and rainbow rolls was a we we kind of uh under anticipated how much okay so we came from the public goods side and we're like we're gonna raise tons of money for charity because uh lots of people are are raising you you just have anybody who has an nft project it's just minting out uh we underestimated how much of that was like garbage marketing and and Chile mechanics and we're like no no it's for public goods people are going to buy it and we minted like 800 something out of the 10 000 and so we were able to

give away about a hundred uh we raised about 100 we were able to give away about 80 which at the top was like I don't know 250 300 000 depending on when people sold it we gave it to a rip medical debt we gave them like 20th that they sold for 91 000 and then they use their little flywheel thing and they they were able to waive 7.35 million dollars of medical debt so it worked for them yeah uh but why don't these things mint anymore and this is the this is kind of the fundamental question that I want to talk about are there any questions about stuff I said before we like dive into that does the Dow have to be a legal entity

to get the work Rewards does a dow need to be a legal entity to earn work rewards you were saying if Dao's refer their members yes I was repeating the question um no uh they don't but they do need to join the Coalition and join in the Coalition is incredibly expensive it is twenty dollars um you so uh it's kind of it's like a legal barrier to becoming a member of a cooperative and like it has to be a nominal amount um and it's very similar to REI I think they charge thirty dollars for for membership is that right yeah so ours is it's cheaper to join our cooperative than REI um but you're not gonna get anything back if you buy skis so

um uh yeah it's twenty dollars um a bunch of dows actually in this room are represented um giveth the the token to engineering Commons common stack all members all right do you guys have Coalition members there no yeah your college member cool um it the the reason for this is because um you you have to we we don't sell the work token the the work tokens never been sold um the only way to earn it is by providing some sort of value to The Cooperative

and to do that you have to be a member of the cooperative and that way what we're we're using the work token as a unit of account for the cooperative but no you don't you don't need to be a legal entity okay cool so what do you guys want to talk about not all at once uh if you were talking about there being memorized sorry uh you were talking about people being members of the Coalition yeah um

like what are some examples of like groups that maybe are or groups that might want to be sure um yeah so right now we are uh for employee members we're primarily us-based uh so if any Dao has a contributor or an employee even if they're like part-time they only give you like an hour or two or something it's worth joining the Coalition or at least uh referring your contributor to opolis and examples of Coalition members um so the first the first like major one we had was Badger Dao they onboarded most of their

american-based contributors they run their payroll through us for their salaries it's like usdc that these guys get paid um and then they just run that usdc through us and then Badger actually invested as well um dapex was a company that like dissolved and became the fio protocol and the contributors to fio uh joined we also helped shapeshift with their kind of dissolution and I think a majority of their us-based developers joined us somewhere between like 50 and 70.

um we don't ask specifically where people come from and a lot of people are Anonymous and so we try to not we do a really good job of not doxing people so I don't know the exact number uh get coin Dao maker Dao um I'm gonna piss some people off by not remembering all of them but there's uh there's there's a lot um uh and we do partner with a decent number of like European dials that'll have like one or two contributors in the US like like doing good um and it's it's worth it for them because one they get a stable contributor who's able to uh you know provide employment benefits for their family um but then too like every every work

token that that contributor is making uh doing good is also making for their Treasury and so while the work token's not particularly worth anything right now because uh there's no demand for it eventually when we hit somewhere between three thousand and five thousand members well let's start with one thousand when we hit one thousand members uh it becomes a governance token you'll be able to vote with it on things like um should we add an additional health care plan well right now we have two bronze of silver and a gold that some people want a platinum plan some people want an even cheaper one like a just a basic catastrophe that'll take members being like hey I

want that and because they are the owners of The Cooperative they can make that decision I think that answered the whole question cool so the onboarding has uh it's set up for like non-crypto native you know it facilitates normies yeah is there much traction with that do you have many non-crypto uh members yes so uh so it funny enough um the attempt to make it easier for normies to onboard has made it significantly harder for crypto natives

we we use something called Magic um and magic links are like you put in an email address and then it emails you a link you click on it and this process generates a like public private key that's it's a delegated private key so they're kind of managing that for you but it's so that you can just log in with an email address without realizing you're touching crypto and we have real estate agents lawyers doctors who use that and like really don't want to use crypto the problem with this is the the magic link like if people don't go in and switch it over to metamask it kind of makes it difficult to to track and like interact with Discord and these kinds of things for Community Building

um and like figuring out because we when you use the magic links we provide free gas so we basically just top up all these accounts with with Matic um the problem is that like polygon will go through these like weird spurts of if too many people try to use it at once well that's not weird that's blockchains in general um too many people try to use it at once and then it doesn't work and then they'll get an error that's like this isn't working um and we don't say oh it's it's probably a gas thing and we're like just try again in a few minutes and it'll go through or we have to send morematic um but like if you do it on your own metamask you can like it'll sell you like you need to up the gas and that's it's a cleaner user

experience if you move if you do the first step and then you move away to your own but that's it's not incentivized because we're paying for your gas but it's still like it's probably on it's like .0001 cents per transaction or something I think that answered your question the there is traction among like normally and like um the website so here's here's the problem we had with with marketing because when you mentioned if you don't mention crypto it becomes more attractive because they're like oh this is like a regular thing I can use this but then people on web3 like don't know it's for them and they're like oh this

