P3RKS: Rewards for DAO Contributors

GM, GM, GM, everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell here. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for members of the DAO to showcase something they're passionate about or have been working on. This could be an awesome project they've been working on, demonstrating unit testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share it with the community. And today, I am very happy to introduce to you some legends of Developer DAO: kempsterrrr.eth, pbillingsby.eth, jazza.eth, and Martin B, who are going to be presenting us their project P3RKS. All right, gang, take it away.

Thanks, Narb. What an intro, mate. Thank you very much. Can everyone see the screen okay? Yep. Sweet. Awesome. So, yeah, welcome everyone. Today, we'll be presenting a project that we've been working on called P3RKS, which is about providing rewards to DAO contributors beyond kind of like native governance tokens and kind of whatever else is sitting in people's treasury.

So the team, as Narb introduced at the start, is jazza.eth—loves being called Jazza, not James. Mr. pbillingsby.eth—I've no idea what that avatar's about, mate, but I do like it. Martin B, myself, and Colin. So Jazza's doing design, Phil and Martin are doing dev, I'm doing a bit of dev, but mostly like partnership stuff, and then Colin's been helping us out on partnership stuff as well and is—I think we're going to keep him on board as an advisor as the project goes on. So, yeah, we've been working on this for, I don't know, maybe two to three months. It's pretty much ready to go, so we're kind of excited to show everyone kind of what the MVP looks like and then happy to ask any questions at the end about the tech stack, about our plans, about whatever people are interested in knowing.

So what problem are we solving? So there are an awful lot of products, services, and protocols out there that need users. That could be developer tools, that could be educational tools, that could be anything, right? And sort of user acquisition is quite challenging, it's quite expensive. There are lots of different ways that people will do this, including hiring their DevRel team out of Developer DAO, cough, cough, Ankr. But we realized that there was a gap—it felt like there was a gap in the market in terms of how product services and protocols in this Web3 space can be connected with targeted groups of users. Then on the DAO front, DAOs are competing with each other and even more so with traditional organizations for being able to attract, reward, and retain contributors. And then contributors, from their point of view, obviously want to maximize the value they receive from the contributions or the work that they do in DAOs. Traditional organizations have loads of predefined norms and products and mechanisms for doing this in their benefits packages, but this just does not exist for DAOs. And for DAOs to really become the future of work, these kind of things we feel need to be created, and we are hoping to play a role in that with P3RKS.

So the opportunity that that provides is connecting DAOs with partners to be able to offer rewards to their contributors. It gives those partners targeted distribution to specific people based on the DAOs that they are a part of. So much like sponsoring a podcast on a specific theme, providers can offer rewards to DAOs based on what that DAO is focused on and the demographics of their membership. And then obviously for contributors, it gives them a chance to receive more rewards for the work that they're doing in DAOs.

So how do we make this happen? So we're going really, really simple out of the gate, but P3RKS at a high level is a largely low-code rewards platform for DAOs. It sits between DAOs, rewards providers, and contributors, providing a way to connect them all together in a space where they can transact value or exchange value.

From a tech stack point of view, it's built on Next, Tailwind, wagmi, zustand, I think, is the state management library, and then Airtable. So we're really going for like as low a lift as possible for the MVP. We don't have a backend at the moment, everything is client-side, a statically generated website. Airtable is our no-code backend. This will all change in the future, but the goal was to go from zero to value being added for the DAO and DAO members and being able to test it versus trying to over-engineer the problem when the reality is we probably don't fully understand it at the moment. And getting something out there allowing people to see value and feedback and help us improve it is kind of the approach that we've taken, and we're pretty much there now and really excited to launch it. So I will do a quick walkthrough of how the app works.

So this is our landing page, super simple: Rewards for DAO Contributors. Unlock more ways to recognize and reward your DAO's top contributors. The bits at the top just go to like lead generation forms for DAOs that are interested in using the platform and then partners that are interested in offering rewards on the platform. So this has primarily been built by Martin and Phil, a little bit me, and all of the design is done by Jazza, and I think they've all done a really, really good job. But I'll walk through how the app works just to show you guys.

So as always with a dApp, it starts by connecting your wallet. Let's hope this is going to work. There we go. And then what happens in the background is we're just checking that the wallet that has authenticated with P3RKS holds the Developer DAO NFT.

As we expand to more DAOs in the future, we'll do the same thing for whatever token represents membership for their DAO. And then what you are presented with is a sort of a grid view or a list of available perks that are on the platform. So there will be more than this at launch, this is just some dummy data that's in there at the moment. So you can see on the cards kind of like what the brand is, what the offer is, and kind of what they do, and you can filter based on category. So I'd expect that we'll have, as well as developer tools and finance, we'll have education and probably some others before it goes live.

