Kickback and Chillax (DAO): The future of event coordination
How it started:
Don’t you just absolutely hate trying to get a firm headcount on an event? Venues have limited capacity, you need to figure out how much food/beverages to procure, and there’s always that person who says they’re coming, confirms, and ends up not showing up.
Kickback was started to help solve this RSVP<-->NoShow problem by adding a bit of financial friction to the equation. To RSVP, every attendee deposits a small amount of money (crypto) into an escrow (smart) contract.
The event organizer “checks in” attendees:
- the attendee receives their deposit back
- the non-attendees forfeit their deposit and their ante is split amongst the attendees.
Turning 5 years old this month 🎂 (formerly known as BlockParty), Kickback is one of the oldest Ethereum dApps still in active use, tracing its roots back to a pre-DevCon2 social dining event in Shanghai (September 19th 2016).
Until now, if an event organizer wanted to use Kickback, they had to contact our team. We were worried the system could be abused to create fake events and steal from innocent party-goers. We have spent the past few years building reputation in the ecosystem, refining the product, and are now finally in a place where we’re prepared to exit our semi-private beta.
When we set out on this journey, most of the tooling, communities, protocols, were just dreams about what the Future of France might look like. We were ahead of our time, but we are, and always have been, firm believers in decentralized governance.
What’s the best way to decentralise the trust model? DAO! (of course)
We have been big fans of the Moloch DAO/MetaCartel ecosystem for many years. We like the transparency of treasury management. We like how new members must be nominated by existing members. We like how the Guildkick and Ragequit functions help foster a balanced, responsible, and tight-knit community. Rather than trusting organizers, or continuing to manage the process internally, we like the idea of entrusting event creation to a DAO that can take it’s time to grow naturally as a community and ensure the steady and secure growth of the Kickback protocol. We like the ETH network and community.
Since the lockdown started at EthCC[3], we’ve been itching to Kickback IRL, so when the opportunity arose to summon members of MetaCartel to a morning tea at EthCC[4] in Paris, we seized the day. A roundtable of 12 Cartelians decided to join the “Kickback and Relax” experiment as Genesis members.
We named ourselves ChillaxDAO and launched on the DAOhaus platform.“Chillax” (Chill and Relax) also sounds like Chili, the mascot of MetaCartel. The name also signifies that we want to help create an environment where event organisers can help each other to offload their work. If you have ever organised an event, you know that you are the last one who gets to relax during an event.
We want to help ease that burden.
How it works:
To be able to use the Kickback event system as a group,13 of us all joined as DAO members.
Since this is still quite an experiment, we asked everyone to stake 10 MATIC as a tribute in return for 10 shares. We also decided to use the concept of a “season” to set rules for a limited time period.
We are still deciding the ground rules so we’ve decided to call this a “pre-season” with the following ground rules:
- If you are a member you get access to the event creation page to create as many events as you like.
- Each member must create at least one event on Kickback. It can either be a casual event like your next team meeting or someone else’s event, but it has to be a real event. If an event seems like a fake event, other members flag the abuse and the member gets kicked out.
- As a service fee, Kickback will make a proposal to take 10% of the total value locked at the end of the period as a subscription fee. The DAO makes a joint decision to accept or reject the proposal.
- The remainder of the pledge will be distributed according to the performance of the members and reallocate the tribute before we all rage quit to finish the DAO to go to the next season.
Who we are:
ChillaxDAO is more than just a DAO service to have access to the Kickback platform. It’s a collective of organisers who are active in each field and organize many events either online or IRL.
Here is the quick intro of the community our DAO members organise. If you are interested in sponsoring these events, want to participate as a guest speaker, or want to run events in each location, please reach out to us via our DAO members.
London
- Organiser: @makoto_inoue (ENS/Kickback)
- Location: London / Online
- Size: 10~20 ppl
London Ethereum Codeup started back in 2016 and has been a home for Ethereum developers to talk about Ethereum code over beers and pizzas.
During COVID, we shifted to online and focused more on AMA’s bringing guests from Yarn, Aave, and Connext as well as some group code review of YAM and SUSHI. You can watch the videos here. We are planning to get back to IRL from September and welcome all coders in London to join us.
Portland
- Organiser: @0xd2_eth (Daohaus)
- Location: Portland, Ore. USA
- Size: 10~20 ppl
EthPDX has been the consistent meetup for Ethereum OGs and newbs alike for a few years. Like other meetups, we moved online during the worst of the pandemic. Now, we’re taking this opportunity to reboot the meetup with more Ethereum usage built-in, including Kickback and POAPs, all of which conveniently require a wallet ;)
Madrid
- Organiser: @cryptoplaza_es
- Location: Madrid / Calle Don Ramon de la Cruz 38
- Size: 150 ppl
Crypto Plaza is a co-working space in Madrid dedicated to crypto that was founded in March of 2019. The space has a conference space where before Covid, 20 monthly events were organized with attendance of over 2,000 people in total. We have different conference spaces for co-working, depending on the number of attendees and the need to access a workstation.
The events calendar is published at this URL .
The space is open to organize events and meetups for the main crypto communities in the world.
The most important event is the “Crypto Economy Forum” that this year will hold its third edition on November 25 and 26.
In the center of Madrid we have created what is currently one of the largest hubs in the crypto world and we invite the entire community to come and hold events. Organizations like MakerDAO, Balancer, AAVE, RSK, Aragon, Superfluid, Waves, Lightning Network have events on a recurring basis.
This year due to sanitary measures, the space has been practically inactive and the events have been digital, but we have already begun to organize events to return to the level of activity we had at the beginning.
You are Welcome to Madrid, we will wait for you!!
Brussels
- Organisers: @xdamman @cryptodevise
- Location: Brussels / https://citizencorner.brussels
- Size: 20–50 ppl per meetup (1425 on meetup.com)
We started the Blockchain Brussels meetup in 2013 (on Meetup.com). We now have 1425 members there. After a hiatus during the COVID19 crisis, we are back and we’ve already organized 3 events since June 2021.
You are welcome to Brussels!
Belgrade
Belgrade is home to many interesting teams (Tenderly, DeFiSaver, OriginTrail, Polygon, Celsius, etc) and OGs of crypto. This is a fresh new initiative with the idea to gather once a week and talk about never-ending innovations in crypto over breakfast and coffee.
Denver
Mcon.fun & side events
- Organisers: 0xjoshua, DamagedGoods, pet3rpan, Yalortackson
- Location: Denver, CO
- Size: 300+
On September 15th we are bringing the Meta Network together for a rare Cryptopalooza of fun, learning, and experimental growth in all directions. Joined by numerous MetaCartel Ecosystem projects, DAOhaus, Fire_Eyes, POKT Network and DAO allies alike such as 1Hive, Gitcoin, IndexCoop, Yearn, and many more. This event is sure to induce max FOMO and leave minds blown for ages to come 🤯
If you’re not using Kickback for your events are you even in crypto? 😛
