Towards the end of Kickback as we know

Back in July 2021 during Ethcc, we formed ChillaxDAO , consisting of event organisers worldwide. We decided to hold “season zero” for three months where each member organises events using Kickback.

Here is the quick number reflecting our last season.

• 1155 participants staked across 23 events
• 838 attendance (465 unique attendees), leading to an attendance rate of 76% (on average, people attended 1.8 events)
• staking amount ranging from 0.01 MATIC (PolyBuilders) to 15.599 MATIC (Mcon) in a total of 8159 MATIC worth $14,767.

You can read the full stats here.

Despite having great success at the season zero, I made a decision to stop leading Kickback which I started back in 2016 (used to be called Blockparty back then).

Here are a few reasons

• Kickback incorporated (as “No block no party ltd”) back in 2018 with three co-founders, but I have been the only one maintaining the codebase for the last 12 months. Unfortunately, I haven’t added any new features over the previous three months due to some family matter, and I could only spend time fixing bugs occasionally. The ChillaxDAO members have suggested adding many great features, but I have been the bottleneck to the DAO.
• Two of the co-founders (myself and Jeff Lau) are the core dev team of ENS (the third co-founder stepped down back in 2019). With their successful DAO launch, our responsibilities as the founding members have been increasing to the point that we no longer can spend much time developing Kickback on the side.

What does this lead to the future of Kickback?

The service will continue for the time being (including current EthDenver events), though we may not accept new events.

We are now officially looking for organisations (whether a company or a DAO) to take over the operation of Kickback (both website and our backend system). The organisation must have sufficient technical skills to take over the maintenance and the development of our product to the next level. Our frontend, subgraph and smart contract are open-sourced under MIT license. Our backend (using node js and PostgreSQL) is currently closed sourced but we are planning to open-source it prior to the handover.

The handover process could either be a traditional company acquisition (a UK-based limited company called “No block no party limited” with a small amount of investment from Status incubate) or a more radical DAO service takeover. We prefer simple transactions over complex legal paperwork so the transition could be done over the sales of the brand assets rather than the company buy out.

If you decide to take over the operation of Kickback, you will also receive support from ChillaxDAO members (NOTE: ChiillaxDAO consists of our community members and they do not own the share of No block no party limited except me). The transition of customer data will be handled with care. If the transition of personal data turns out to be illegal/unethical, we will seek other ways to hand over information such as issuing POAP badges to all the past attendees based on onchain info.

Our primary focus is for Kickback to flourish in the years to come.

Since I started Kickback in 2016, I have received so many compliments that how our simple “skin in the game” staking system help explain the power of the crypto-economics to people new to crypto. With the help of ChillaxDAO (it is up to you to onboard with them or not), I truly believe that Kickback can be the catalyst of crypto to the mass market. Even though I can’t ride in the driving seat, I still love to join the journey with you as a member of the community.

In the era of anons throwing millions of dollars to jpegs which were minted in 2017 just to satisfy their status ego, how would you help one of the OG crypto projects that started back in 2016 to make crypto to the mainstream?