At the moment, because it's all purely for Developer DAO members whilst we test this, there's no sort of filtering based on DAO, but it's likely in the future that if you see this icon here, 'view all perks', we will have similar icons underneath it for each of the DAOs that people are a part of. So kind of like the sidebar in Discord, but like hopefully not as anxiety-inducing. And we've got a good old critical light mode/dark mode switch down here and a feedback form.

So when this gets launched, we're really, really keen to gather as much feedback as possible. This just opens up an Airtable form for people to do that, and we'll be looking for as many ideas, criticisms, or whatever that we can get from everyone that's involved, kind of contributors receiving rewards and benefits providers or perks providers providing those rewards as well. But enough of that, if we click through to, let's go with Alchemy. So what this then takes you to is basically a profile page for the perk provider.

Again, super simple. All we're doing here is like what's the brand, what do they do, a little bit about them, some marketing assets to be able to kind of see what it's about—these are all dummy content at the moment, it will be updated before we go live—and then instructions on how to redeem the perk. So what is the perk or the reward that you're getting and how do you go about redeeming it? And then when you hit this button, it just takes you to the partner's website. And that is literally it for the MVP.

We're hoping to get this launched in the next probably two to three weeks, so we'll be sharing a lot about this in the run-up to that, doing some probably marketing with the partners alongside it as well. But that is kind of the app as it is now. We do have some future plans. So I will just reopen this. OK, cool. So as we were saying, like we've really taken the approach of streamlining the MVP as much as possible so we can get something out, provide some value to everyone in Developer DAO, to Developer DAO itself, and it's obvious the value for members in terms of discounted products that are useful to them. And then to Developer DAO, it hopefully should help increase the intrinsic value of being a member of Developer DAO. But we also in our budget application, if you take a look on the forum, are committing to returning basically 7% of the value of the org back to the DAO.

So kind of like a Y Combinator model, the DAO's going to allow us to test this and launch it and use its network effects, and then either the DAO will receive an equity stake in the business that we're setting up alongside this or if we do a native token issue, then we will allocate that percentage of the token straight back to the DAO treasury. Our goal at the moment is to get this out, launch it and test it, take feedback, and expand. The next steps for us in terms of like phases of development will be expanding out to other DAOs and how do we build out the application to support that.

One of the ways that we're looking at doing that is turning this into to a degree like a multi-tenant system. So Vercel has some really nice built-in functionality which makes multi-tenancy quite easy. So what that would end up looking like is DAOs can host a static version of this view on a subdomain of their website. So I don't know if anyone's seen Surge Women's perks platform, but not overly dissimilar to this. So we can provide DAOs an easy way for them to be able to spin up their own sort of rewards and benefits platforms and host it where their users are.

We also want to start looking at allowing DAOs to be able to provide custom rewards. So off the top of my head for Developer DAO, that might look like something like anyone that receives X code tokens in a season for contributing to the DAO can get like a free piece of merch. Or as it evolves over time, like there's all sorts of things that we could potentially do depending on kind of which way the product leans. There are other groups kind of tangentially in this space that are doing like pooled insurance and all types of stuff.

For now, we're focused on these kind of lower lift, easier rewards, but there's all sorts of ways that that could go in the future. And I think we'll probably evolve it to become like a two-sided marketplace, or well, three-sided marketplace, but a two-sided marketplace between DAOs and benefits providers. So DAOs can sign up, they get a list of benefits providers that have been added to the platform, and they can then connect with those benefits providers and look to provide a benefit to their members via some kind of like unique agreement between the DAO and the provider. Quite a tough challenge doing like a multi-sided marketplace, but given the kind of network effects in the space and the value we'll get from Developer DAO around doing that, we're quite confident that if the product works and people feel the need and use it, then I think growth is like really hopefully possible, but we'll have to see how it goes.

And then lastly, we're really keen to evolve this system so everyone that is involved in the value chain of the product receives a return. So anyone who's familiar with MetaFactory, the model that we're considering is very similar to that. So on MetaFactory, they offer a merch platform and they do basically all of the backend: manage the website, handle logistics, and so on and so forth. And then they partner with DAOs to do merch drops.

And then what they do is for every item that is sold on their platform, they then allocate a representative proportion of revenue in their native token to everyone that's involved in that value chain: the person who designed the merch, the person who did kind of like the logistics side of it and got it all set up and working, and then the DAO or the organization that's being represented in the merch drop themselves. And assuming we can figure it out in an effective way, we'd really like to or we're very seriously considering moving down a very similar model so we can make sure that everyone who's involved in that value chain kind of gets a return and receives some kind of stake in the platform that they're helping to grow.