is just some freelancer thing and then you you put crypto on you're like no like this is this is for you we designed this like the our founder John Powers also the founder of eat Denver like deep roots in what we're trying to build here and then like we'll we'll meet this happened the other day like a real estate agent was like I don't I don't do crypto it's like you can do a hundred percent of the thing without touching crypto but how do you how do you thread that needle that's a that's an interesting one um yes it is a big deal and I I realize that what I just all of this is is very us-based but we're in the process of

expanding you thought of marketing as two separate things even though the same thing oh this is the crypto one this is the not crypto one and it's the same thing it has come up I don't know where we are with it um what would you call the the other one would you would you change the names I don't know it seems like almost the pain point there is that we need to restructure people's like idea of what being in crypto means rather than cater to people that don't want to be a part of it yeah um this is this is like part of the The Narrative and I don't know if it's a

perfect narrative but it's the one that I like pulling on that like uh crypto and web3 aren't synonyms and we shouldn't use them that way um it's no longer like the both of them have negative connotations now because of how badly they've been misused and it's like we need to figure out like what is the word uh that we can use to describe this like new economy that we're building with proper game incentives um that doesn't like scare people away and like no I don't like the board API Club I don't want to do this crypto stuff it's like this is what about anything that I just described has anything to do with like I don't know we like nft projects it's but like we we all get lumped into

the same the same bucket um did any of you go to like nft NYC for example yeah it's like a totally different vibe right you you would never know that we were in the same industry yet we are like we're all categorized as like point zero zero zero one percent in this like same industry um it's the same as like how how Intel and Netflix are also considered the same industry so this is not new to our industry it's like in in what world are these just both tech companies they're they're not even remotely the same cool

um so I guess the what it boils down to in in trying to figure out like uh and trying to figure out how do we how do we improve funding for public goods or the commons or you know recreating society and the way that we would like to is trying to take to not like change human nature because humans are always going to be selfish individuals how do we take the thing that makes you a selfish individual and and make that part of or align it with what the community's goals are um and this is this is kind of a a half-baked thought that I've been trying to to figure out so it's definitely the best time to present it on on uh on air

but like you guys are familiar with like Marx and like uh the Karl Marx and socialism and um talks about like you know workers of the World Unite the in the uh like seizing the means of production um and and one of the things I keep thinking about is like socialists kind of have it wrong where they're like yeah the government's going to take this stuff from the rich people and we're going to give it to the workers or whatever right um and correct me if that is a wrong assumption about what socialism proclaims but what we've done with blockchain technology is make it so that through market-based incentives consumers are taking back the means of production

does that make sense like we're we we own the companies that we are patronizing because we are engaging with them so like you run your payroll throughopolis you're an owner of the company it's just a game design incentive we didn't we're not taking anything from anybody we're just building from the ground up and it's like it's really it's an interesting uh yeah I I don't Proclaim to be a socialist but that was co-opted by the government I don't think anything in Karl Marx's like original ideas was like yes the

government should do this it was we should do this and that is like reflected in Co-op structures yeah that's sort of the modern iteration of that which is really cool yeah like taxonomy is important stuff gets co-opted it's why like people think board AP Yacht Club is web three it's like um it also seems that um excuse me that that uh like blockchain technology uh kind of serves to serve that purpose better than anything that we generated so far because uh the idea of seizing the means of production and such was based on actual physical goods and the machines that created those goods whereas now we are the machines that are creating the goods digitally and we

don't have to like take any resources from anything else to do it except for electricity and CPUs yeah that actually reminds me of a great um one of our partners Brain Trust is like this there's the web 2 model of freelancer work which is like upwork and like uh Fiverr and like top towel and you you sign up you get vetted you're like you know a verified coder right and then they Farm you out as a staffing company and take a giant chunk of your earnings and you don't really get anything in return for that except for the ability to continue working on contracts right but like with Brain Trust it's a similar model except for you are also getting a token that is

ownership in the community and it's the same like one by one individual pieces of society are gonna get picked away until and this is uh with Griffo was here earlier likes to talk about um the things that we're we're doing or what we'd like to be building with this infrastructure is to one by one take away uh pieces of government infrastructure like government's big and individual like it probably doesn't need to be providing all of the services it's providing but those services do need to be provided but by whom and like we as a community could do it by using smart contracts and like individual pieces of of public goods that need to be funded we we can fund through grants or through the defy game design and

we can just make governments smaller not by like Republicans breaking the government and saying hey look it was broken but like actually by like providing public services but not by collecting too many taxes and then putting it back out but just by like taking I don't know a percentage of my D5 gains and like funneling it to a Smart contract that like uh a street sweeper can just like claim and be like yeah I I did this today or something you know I mean um but this is like step one and then step two like you get an airline or how many of you like your cell phone telecoms provider who do you have that you and you like

you like them as a you're not going to leave T-Mobile so I I've been with ATT longer but like if if a company came along and was like if you pay your bill on time I'm Gonna Give You equity in the company I'd be like all right off at T I'm out of here is it just the game design like I don't want I don't want Hilton points but like the first hotel or like series of maybe maybe it's a decentralized Airbnb that's like if you you know you you rent a place you stay and you get a positive review and like you didn't damage the place uh and there weren't problems you're gonna get equity in this decentralized system I'd be like all right I'm never staying in a hotel again that's way better than points or status

ownership okay cool what how much time we have left seven minutes cool all right okay uh I don't know do you any you guys want to keep talking about stuff yeah we can just cut it here let's do I have anything else yeah uh yeah so if you if you're interested in Annapolis or you'd like to become a coalition member uh commons.opolis.com um I'm I'm my DMs are open on all of the platforms so

yeah cool [Applause]