TLDR
Fund the Calabara team with 50 ETH to build uplink.wtf, and 10 ETH to host the first Nouns Raffle.
Uplink … WTF?
In wireless communications, “uplink” refers to transmissions originating from user devices. For Nouns, it’s a mechanism for communities to create decentralized marketing campaigns, utilizing token-gated Twitter contests to proliferate both user-generated and DAO-funded content.
Twitter + Ethereum is our secret sauce. After experimenting with contests for 6 months, we are now ready to take the project to the next level. We will build uplink.wtf, a unified nounish platform with modules for both a refactored Creator Contest experience and a brand new Nouns Raffle application.
Use Cases
Uplink has two main use cases, each taking a unique approach to planning, content creation, and distribution.
Use case 1: NounsDAO
The problem
With a proven track record of funding high-quality content initiatives such as the Ordinary Folk video, Nounish productions, and more, NounsDAO boasts a diverse portfolio of content ready for widespread distribution. The challenge now lies in finding innovative ways to expand our reach and connect with a wider audience.
Module 1: Nouns Raffle
Nouns Raffle is a new mechanism for targeted external distribution. We’re flipping the script on the traditional curation contest model, allowing the DAO to incentivize influential token holders to proliferate nouns in exchange for raffle entrance. Only holders of pre-configured tokens who share specific nounish content on Twitter are eligible for the draw.
Example A
NounsDAO puts up 10 ETH to proliferate the Oridinary Folk video. To enter the raffle, entrants must
- Share the video on Twitter
- Hold a punk, ape, noun, or something else preconfigured by the DAO.
Once a participant verifies proof of wallet and account ownership, they are officially counted as an entrant. When the contest ends, 1 entrant is randomly selected and the 10 ETH is distributed to their wallet.
Example B
The Nouns video contest team is currently posting 25 ETH to create a decentralized marketing team - asking proposers to explain how they will get people to enter the main $200k video contest. Imagine if instead, the organizers created a short explainer video and raffled 10 ETH to a random punk holder that shared it on twitter.
Remember that foobar tweet about getting ETH to market for Nouns? It turns out it’s not such a crazy idea. This model allows NounsDAO to achieve mass proliferation outside of the ecosystem, and creates incentives for influential token holders to extract additional utility out of their NFT’s. Just imagine the memes.
Proliferation machine
The raffle landing page can also double as a valuable ad space for the Nouns – linking back to nouns.wtf, Prop House, or other relevant projects, with the goal of increasing visibility for other activities of the DAO and encouraging influential token holders to further explore Nouns while they’re here. The raffle landing page is a great opportunity to cross-promote and increase the reach of the DAO’s other projects. If we really wanted to get crazy, we could even render the current auctions.
Implementation details
- We’ll host a vote for Nouners to decide:
- What they want to proliferate.
- Who they want to proliferate it.
- As an example, Nouners could decide that they want punk, ape, and noun holders to proliferate a video produced by the Nounish team.
- We’ll open the raffle for submissions.
- When the raffle ends, we’ll send a transaction with all verified entrants to a contract using Chainlink VRF to verifiably choose a random winner.
- Our goal is to demonstrate a social proof-of-concept for this marketing experiment. The neccessary features for a permissionless implementation involve quite complex technical considerations (some alpha in “Beyond” section). For now, this is how we’ll handle the random selection.
Of course, we’ll make sure we are complying with Twitters rules and guidelines for paid promotions, as well as taking preventative measures to ensure the system is not gamable / botable.
Use case 2: Nouns ecosystem projects
The problem
Twitter contests are an effective means for nounish projects to spread their meme, attract new creatives, and generate novel interest. They can be utilized to align the incentives of a given project and contributors towards driving both creation and distribution. In other words, they are an excellent marketing and proliferation tool. The Noun Square has had great success with this model, so why don’t more projects follow suit?
Twitter contests are an administrative nightmare. The process of fetching submissions, importing them to a judging platform, collecting wallet addresses, and handling payouts can involve up to 3 hours of total admin overhead.
Module 2: Creator contests
Through Creator Contests, projects can launch open-source marketing campaigns, incentivizing both new and existing community artists, storytellers, and other creatives to proliferate the meme on Twitter.