And I suspect that if we go down that route, we'll also evolve P3RKS into its own DAO as well. However, probably slowly. Having a small team and being able to move fast has been really, really beneficial. So it's a journey that we'll go on as we build it out if it's successful. But that's kind of like the long-term ambition for I guess how we would potentially see this evolving now to support kind of DAOs, contributors, and providers and kind of be that connection between all of them to kind of add value to their life and experience in the Web3 ecosystem. And that's pretty much that, guys. Thanks for listening. Does anyone have any questions?

This is looking awesome, gang. Well done, well done. I guess, once a person logs in, do they only get perks if they have—say, for example, let's assume that most DAOs have like an NFT or something that needs—that grants them access to that DAO. Would those DAOs' perks unlock only if that person's wallet contained those assets, or is it kind of free rein at this moment?

So it will only unlock if the person that logs in's wallet holds that asset. So I can show you. So if I log out—wait, connect back in one sec. So if I—where's MetaMask? Oh, how do you switch accounts? There we go. OK, cool. So if I switch to a different wallet, you get a little—I can't remember what these are called, but I always find them really satisfying. But you get this view, which says 'access perks, currently only available to Developer DAO members', and then encourages people to either like submit a form or tweet at us if they want to add their DAOs.

'Join the DAO waitlist' basically opens an Airtable form, or 'join developerdao.com' will at the moment go to the website—probably update that link to go to OpenSea. We are also toying with the idea of adding like a 1-inch swap component here so like people can within this space potentially swap out assets to be able to access the DAO's benefits, but that's just an idea at the moment, not necessarily something we'll do.

Interesting. And so once you sign up for a perk, are you not able to sign up for it again with the way it's built today? I would assume so. But like suppose somebody had like five or something Dev DAO NFTs, would they be entitled to sign up for a perk five times or are they only limited to once?

That's a really good question. There probably will become some ways that people can game this system, but we are not handling the like delivery or the redemption of the benefit in the app. So basically what we're doing is we're handing people off to the company, right? So when someone clicks Kubera—this is the first team that partnered with us, they've been great—what these guys offer is like a network tracking platform which includes crypto and NFTs. So when you sign up to Kubera, it's free for 14 days, you connect your wallet, and then as long as the wallet that you've connected—and you can connect as many as you want—is holding a Developer DAO NFT, you'll automatically be entitled to redeem that benefit. And the benefit here is like a 25% discount. And it works in a similar way for everyone else whereby we're handing people off to the company to redeem the benefit rather than trying to build a whole benefits platform like all that logic ourselves. Makes sense, makes sense. Excellent.

Can you just see how that works?

Which bit? The redemption?

The part where you visit Kubera and you are automatically prompted that you receive some type of perk.

Yeah, sure. So this is like a net worth tracking app and it's brilliant. What it will allow you to do is automatically connect up all of your bank accounts, but it'll also allow you to automatically connect your exchanges—so Binance, crypto.com, whatever—as well as like on-chain wallets from multiple different chains. And what they'll do is in real-time it will monitor the value of all of your assets including your NFTs—like I'm pretty sure it uses like a price from OpenSea or something—to give you like an accurate picture of your full net worth. As long as when you sign up to the platform and you connect your crypto wallet, as long as your crypto wallet holds the Developer DAO NFT, when you go to purchase the subscription to the platform, you'll be provided with the discount at point of sale. So they will check in the background whether or not the wallet holds the Developer DAO NFT or whatever NFT or token in the future depending on the DAO. And then as long as that token is in there, then they will discount from the price for their subscription at point of sale. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think so. But do all—do all like the platforms that you're providing perks for, do they all have some type of like Ethereum connection? So did they all like handle the authentication in the same way on their end?

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, so not all of them though. So in each of these will be an instruction on how to redeem the perk. So Koinly, for example, they've given us like a unique link and I think a unique landing page with like UTMs in it or a redemption code. This description is a little bit out of date, we're still on dev. So for Koinly, when you go there, you just go through their normal flow and I can't remember if they've created us a unique landing page or given us a redeem code and then you'd use—you either go to that landing page or enter the redeem code and you get the discount that way. So not quite as like Web3 native, but comparatively Ankr—I don't know if Josh is here, I can't see Discord—when we get Ankr on the platform, the hope is that they will do something very similar to Kubera because if you haven't used Ankr, Ankr payments are in their native token so you have to connect your wallet to use the app anyway. So they're looking at—they were looking at doing a similar thing whereby if the wallet that you've got connected to your Ankr account holds the Developer DAO NFT, then a little modal or a little component will pop up and say, 'Hey, we know you're a Developer DAO member, use this code to get access to free credits or discount or whatever'.

