Kickback Challenges: Feedback & Next Steps
After 30 long fought days, Cohort 1 of Staking 4 Fitness has officially come to a close. Every day for the past month, 20 brave souls got a little bit stronger and a lot more fit by doing a minimum of 20 pushups per day.
In this article we’ll dive into:
- Reflections from the first challenge
- A custom POAP designed by Alex Van De Sande
- Future Kickback challenges
- 3box to power challenge communications
Let’s go!
Getting Started
The pushup challenge started with anxiety looming just a week after the UK (where I live) went into lockdown. In light of a globally mandated quarantine, Staking 4 Fitness became a beacon of hope for people to stay fit by doing pushups with their friends. With an added incentive of staking 0.1ETH to participate, the Skin in the Game nature was a great driver of long-term participation.
As we kicked off Cohort 1, ETH markets were starting to recover from the Black Thursday crash where prices tanked by ~50% in a span of 24 hours. Safe to say, this was not exactly the climate we were hoping for when encouraging people to post collateral to stay healthy!
However, there was a silver lining as the 0.1 ETH being staked went from $13 when we started to a current value of $26 at the time of writing (0.125ETH payouts to everyone who completed the challenge). Congrats on the 2x in USD!
While many countries have started to flatten the curve on COVID-19 and are beginning to ease their lock down, it’s still going to be quite some time before we can freely go outside and socialise with others in high traffic areas — let alone going to meetups and conferences in the meatspace.
What this goes to say is this small daily ritual helped me stay in shape and keep in touch with others around the world. Kickback is now planning new challenges and I would like to use this post to share feedback from the first participants on what it was like to join.
Reflections
We received feedback from 20 of the 25 participants including 2 people who didn’t make it to the finish line.
While the majority of people joined to stay healthy, there were numerous mentions about community, excitement, and experimentation. Out of all those that joined, only one person chose financial incentive as their main motivation for joining.
Following the challenge, 100% of people responded positively — even those who didn’t finish!
Out of the 25 participants, 8 people completed every day, 7 people missed one day, and 5 people missed two days.
When I asked why people missed any given day, there was only one person who deliberately skipped their contribution for that day. The rest had either forgotten about the challenge or forgot to successfully upload their videos.
These responses were quite interesting to me. I have used many activity tracking apps and often give up after failing to log a few entries — even when doing the activity itself.
Even though people became extremely careful after getting their first strike, this goes to show there is definitely room improvement in terms of reminding people to complete the challenge on any given day.
In terms of sustainability, the most popular choice was for Kickback to charge 1 DAI to each participant, though a few people voted for an NFT as some sort of badge or certificate — similar to what we did with Alex’s custom designed POAP.
Who Cheated?
To be honest, I don’t know. Even though I did check if people submitted or not pretty rigorously, I didn’t check each video to see if people had completed 20 pushups.
There were two people who deliberately uploaded fake videos as a test (or to challenge me if I was doing good job policing) but other than that no one identified any cheaters in the wider cohort.
After finishing, we set a three day “dispute period” for other participants to challenge fake or invalid entries. To incentivize this, Kickback rewards those who identify malicious behaviour by distributing the bad actors’ stake among those who acted honestly.
In practice, people didn’t seem to care enough to go and check every single video for a few extra quid. However, I suspect this attitude may change once the stakes become higher and there are more automated tools for making dispute analysis more efficient.
POAP badge from Alex Van De Sande
80% participation on a survey is absolutely unheard of. I believe this is largely due to me telling participants they would receive this amazing Proof Of Achievement Token designed by Alex Van de Sande who is still competing in Cohort 2.
According to Alex, this badge has a double meaning:
“It’s doing pushups but it’s also “pushing” covid away, by staying home and being healthy”
Go ahead and ask anyone who got this POAP! I’m sure they’ll tell you it has some of the highest sentimental value out of all the amazing POAPs they’ve received to date.
Future Challenges
As the end was near, we started discussing future challenges using Github issues .
If you have any ideas, please feel free to suggest new ones here.
For now, I created three challenges which I’m personally taking part in. We’ll also be switching staking from ETH to DAI to avoid additional emotional distress.
Please note that I am happy to create more if any issue gets at least a few 👍.
Based on the feedback we received from the first cohort, we are going to make a few changes moving forward.
Using Discord
For the first two cohorts, we used Telegram channel to post videos and Google Sheets to keep track of progress. While it wasn’t too hard to keep track of one cohort, I certainly wouldn’t be able to monitor multiple challenges at once.
We also found that setting up a unique Telegram channel for each cohort prevented communication across different participants and divided the discussions between two groups which shared a common goal. However, it’s likely that combining two cohorts would make tracking a lot harder.
To solve the latter problem of tracking, we will be using our Discord channel for general communication — making it easier for cross channel discussion while keeping unique cohorts segmented and easily trackable.
3box Smart Chat
Thanks to think-in-universe — an active contributor through the Gitcoin Hackathon — Kickback has integrated the 3Box based chat channel directly into our platform.
While the chat is still rather limited (eg: no ability to upload images or video and receive mobile notifications), it gives more flexibility for us to extend communication among participants.
In our dashboard, we can easily aggregate submissions to keep track of progress. The idea is that users would upload to their site of choice, then share that link on our chat.
This means if you plan on posting from a mobile device, you should RSVP with a mobile wallet like Trust Wallet, Status.im, Opera Touch, or Metamask mobile.
Last not least, let’s end on a high note by sharing some of the comments from our participants.
As you can see, this was a fantastic experiment to test new use cases for Kickback. Watching everyone come together for a healthy goal while simultaneously making some profit was one of the most exciting ways I’ve seen Kickback used to date.
If you’re still reading at this point, it’s pretty obvious you’d like to get involved.
What are you waiting for? Come and join us!
Special thanks to Cooper Turley for reviewing and polishing up this post