In this system, community operators launch a contest which triggers an automatic announcment tweet from their twitter account. This tweet serves as an invitation for creatives to craft content and potentially win the ETH or ERC tokens being auctioned following a token-gated community vote. Creatives submit by quote tweeting the announcement tweet with their submission, helping spread the word about the project through their nounish creations.
This UI/UX will be retired in the V2 upgrade
Contests are designed to be completely configurable, with flexible options for rewards, submission and voting requirements, voting strategies, and more - allowing projects to experiment with different incentive systems and implementations that align with their unique goals. Here are some of the ways Twitter contests could be utilized for different projects:
AI pod - onboard new artists and creative thinkers to AI and show off their latest and greatest models.
Composables - recently hosted a contest in which they observed 30+ new collections and 1000+ new traits uploaded to their platform and shared on twitter.
Esports - host “best-clip” tournaments or open-source the creation of nounish gaming heads.
SharkDAO - source and vote on community art pieces to mint as open-editions from the DAO.
Gnars - “Skate Your City Series”. Worldwide digital skate competitions hosted by Gnars, run on Creator Contests, judged by GnarsDAO.
Builder DAO projects - run contests to help the community find their meme.
For nounish projects and pods, creating and distributing their own meme is critical for the path to sustainability, attracting new creatives, growing the brand, and deploying cool s**t. Creator Contests are the final piece in allowing projects to implement a microcosm of the virtuous cycle.
Status
Creator contests exist today. Nouns Raffle does not. We launched creator contests in September, and have since helped groups like TNS, Composables, SharkDAO, and others generate almost 600 submissions and award over 8 ETH + 25k ERC20 tokens to proliferators. SharkDAO and NSFW both awarded us small grants to build the underlying infrastructure.
The ask
We’re requesting 50 ETH to fund a 3 month development cycle to deploy Creator Contests v2 and a brand new Nouns Raffle application to the new uplink.wtf platform. In addition, we’re requesting 10 ETH to host the first Nouns Raffle following its deployment.
Roadmap
Over the 3 months, we will work in a rapid development cycle that can be split into 3 main phases. As always, everything will be open-source.
Phase 1: Escape velocity (8 weeks)
In phase 1, we’ll be focused on optimizing and extending our existing stack, deploying Creator Contests v2 to the new platform, and laying the foundation for phase 2.
- Week 1-6: Nuts & Bolts.
- The focus of this phase is to address various technical challenges related to our MVP Twitter services and other critical infrastructure, with the goal of re-designing a more efficient, scalable, and reliable infra and deploying it to the new platform. This work is critical for matching current demand and supporting the vision for the next phase of the project. Our applications real-time requirements are a simple example of this. The MVP implementation is only able to handle 5 concurrent real-time instances (contests), which we’ve already exceeded multiple times.
- Week 7: Support native video and other creative formats.
- Week 8: Deploy version 1.0.
- Week 9: Add social impression graphs and support voting for token delegates.
- Will be key for measuring success transparently and tracking real-time engagement data for campaigns.
- Week 1-9: UI/UX redesign.
- UI: uplink.wtf will be a totally nounish implementation, with new logos, fonts, layouts and more.
- UX: We’ve compiled a laundry list of improvements that we’re ready to implement to create the best user experience and offer more features for operators. This will be a continuous WIP and won’t be a blocker for phase 2.
Phase 2: Nouns Raffle (3 weeks)
With most of the heavy lifting taken care of in the first phase, we’ll be able to stand the Nouns Raffle module up fairly quickly. 10 ETH of the budget is allocated to run the first campaign.
- Week 10-11: Development of Nouns Raffle app.
- Week 12: Nouner vote
- Week 13: Deploy version 2.0. Host Nouns Raffle #1.
Phase 3: Wrapping up
- Week 14: Open access to API and add vote audit reports.
Defining Success
KPI’s
Following the deployment of version 1.0 (Creator Contests - week 8), we’ll be targeting the following KPI’s over a 3 month period:
- Reward at least 250 nounish creatives
- Achieve at least 350,000 social impressions
- Proliferate at least 2,000 nounish creations
- Onboard as many nounish projects as possible
Following deployment of version 2.0 (Nouns Raffle - week 13), we’ll be targeting the following goals for the first campaign:
- Onboard at least 30 entrants to the first Nouns Raffle.
