PTBR-19: Pooltime

Governance PT Budget Requests
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[RFC] PTBR-19: Pooltime

Start date: July 1st, 2024
Est. Timeline: 6 months
Budget: 140,000 $USDC

Pooltime is a team of dedicated long-time contributors who have been meaningfully involved in all layers of the PoolTogether universe. We have a track record of serving the community’s needs while adapting accordingly.

The team consists of two full-time and two part-time contributors:

We are asking the PoolTogether community for a six-month budget extension to sustain our work for Q3 and Q4.

Scope of Work

Motivation

The Pooltime team is obsessed with the vision of onchain prize savings. For us, PoolTogether is one of the very few protocols on the brink of proving true positive-sum financial applications are possible. We’re here to ultimately help PoolTogether in its transition to becoming a true public good.

With the relaunch of PoolTogether V5, we entered a transformative phase for the protocol and its community. PoolTogether is finally at a point where it can scale. We’re ready to focus on highlighting the different parts of the system and the builders who are building on top of it.

Goal

Our goal is to keep this community fun. It should be fun being a Pooler. Members should be proud to be a part of the community and to contribute to making PoolTogether what it is.

We want to bring the excitement for the PoolTogether vision back by setting positive examples and empowering members of the community to achieve their goals.

Milestones & Deliverables

In our pursuit to promote PoolTogether, we’ve often been too quiet about our own achievements as a team. We acknowledge that this creates a difficult setting. Going on from here we strive to build more in the open and ensure no single improvement or milestone goes uncelebrated by providing regular updates on the forum.

Community Building

We act as a bridge between the protocol, brand, community, builders, and lurkers. This community needs care and safe spaces to get together and align. We are dedicated to responsibly maintaining, nurturing, and safekeeping our community spaces, providing a secure and inclusive environment for anyone who wants to engage with the PoolTogether ecosystem.

  • Maintain spaces for the community: Ensure the upkeep and security of community spaces across various platforms.
  • Host weekly Community Calls: Organize and facilitate weekly calls to engage community members and discuss protocol updates.
  • Manage delegation budget: Administer a $100,000 budget to support growth and community initiatives.
  • Sustain a level playing field: Enforce the community code of conduct to maintain fairness and inclusivity.
  • Create a space for knowledge transfer: Members of our team have been around since the PoolTogether stoneage. We are looking to open-source our knowledge by creating a space to drop PoolTogether knowledge bombs.

Social Media Management

We lead PoolTogether’s brand efforts across various social media platforms, keeping the community informed and providing ways to get engaged. We’re constantly monitoring any mentions of PoolTogether and related keywords and engage accordingly. Over the coming weeks

  • Amplify protocol updates and collaborations: Share updates, collaboration news, and success stories to keep the community informed and excited.
  • Interact with users: Engage with user-generated content, cross-post inspiring stories, and highlight key community members and integrators.
  • Announce major enhancements: Celebrate winners and announce new features and protocol improvements.
  • Share Interesting stats: Provide regular updates on key metrics, such as prize distributions and participation statistics.
  • Remind about opportunities: Keep the community informed about current opportunities, such as reward programs and upcoming campaigns.
  • Create a multi-part content series: Develop a series of articles to educate about prize savings with PoolTogether.

Handles and spaces we oversee for the PoolTogether community:

Pooltime App & Toolsuite

We are enhancing the user experience through pooltime.app and associated tools.

  • Upgrade landing page: Develop an intuitive landing page to welcome new and existing users.
  • Optimize for mobile friendliness: Ensure the app and tools are optimized for mobile use.
  • Improve monitoring: The Pooltime API allows to easily tap into PoolTogether data. We are looking to set up additional public monitoring events in #pooly-bot.
  • Innovate on prize hooks: Integrate features leveraging prize hooks to run engagement experiments and showcase possibilities of protocol tech.
  • Gas-free transactions: Explore options to make the Pooltime app gas-free.
  • Smart wallet integration: Investigate the integration of smart wallets for a more seamless user experience.

Pool For Good

We aim to leverage the protocol for social impact by creating and promoting “Pool For Good” as PoolTogether’s charitable arm. The community has already shown clear support for the idea and we are ready to execute the foundation work.

  • Set up Charity Prize Vault: Establish a prize vault dedicated to charitable causes.
  • Inject OP Incentives: Provide Optimism (OP) incentives to encourage participation.
  • Create Social Media Posts and Blog Articles: Promote the charity vault through various content channels.
  • Create Documentation: Develop comprehensive documentation to support the charity prize vault initiative.
  • Develop Front End: Develop an interface to interact with and display information about Pool for Good.

