MetaCartel Grants Funding (Wave I)

Mintbase, Kickback, PokeMol, Pepper4D

EP2: Making moves 🏀

DAOs are hard work — but we survived through our first month of operation! And I am excited to announce the DAO’s first wave of funding proposals that have been passed ✅

Introducing…

Mintbase — NFT Demo Day Pilot

$1,500 USD (Proposal link)

Mintbase is a platform that helps you mint, manage and sell NFTs. MetaCartel has partnered with their team to pilot the first-ever NFT ticket conference for the upcoming — MetaCartel Demo Day in Berlin.

Worked with MetaCartel’s resident artist: LoveArtHate (Stefan Stignei) to launch and sell 120+ NFTs (still ongoing) as tickets to MetaCartel’s conference known as ‘Demo Day’ during Berlin Blockchain Week.

During this first pilot, we discovered that these were naturally highly engaging with MetaCartel’s community, naturally leading to many attendees naturally sharing their ownership of their ticket on social media. A report of this data will come post-conference.

Mintbase will be looking to further experiment with how to use NFTs to enable unique and engaging user behavior patterns.

We have decided to fund this initial experiment as we saw that Mintbase would foreseeably provide widespread value to the rest of the community, especially around this initial NFT ticketing usecase.

Odyssy — MetaCartel DAO Frontend

$3,000 (Proposal Link)

Odyssy designed and implemented a mobile compatible web app frontend for the DAO that works without MetaMask using the Abridged SDK. Every user creates an email & password login which manages an in-browser key that is used to counterfactually deploy a smart contract wallet. This work was funded after it has been completed.

UX experimentation around application-specific contract wallets.

Currently maintaining, providing support to the MetaCartel DAO members and also helping fork this implementation off for Yang DAO.

Looking to further implement a native mobile version of the front end with features such as push notifications.

We funded this project as it was a crucial advancement to the UX of DAOs and iterated upon the previous design of Moloch.

Kickback — Orochi DAO

$2,500 (Proposal Link)

Kickback is a events management platform that aims to drive higher engagement and event participation rates through onchain incentive design.

Looking to experiment with a new event system that uses a DAO to coordinate event sponsorship funding and fiat off ramping.

Experimenting with a new DeFi staking business model for their product to then be able to model out what sustainability for the business looks like.

Piloting with an initial DAO run event during Devcon Osaka called —

‘Year of the DAO’

MetaCartel DAO Reputation NFTs — Eric Arsenault

$450 (Proposal link)

Eric is looking to experiment to see if a DAO could feasibly implement a points system that could help gauge internal reputation around various DAO activities by issuing NFTs. These cards could take on additional attributes and can be designed around virtual hats, weapons, disguises, outfits, custom names etc. They can be distributed based on DAO activities such as…

📄 Passed MetaCartel proposals or DAO meetings attended

⏳ Time volunteered that doesn’t result in a proposal

🐈 Project management of portfolio projects etc.

✍️ Odd jobs (onboarding, note-taking, writing article .etc)

🏓 Doing something cool ~

We are funding his work as we believe this is an important DAO challenge to overcome if the DAO will eventually scale on beyond 100+ people. This reputation is key to scaling trust at scale when not everyone has a relationship with each other.

Key areas that the MetaCartel wants to fund and support more work in 🌱

With limited funding and not enough capital to get projects entirely off the ground, the scope of the MetaCartel DAO is relatively small. Despite this, the DAO has a great community network and has a strong ability to work with teams to launch initial pilot experiments to find community traction. Building off the DAO’s strengths, we are looking to fund…

Products that provide consistent utility and value to the Ethereum community and greater Web 3.0 crypto community.

How can we help form a team to build an initial MVP — then get it to be used by 1000 people within the first month? The crypto community is a great testbed for experimenting with the future of work. We can run experiments, get projects out there and immediately understand whether they create value and whether iteration needs to happen.

Initial focus area: work, events, news — replacing Web 2.0 projects

One of the key product strategies the DAO has adopted is to understand how we as a community can replace Web 2.0 products that the crypto community currently uses on a regular basis.

One way to think about this is that we want to replace behaviors that exist today in Web2. This reduces market risk since we know that there’s already a need for these tasks.

By focusing solely on the crypto community, we can overcome Web2 network effects and create our own network effects. These are the equivalent Web2 products that we should seek to displace:

🎟 Eventbrite = Mintbase

🚩 Meetup = Kickback

📙 LinkedIn = ???

💻 Medium = ???

If we focus on these areas and create dApps that are genuinely useful for performing related tasks, we can advance dApp adoption while creating the building blocks to seed the network effects needed for Web3 to flourish.

By moving this data and logic onto open and verifiable protocols, we can have building blocks that can be leveraged for a wide variety of future dApps. We want to encourage ecosystem composability and build a community of projects that can leverage each other to create shared value.

I have an idea, what do I do next?

If you have something that you are already working on or want to share an idea that you may want to work on — the best way to get involved is to first check our out forum. Here are also some relevant forum threads…

If you have any other questions, please attend next week’s MetaCartel DAO public community office hours.

Next — Wednesday 14th August

🐻 CEST (Berlin): 6:00 PM

🗽 New York: 12:00 PM

⛰ Denver: 10:00 AM

🌉 San Fransisco: 9:00 AM