DAppNode’s community Treasury
It has happened.
Like most of us, when I turn on my computer in the morning hundreds of alerts pop up. There’s one particular type of alert that I always stress about: the messages in the DAppNode Community. But in the past few weeks, I’ve come to open these messages and find that they weren’t so many fires to put off, no immediate requirement of mine or my colleague’s attention, and that most of the conversation happened among community members and the team didn’t have a disproportionate amount of participation.
The community was happening. Lots of projects tout this word like it’s snake oil, but I have seen it happening in my backyard: people helping each other out, joking around, bantering about non-DAppNode related stuff, pinging the team when necessary and crossing over platforms to open issues, post forum threads and share knowledge. I have been and am part of online internet communities, of course, and DAppNode’s is still very very small compared with pretty much any other community — but it’s extremely valuable.
People test the software, report bugs, create issues, provide support… and all of this makes DAppNode better.
We want to experiment with ways to reward this community. After all, cryptoeconomics is all about incentive mechanisms! But we are also wary of losing the genuine touch, losing the selfless participation, losing the sense of cooperation and not competition and losing the sense of… community! It is a well-studied fact that when bringing money as a reward for doing something people were already doing selflessly has the opposite effect: after a while people end up seeing it as a chore and stop doing it. So we will reward selflessness with the selfless token for excellence: PAN.
PAN what? Panvala.
Panvala’s token, PAN, is a token whose only purpose is to help. It has no other value than to be staked for a community or directly donated to a community. It has value because people who want to support projects buy it, and it has a healthy market because people DO want to help a lot!
Panvala matches donations in PAN with more PAN to the communities
DAppNode is one of the Panvala’s communities, and people can do two things to
SourceCred and PAN: The DAppNode’s Community Treasury
SourceCred (definition from their documentation) is “a technology that makes the labor of individuals more visible and rewardable as they work together in a project or community. The goal of SourceCred is to use this technology to make rewarding labor as nuanced as human contribution often is”.
In short, it tracks users and their contributions and lets other community members reward each other with “cred”: an abstract measure of contribution. If we can use the communities’ feelings to rank the communities’ contributions, and reward them accordingly, we’re one step closer to empowering this very same community to decide what matters.
OK, but how does it work?
SourceCred is connected to our Discord instance. From there it reads everyone’s contributions and ranks them… but it doesn’t really know how to score them. Hence, we need to help it by “reacting” to the posts we find the most useful.
By reacting with 🔥, 💯, 👍, you will be recognizing a great contribution and some cred will go to the owner of the post being reacted to.
By reacting with the dappnode emoji, even more cred will flow towards that contribution, so make sure you really want to demonstrate that this is an outstanding contribution: use with caution!
In reality, the minting of cred and its flows are a bit more complicated, but that captures the essence of it. If you want to dig deep in this amazing project, I invite you to read more about it in the SourceCred docs.
At the end of the week, the total cred for each user will be computed and a weekly amount of PAN will be allocated to the contributors.
At the beginning, the distribution of this PAN will be manual and ideally in L2. To make it more economically manageable, there will also be a limit of XX PAN as a minimum to “claim”.
Then the user will be able to decide whether they want to keep making this process cyclical: they will be able to donate or stake all or part of these PAN to DAppNode or another community. If enough donations flow to DAppNode, they will be matched by PAN’s treasury in order to refill the community treasury and keep it rolling, so the cycle can continue indefinitely.
We expect a percentage of the PAN distributed to normally abandon the flow cycle and be sold. This is logic, normal and welcome: it is, after all, a reward for their efforts and they can cash out at any point! But we also expect that a lot of contributions will flow back in and that we will be able to reach an equilibrium that will also be a signal for how healthy the community is.
How about contributions not on Discord?
Contributions on other platforms are often extremely valuable as well, but cannot be properly captured by SourceCred. This is why we have created a channel called “I did a thing” (following SourceCred’s own instance), where people can post their how-tos, blogs, videos, etc., and be given some cred by the community (by means of reacting with the chosen emojis).
Let’s get it rollin’
The first week for this experiment starts today! And on Sunday we will do our first PAN assignment. We are planning to release between 8000 and 10000 PAN this first week and we will revisit the amount before the 2nd week is distributed — bear in mind this is only an experiment!
During the second week we will also be collecting Ethereum addresses for those who want to claim their PAN. We’re hoping to have an automated bot to link addresses to discord usernames to facilitate the process.
Head over to discord now and start participating!
I can’t wait to see how we can create a sustainable reward system!
Apart from our Discord, If you want to be the first to find out about any new DAppNode updates, follow us on Twitter or check out our blog. You can engage with our community on our forum. Finally, consider donating to our Gitcoin Grant!
