Gnosis X — A Retrospective
What we learned and what we want to change moving forward
Earlier this year we launched the inaugural round of Gnosis X, our community developer challenge. The submission deadlines for all three categories are now behind us.
Unfortunately, none of the submissions we received met our criteria for the evaluation process. More than 80 teams registered for the competition. However, none of the submissions we received included a prototype or working decentralized application.
We’re taking this opportunity to improve Gnosis X.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been gathering feedback to evaluate the weak points of Gnosis X, and we plan to synthesize these findings into a new developer challenge model.
When we asked Gnosis X participants about their experience, the most prevailing critique was that it was difficult, and sometimes unintuitive, to interact with our smart contracts: “I’ve been going through it and I’m concerned about the architecture. It’s been made extremely complicated even for a simple market creation.”
Some Gnosis X participants were also confused by the prediction market protocol documentation: “I’d say to revamp the whole thing, to be honest, and make a youtube series on how to deploy and use Gnosis contracts. It’s also hard to understand some of the underlying logic of your contracts.”
A number of participants also felt that the required level of commitment for the challenge was simply too high: “Spending 6 months on a project and not knowing whether you will take home the prize is too risky.”
Others simply struggled to come up with good prediction market use cases: “We were brainstorming about use cases but simply couldn’t think of a good one at the end.”
Most of the feedback we received about the competition can be boiled down into these four areas:
1) unintuitive smart contracts
2) confusing documentation
3) impractically high level of commitment
4) lack of compelling prediction market use cases
Here’s what we want to change going forward.
The first step we’re taking to better support developers who want to build their own prediction market use cases is to improve our smart contract usability and documentation.
We understand that it can be challenging to invent interesting and novel prediction market use cases. For this reason, we recently launched a series of articles on our blog called “Futurescapes” which showcases a variety of compelling prediction market case studies.
To reach our goal of a decentralized future, it is imperative that we support developers who want to build on decentralized platforms like Gnosis. With Gnosis X, we strive to support the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem and leverage the full potential of our products and services.
With these considerations in mind and an expanded company vision that incorporates our other projects — namely the DutchX and the Gnosis Safe — we are looking to restructure the Gnosis X developer incentive program. Going forward, Gnosis X will apply to all 3 of our platforms, and will be divided into 3 separate tracks:
- Bounties — We will announce specific bounties in order to add additional features, improve our products and strengthen the infrastructure of the Ethereum ecosystem.
- Grant Program — In the coming weeks, we will announce the ecosystem grant program.
- Hackathons and University Outreach — Looking forward, we will extend our focus to developer support within the academic context and in hackathons around the world.
For those developers that have already worked on or submitted prediction market use cases, do not feel discouraged! We would like you to elaborate on your ideas and submit them for our upcoming grant program. If you are looking for feedback on your proposals or want to give us feedback on Gnosis X, let us know at gnosisx@gnosis.pm.
Stay tuned, more details coming soon!
Thanks to Eric Gorski.