- Achieve at least 200,000 social impressions.
We’d also like to answer the following questions:
- Are voter rewards a feature or a bug?
- Is Nouns Raffle a viable system for external proliferation?
- In the voting period, how impactful are visible vote totals on a communities ability to choose the “best” submissions?
- Does submission history serve as a relevant talent repository for other pods?
- Are deep Twitter integrations viable for other tasks, like governance? (Nouncil, Nerman, etc)
- Are there ways to maintain a certain level of submission quality without directly moderating submissions?
Beyond
If the experiment is a success, we’ll turn our attention to an on-chain implementation of our Twitter protocol. Our focus will be on determining the feasibility of zk-snarks for generating verifiable proofs for tweet ownership. The ultimate goal of this research is to enable NounsDAO and others to conduct contests and raffles directly on ethereum, initiated by on-chain votes. If we can make this work, Nouns raffle could eventually become a revenue stream for the DAO.
Team
Weez: frontend dev, designer, UX, support
Nick: lead dev, fullstack
We were both first introduced to Nouns by way of SharkDAO, which we first joined over a year ago. Soon after, we started building Calabara, a platform that hosted various tools to ease some of the unique challenges of a Nounish subDAO. Last Spring, the community funded us with 7 ETH to begin developing Creator Contests. We launched our first contest in September, and have helped fund 60 nounish creatives with 8 ETH and 25k ERC-20 tokens since. We have groups like SharkDAO, Composables, TNS, and others running contests as we speak. With learnings from many iterations, we’re now ready to take the project to the next level.
Budget
Total: 60 ETH
50 ETH for development
- 30 ETH to team wallet upon execution
- 20 ETH streamed over 3 months
10 ETH to fund the first Nouns Raffle. These funds will stay in the multisig, and will be distributed directly to the winner.
3/5 Signers:
Nick: nickdodson.eth
Benbodhi: signed.benbodhi.eth
Juan: juanx.eth
JoshuaFisher: joshuafisher.eth
ToadyHawk: toadyhawk.eth
For those interested in more visuals and info from the soon to be retired Creator Contest application:
details 👇
Project operators can start a contest by creating a prompt that asks for submissions in a certain medium, such as art, lore, crafts, memes, jokes, or anything else. The prompt should be centered around a particular theme or idea.
After defining the deadlines, the contest designer will choose 1) who gets to submit and 2) who gets to vote. Either can be based on any erc-20/721/1155, but most contests are designed without any submission restrictions.
Next, the contest designer chooses the reward structure for the winning submissions. Any amount of eth or erc-20/721 can be programmed as the reward for any rank. Admins also have the option to reward voters that correctly choose the winning submissions in order to experiment with unique incentive systems.
After defining rewards, the administrator will choose a voting strategy, or how voting power is calculated. We currently support 2 strategies - Token based and Arcade - with plans to add more in the future. Token based is straightforward, similar to how Nouns governance works, while the Arcade strategy alotts a uniform voting power to each qualifying voter. (i.e. Nouns holders of any amount will each receive 20 votes).
Finally, the operator has options for some additional parameters. Afterwards, the announcement tweet is automatically sent from the project account and the contest has officially begun.
Submitting
Participants can either head to the contest interface or twitter to create their submissions.
- If a participant submits through the contest interface, the submission is auto Quote Tweeted for them from their account.
- If a participant Quote Tweets on twitter, the platform pulls the submission into the interface.
Voting
Finally, qualifying voters spend their voting power on the best submissions and tokens are distributed based on the reward criteria.
A note from the sponsor
I have no links, financial ties or conflicts of interest in relation to this team or proposal. And because of that I intend to vote yes. My involvement was in giving guidance to the team on the product on the marketing tool after they asked for feedback on their original proposal. I am putting this on chain for them because I think it has potential to be an excellent proliferation tool for Nouns, I think it is excellent value at 50 Eth and it demonstrates the positive impact voting no can have on a subsequent proposal in terms of the quality of the proposal. - Hindsight