Hello, World!
We’re 1UP and we’re here to reward your community for their value added contributions.
Our Roots
1UP is the product of an experiment I first got funded via a MetaCartel grant, originally named Pepper4D.
The vision was to gamify all the actions within various MetaCartel working groups in an easy and intuitive way. Points would be issued for various value added actions, and players would then be able to spend these points within a game.
These thoughts were bootstrapped into an MVP, created using Telegram, Figma and Google Sheets. These tools were used to keep track of points while people decided what to spend them on, all of which coalesced with digital character creation which could be used to battle other people in the Figma enabled game.
Aside from the chaos associated with managing this very manual game, by many metrics, it was a huge success. Over the course of a month, thousands of points were claimed within the community, and we even saw an increase in valuable contributions by members who “just wanted to win”. Over time, the game board also became a visual representation of value-added activities in real life, which made us think this could also be a very valuable community onboarding tool.
By the end of the trial, one thing became clear: a scalable version of this model was needed to share this with the rest of the world. So we partnered up with Raid Guild and got to work.
1UP Evolved
The much more scalable version of 1UP (ie, not a game that requires manual entry of data in a Google Sheet!) is very simple and consists of the following elements, for now:
- A bot that can be added to any Telegram chat (soon to be other chat interfaces)
- A website displaying point information (1up.world), where points can be submitted to a DAO to earn tokens or voting power.
You simply add @oneupworld_bot to your community, and dish out 1UPs using the /1up @username command. Members don’t even need to be onboarded to web3 to use it. For the time being, 1UP is only tied to a single 1UP DAO, but the idea is to allow 1UP to be used by various DAOs, each running their independent game.
Ownership of the game is distributed by the users of 1UP. The more you play, the more of the network you own.
1UP Your Community
Throughout our tests, we saw a couple of clear value ads for communities.
Recognition
It’s been proven that people respond better when their hard work is recognized. This bot provides a quick and easy way to give some props and foster a culture of recognition.
Engagement
People naturally want to win. By gamifying activities, engagement can increase and drive progress towards the community’s goals (at least, that’s what we saw in our pilot).
A non-financial rewards layer
1UP allows any community to set up a non-financial rewards mechanism in parallel to their existing efforts.
Looking Forward
1UP is just getting started, and we believe this simple tool will become a core piece of infrastructure in the emerging DAO stack. Our next steps include 1) enabling multiple games within the 1UP world, as well as 2) building out the 1UP game.
If you or your project are eager to get started, join our Telegram! There’s a lot to do, and need both builders and dreamers to help us get there.
The project is currently being bootstrapped in-house, so please consider supporting us on Gitcoin as every donation counts!
Earlybird Prizes
1UP is working with well known crypto artists in the space to create limited edition NFTs which will be distributed to the top 5 players at the end of May.
Stay tuned! Until then, we’ll see you on the leaderboards :)
A special thanks to Cooper Turley for co-creating this article.
