Meet pETH: The DAO Coordinator
When it comes to understanding Ethereum, there’s a stigma that you have to be highly technical to take advantage of the diverse ecosystem of tools and products being offered. Here at MetaCartel, we’re looking to change that notion by seeding applications on the forefront of easing user adoption.
Aside from designs that leverage things like meta transactions and optimistic rollups, it’s important to think about how we can further gamify involvement in the Ethereum ecosystem for those on the cutting edge of what’s happening right now.
In today’s interview, I took some time to chat with Peter Jursic, one of the Founding Fathers of MetaGame — an RPG adventure designed to reward users for exploring and contributing to the larger Ethereum ecosystem. In this chat we covered:
- Getting into Ethereum
- The importance of non-technical roles
- DAOs > DeFi
- Founding MetaGame
- Gitcoin Grants CLR Matching
Let’s dive right in!
Tell us a bit about your background before getting into crypto?
I’d say I’m a bit of a wildcard in the sense that I never attended a traditional university. I was constantly searching for something that I genuinely enjoyed while bouncing around from jobs that paid the bills, but weren’t deriving any real value.
I was a fan of a prominent futurist YouTube channel and saw an opportunity for them to cut the length of their episodes down and highlight important snippets and ideas. I decided to reach out and soon enough was running the production, organization and editing of all of their episodes for close to a year.
Unfortunately, the direction of the podcast took a turn for the worse and I no longer felt like it embodied a lot of the values that I had originally loved.
And how did this lead to you discovering Ethereum?
Bitcoin never really caught my attention. Bitcoin is better money but it’s just that — better money — it didn’t really offer any visions of making the world a better place. But when I found Ethereum, I thought “holy shit, this is how we build the socioeconomic system of the future”. The best part was that companies working in the space didn’t seem to care whether you had a university degree or not.
I quickly started thinking, what else can Ethereum do? I was messing around with Colony — a tasks management and work allocation system — and testing some of the first DAO interfaces that resembled Trello but with tokens.
When the DAO first launched, I went almost all in. It seems like almost everyone in Ethereum did at that time. The crash ultimately shed some light on the importance of making sure code is thoroughly reviewed before it’s launched.
I spent the next couple years taking on some freelance projects here and there to stay active and involved.
What does your work in crypto look like?
I’m inherently a non-technical person. The scope of my work constantly changes. Whether it’s something simple like connecting two talented individuals to testing out a product in its early stage to provide feedback, I’m constantly trying to offer insights from the perspective of how an average user would feel trying these applications.
Beyond that, I commonly find myself helping projects find their narrative through blog posts, community development, meme generation, you name it. While developers have their heads down building things, I try and be out in the public spreading the word about projects that deserve it.
What excites you most about Ethereum?
I’m most passionate about the DAO space — namely the opportunity for sophisticated human coordination. While DeFi is great, I’m personally not as fascinated by that as I am by the potential for what DAOs can lead to with the proper foundation.
What has your experience with MetaCartel looked like so far?
I went to a meetup in Ljubljana where Peter was speaking and was quickly onboarded to MetaCartel thereafter. If you’re a part of MetaCartel you’ll probably agree that the onboarding process can be made better and the things that are going on inside and who’s who and does what can be made clearer. I had some ideas on how to make it better and got onto it. Eventually, that internal project became MetaGame.
What is MetaGame?
MetaGame is a reputation system with titles, quests and more. The tasks are all connected to value added actions in the Ethereum ecosystem. Players earn tokens which represent equity in the game. This way we can start building a value system in which people can submit proposals saying “I did __, it took me X amount of time, and I think it should be worth $Y”.
Currently, there are only ways of keeping track of who contributed, but soon we’ll be paying in standard currencies and eventually *hopefully* make that equity worth something.
I personally think security by reputation is an illusion. Instead, MetaGame will be stake based. If you want to do a task, you stake to guarantee. If you don’t do that task you’re slashed. In this sense we’re hoping to encourage active participation to get tasks done faster. At this point it’s free to play but in the future we envision it likely shifting into a paid subscription.
At first, MetaGame was just an internal MetaCartel project, meant to make navigating and ascending the MetaCartel easier. But as we imagined other DAOs and grant giving or service providing organizations join the game as guilds — ones that aren’t necessarily affiliated with the MetaCartel — it had to be a layer above the MetaCartel. Hence MetaGame came to be, and MetaCartel became an alliance of guilds inside MetaGame.
For right now, we’re in the early stages of building out the project. The game is entirely self-funded, meaning we’re leveraging outlets like Gitcoin Grants to seed it.
Why Gitcoin Grants?
Gitcoin Grants leverages quadratic funding to allow donations to go further. Gitcoin posted a matching pool of $200k which is divided among the most popular projects relative to the number of unique donations it receives.
This allows donors to give a lot when they actually give very little. To show the value of Gitcoin matching, $1 of donations to MetaGame is estimated to deliver ~$100 in value to the project.
This not only encourages more participation, it encourages us to be more active in refining our value proposition to collect more donations so that we can seed ourselves with a larger bank to fund the project. With our funding, we’re planning on hiring some developers to help launch the first iteration of the game.
Where can people reach you?
The best place to reach me is on Twitter, @petheth
If you’re working on anything DAO related and want to collaborate, give me a shout!
— — — — —
That’s all for now folks! Now that we’ve laid a foundation for some of the most active members of MetaCartel, these interviews will be shifting to a reward basis.
We’ll aim to shine light on individuals who have displayed exceptional talent, further propagating the belief that experimentation should be rewarded.
In the meantime, be sure to help keep the dream alive through the MetaCartel Gitcoin Grant or by following the MetaCartel Twitter.
ETHDenver is shaping up to be a huge MC takeover, so if you’re looking to get involved, reach out to James Waugh for more information!
Until next time!