Contributor Fund

We plan to support builders and contributors by providing funding and resources to encourage involvement and innovation within the PoolTogether ecosystem. We have bootstrapped the contributor fund with $17k, which we are planning to put into action soon.

  • Create Documentation: Develop detailed guidelines and documentation for accessing the contributor fund.
  • Distribute Funds: Allocate funds to contributors to support their projects and initiatives.

Proposal Support

Anyone should feel empowered to engage in shaping PoolTogether. We continue to offer assistance to anyone aligned with PoolTogether’s vision and values.

  • Copyread RFCs for PTIPs and PTBRs: Provide editorial support for requests for comments and proposals.
  • Provide $POOL Delegations: Allocate $POOL tokens to support proposal creation.
  • Assist in Bringing Proposals Onchain: Help move proposals through the necessary stages to be implemented onchain.

Budget

  • Total Requested: $140,000

Status

The proposal is live onchain.
Please vote: Tally | PoolTogether | PTBR-19: Pooltime

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We’d like to invite anyone with feedback, questions, or suggestions to join the upcoming Community Call on Thursday, 2024-07-04T18:45:00Z. We’ll be there to discuss our RFC with you.

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Thanks for this @Tjark - I really appreciate the incredible work the PoolTime team has been doing!

Looking at Q3 and Q4, does PoolTime have quantitative targets for this 6 month period around Community Building and Social Media Management? Could be engagement, adoption, usage, partnerships, growth, etc. If so, I’d be curious to know what they are. Basically, what measurable outcomes do you see being realized over the next 6 months?

PTBR-17 included some of this data, and I’m be curious to know what things look like now versus then as well :+1:

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Thanks for the PTBR, @Tjark!

I’m a big fan of Pooltime, and it’s my preferred interface. I love the simplicity of the UI, and I enjoy the detailed metrics available. I appreciate everything you, @underthesea, @Lonser and @Shivansh are doing within Pooltime.

The charity vault is a great initiative, and I believe this usecase can attract others to build on top of V5, as prizes for good is a great value proposition for everybody in the space. Gas-free transactions and wallet integrations would go a long way, as well, to help with growth.

Maybe Coinbase Smart Wallet is in the pipeline?

I don’t have any comments. I think the work being done by Pooltime is a bargain for what the community gets in return. Keep up the great work!

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I’m curious how many users stETH.win attracted - especially outside of the core community?

I think if you were to ask anybody if they think the idea of raising money for charity is a good idea, they’d likely answer, yes. But how many actually made use of it(?).

Personally, at this point, I’d prefer to see work done towards simplifying the creation of prize-linked PT NFTs (if possible). Supposedly this functionality has existed for a good while now, but to the best of my knowledge there are still zero PT prize-linked NFTs in existence. My gut tells me this avenue would likely be more popular if done right than the charity thing. Which I’m not against - but if it’s simply a vanity-project in-keeping with PT’s “the nice guys of DeFi” image, but with no interest outside of the core-community - the time and money might be better spent elsewhere…

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Some numbers at a glance:

Looks like stETH.win was launched some time around Mar 23.
Currently there are 129.45 ETH in the vault.
91.4 of these were donated/deposited by PoolTogether.
12.6 donated/deposited by the Witnet Foundation.
Which leaves 25.4 Eth deposited by users over 15 months. I’m guessing most if not all of this came from core community members(?).

Added for context. Correct me if wrong. But these numbers do not suggest to me that “the (wider) community has shown clear support for the idea”.

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@BubbaHoTep I believe you’re referring to the NFT Sweepstakes deliverable that G9 has included in their PTBR, which was recently funded. You can see this deliverable in G9’s most recent PTBR.

NFT Sweepstakes
NFT Sweepstakes1145×557 49 KB

Editing my tweet here to follow up on the charity vaults idea.

Personally, I love this idea. We’ve seen people in the DeFi industry rally around efforts to fundraise for legal defense funds, political lobbying groups, public goods, etc. If Rokti and other great infra apps could host a prize pool in their dApp that allowed people to deposit and a portion of the yield went to fund their project, that would be a massive usecase.

I deposited into stETH win, and when it launched on Ethereum mainnet, gas fees were high. That was cost prohibitive, but that’s solved for with v5 on L2s.

It also wasn’t heavily marketed, and I don’t recall the main PT accounts advertising this community effort. Because there wasn’t much awareness, it didn’t take off. However, if you have one good usecase, it could definitely take off.