Yeah, I feel like that experience is what is most interesting to me because I'm imagining as like more and more DAOs or other developer tooling begin to partner with P3RKS, it's going to just become like a kind of a long list, similar to maybe if you like subscribe to AAA or—I don't know, that might be just a US-only reference—but there's just a bunch of things that you know having some random subscription might allow you to, but it's super unclear like when you're going to use that product that you might qualify for some kind of discount, so having that you know natively and automated is I think more interesting.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. And like Kubera were the first team we spoke to. I got one of those like automated 'Hey, I'm the founder of Kubera' emails, I'd noticed that you've downloaded our product, how's it going? And I had already fallen in love with it and I just emailed him back, got on a call with him and he was like—I was like, 'Do you have like an affiliate platform or whatever we can use?' And he was like, 'I've got this much cooler idea'. And this is how we got to the setup that we have with them. So I would love to encourage as many of the providers to do it in that way. In theory, Koinly could do that as well because you connect your wallets there to get tax reports on your crypto. But I don't think, necessarily certainly not to begin with, we would restrict it to that purely because it feels like it might add a fair amount of friction to adding more value to users. Unclear if we might choose to restrict it to that in the future, but completely agree with you like the more that we can have that like native Web3 authentication flow would be way, way better and it's also way cooler and way more crypto native.

Yeah, well awesome, it looks great. Good work guys.

Thanks fam. I don't know if there's any other questions or if Phil or Martin or Jazza have anything they would want to add.

I don't have any more comments, they gave a great description of the project. I have nothing extra to talk about on the product or the design. I don't know about you Phil if you have anything about the tech stack or whatever.

No, I think it's all been covered. I think one thing we forgot to mention with the tech stack is we're using TypeScript as well. So that's it.

Yeah, we're kind of pretending to use it. I don't know how much of it is actually typed, but it's definitely written in TypeScript. Nate's written something in the chat. It just says, 'This is a great idea, seems like you just have to worry about the marketplace and each partner worries about implementing how to redeem benefits'. Yeah, exactly. So back to the earlier points, like as developers, I think we've probably all had experiences where we try to over-engineer solutions and we struggle to launch anything. And we were really keen to avoid that and kind of like a natural result of that is like being able to throw that problem over to the providers, like massively simplified the application.

We may or may not try to get more clever about that in the future. So for example, right now some of the benefits providers just have like one redemption code for like all members of that DAO. Maybe we can get slightly clever about it in the future and if they have like a reward platform, we might be able to hit an API and get a unique code for everyone. But largely speaking, like as simple as not complicated as possible to get this out there. I think the main complicated bit we're going to have to do next is making it multi-tenant and allowing DAOs to host a view—basically this view—on a subdomain for like wherever their website lives. And hopefully that should help quite nicely with growth as well, like probably have something like a 'powered by P3RKS' link up here or something like that. But yeah, simple as we can possibly get it at the moment and depending on what people tell us, if they like it, if they don't like it, we'll sort of progressively make it more complicated as we need to.

Beauty. Awesome stuff. And I guess one final question from me is, if people want to lend a helping hand to P3RKS, what's the best way to get started?

That's a really good question. So I mentioned a little bit before that having a small team early on has made it a lot easier to just be able to make quick decisions and move fast. And we will probably keep it that way till the MVP's out and we start getting some feedback back and then we'll look to try and figure out ways to welcome in new contributors if people are interested in doing that. We're sort of toying with the idea of like creating bountiable tasks and a few other ways, but right now probably the biggest way people could help us, although there's no reward mechanism created for this at the moment, is if you're members of other DAOs and potentially could be interested in getting involved in P3RKS and being able to offer your own benefits, then there's a form there which you can share with whomever needs to be shared with. Or if you know of any partners who might want to offer rewards on the platform, then there's another form there which can be shared with anyone really and they'll come through to our team and we'll build kind of like a backlog and start working through to add folks in. But we'll definitely be welcoming more contributors, we just wanted to get to like 0.1, launch something first, so we could try and get some momentum and some learning happening as soon as possible.

Excellent, yeah. Makes total sense to me. All right. I see we have one minute left. Are there any final questions from the crowd? Going once, going twice, sold. All right then. Thank you very much P3RKS team. It's awesome to see the progress so far on this and we can't wait to see this actually launch for MVP. So best of luck on that and we'll all be scouring for them perks once they become available. And with that, I want to wish everybody a happy Friday and/or weekend, whatever it is for you, and we will see you back here next week. All right. Peace. Narb. Thank you guys. My pleasure. And I'll be dropping a link to the POAPs in this chat, so stick around for a couple minutes to claim that. And P3RKS team, I will send you your special POAPs as well through DM. So I will stop the recording now.