I think charity vaults are a great initiative for Pooltime, and that’s on top of all the great work they’re already doing in the community, making all prize vaults accessible/discoverable in the Pooltime UI, showcasing rewards and stats in detail in the UI, etc.

Providing value for NFT holders would have been great in the previous cycle, but I don’t think there’s much benefit beyond an application of that delegation function for POAP collections. I don’t see it as a major growth unlock.

Agree on that point. I’m looking forward to G9 providing us wrong, but I’ll say that’s offtopic for the Pooltime PTBR discussion.

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Perhaps. Though if it’s just a function for allowing people to delegate funds to an NFT collection, then no, not really. I’d be surprised if that got much use beyond the occasional and fleeting marketing gimmick.

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It’s possible I’m being grouchy on this (though the stETH.win numbers don’t really lie in terms of general interest). I’ll admit I’m not the most charitable of persons. That said, my stance on this is inline with something I heard in a movie I can’t quite remember (possibly Wolf of Wallstreet) - “You know why I like being rich, because with lots of money you can donate to causes of your choosing, build a hospital wing, whatever” I remember when the HEX boys were at their peak, they were doing all kinds of fantastic things. With a broke-ass community of token-holders like us, we were lucky to scrape 25 ETH together over 15 months to build a well.

Or to summarise: charity second, create value first.

As for the NFT thing, I believe (but could be wrong) that PT prize-linked NFTS could be popular if it were baked in at the point of minting. i.e. all of the mint-money goes into an associated vault. And preferably the trading royalties too. To create “up-only” value for the collection. The vault gets bigger-and–bigger the more people trade the collection. But your right, this is off-topic. So I’ll say no more… :slight_smile:

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The value that PoolTime team delivers in community engagement, management, and promotion continues to be top tier quality and I support this team and PTBR.

I support the Pool For Good initiative as well since it’s a chance for the team to look back on previous charity attempts and learn from the mistakes to make it better. PoolTogether as a protocol is in a position that allows for diverse experimentation and I fully support the exploration of niche applications that leverage and build on the V5 infrastructure.

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Thanks for all the responses so far!

@nopey.eth has been asking for some quantitative data:

  • Our PoolTogether bots captured 95+% of all liquidations
  • Involved in the acquisition of three Optimism grants (Sherlock audit, Trail of Bits audit & rETH user incentives)
  • Published 6 articles on Mirror, growing the blog to 607 subscribers
  • Published >100 tweets gaining 446K impressions. This is 162% up from Q1 of this year.
  • Earned the power batch on Farcaster, growing the handle to 458 followers
  • Grew Contributor Fund to >$17k

A look at the current social audience:
Discord 11413
Twitter 49349
Lens 5257
Farcaster 458
Mirror 607
Zora 471
Substack 2303

In the history of Defi it’s been incredibly hard to predict any future meta. We learned that setting the wrong goals has previously created both wrong expectations and a situation where we tried following up on things with limited impact or bad timing.

Our new approach would be to work a lot more in the open and work together with the community for swift action. Tell us what you’d like to see and we’ll work on realizing it.

Generally, we want to see all numbers go up. The immediate goal is to get 100% increase in impressions on our content and ultimately to increase the adoption of all PoolTogether interfaces.

Thanks for all the flowers, @BraveNewDeFi! Yes - we’ll actively look to improve UX further and have earmarked smart wallet compatibility.

:pray:

I wish I had some better numbers but the Dune dashboard we used was pre Dune V2.
The first run did not get the attention it deserved and was rather run as an experiment. It wasn’t connected to the V4 prize pool, nor linked from other PoolTogether interfaces. The project sadly fell into the gap between V4 and V5.

This time we’ll be able to promote the charity component across interface, bootstrap it with incentives and directly grow the V5 prize pool.

This is something the G9 team is actively working on! We will help where we can.

This is what I love about this: it can do both. Any charity vault will directly contribute to growing prizes.

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Thanks for the updates! I’m onboard :rocket:

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We published our PTBR onchain. The voting period will start in a day.

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Respectfully we are yet to see any funds go to contributors and I could pick apart every bullet point. It seems that the only person to believe any of this in voting is more delusional than this post and you voted to fund them too.

Luckily if you all stick to your statements in the council channel, this will be the last funding request by pool time. Even with that, I’m not sure a rate of $280k a year is worth social Media management and an updated landing page.

I can confirm that you interact with users by twisting words and offer false promises. Seeing funds go to builders will change my mind, but the only thing funded in the past 18 months are pool time, Gen software, and $100k for liquidity for some reason. You had a builder and I can confirm outgoing contributor awards are about $28 per month on average.

I’m not sure how $140k is justified