PTBR-22: Watchman Labs

Governance PT Budget Requests
1

:rotating_light: PTBR-22: Watchman Labs :rotating_light:

Watchman Labs
Start Date November 1st, 2024
Duration of Work 2 months
Budget $13,000 USDC

Summary:
Watchman Labs will drive Prize Pool Contributions (PPC) and thus grow Total Value Locked (TVL), and Total Unique Wallets (TUW) while exploring innovative ways to build with the PoolTogether Protocol.

By engaging with partners and attending events, we aim to enhance PoolTogether’s reach, build key partnerships, and ultimately drive lasting growth.

Recent Wins:

  • Coinbase Onchain Summer NFT Activation resulted in 4.9 million mints, 8.5K smart wallet mints, and led adoption across all Base campaigns by a factor of 3.
  • In one month, raised $4K+ in Prize Pool Contributions, equivalent to a prize pool contribution of $2.2 million USDC on Base.
  • Currently in talks with Gnosis for Prize Pool sponsorship.

These successes highlight the potential of strategic collaborations and innovative campaigns. By leveraging similar tactics and relationships, Watchman Labs will drive PoolTogether’s growth in PPC, TVL, and TUW.

Scope of Work

Motivation:

Following the successful launch of V5 and the introduction of permissionless vaults, PoolTogether is poised for significant growth. This proposal seeks to capitalize on that momentum by increasing PPC through strategic partnerships, product innovation and incentives.

Goal:

To grow TVL in the WSTETH/ETH vault to $7 million by December 31 2024 so that we unlock the remaining 92K OP in Bonus Rewards.

Coordinate with Pooltime and G9 Software to launch pooltogether.yearn.space, while finding incentives for current vaults and finding new vaults to feature.

Promote Gnosis Vault Boost and encourage continued and greater investment.

Raise $13,000 in prize pool contributions by developing strategic partnerships, launching campaigns, and drumming up incentives to drive prize pool growth, TVL and new user adoption.

Milestones & Deliverables:

  1. Partnership Development:

    • Collaborate with key partners like Beefy, Yearn, and other yield sources/chains to expand incentives and reach. Raise $13K in PPC by EOY via direct contribution or vault yield by growing TVL.
    • Work with Beefy and Lido to reach $7 Million TVL to unlock 92K OP by EOY.
    • Continue to create solutions and build out reporting for these partners in a continued process of experimentation to keep projects engaged.

  2. PPC Experimentation:

  • Develop, launch and manage campaigns focused on staking vaults and delegation to grow PPC.
    • Mint and Win Campaigns: Based off of the success of the Onchain Summer Campaign, pursue Base, Circle, and other partners like Privy to launch a larger campaign.
    • Loyalty Rewards: Work with partners like Zerion and Rainbow to provide additional rewards to premium users. Laucnh a campaign that contributes at least $1K to a prize pool.
    • Onchain Action Rewards: Similar to the campaigns above, any onchain action can be rewarded with chances to win. Identify key actions (mint, stake, bet, claim, etc. ) and execute a campaign to reward eligible wallets.
    • Vault Sponsorship Campaign: Identify juicy vaults and pursue partners (yield sources or token issuers) to deposit big TVL and renounce prizes, thus giving vault depositors more chances to win.

Budget

Amount Token
$13,000 USDC

The total request is $13,000 USDC, payable upfront for two months of work.

We welcome community feedback on this proposal and look forward to collaborating with PoolTogether stakeholders to drive the next phase of growth.

6 Likes
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Great to see you put together this initiative @tim! I will be happy to assist your endeavors with any technical questions or integrations that you might need with our existing infrastructure.

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It’s great to see you propose this Tim! Like @trmid said: we will support you as we can!

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I think there is a easy success metric here - does prize generated from these activities exceed the costs? I understand there are other growth factors but could that be the most simple goal to achieve with these efforts? prize generated > $13k?

Why is yearn still a work in progress? PoolTogether Inc gave yearn a significant amount of OP ($25k) to build a interface. This collab goes back at least 6 months and has been presented as deliverables in previous budgets.

How will we grow the wstETH/ETH vault to $7m by December 31? I think it needs more incentives. Why is that not included in the POOL distribution? Value for value is an obvious place to focus. Getting more of these OP rewards is a big win.

What happened with the Exodus campaign? There is this guy asking every week in the discord for months.

For Scroll and Gnosis I think we need more direction. The gnosis $200k sponsorship is great and promoting that is a good idea. What’s next for these chains. What’s the goal and how do we get there?

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Yep. 13k PPC sounds good. Can definitely swing that.

It’s been a V2/V3 prize vault conundrum where most Yearn vaults that we wanted were V2. In exploration it turns out we just need to stick with V3 vaults. Also, they are the ones building the wrapper for the V3 vault so we had to fit that into their development schedule.

It’s good to go now. Time to launch it.

Can definitely loop POOL rewards into this vault, and in conversations with Beefy they were confident we could reach $7 million. Agreed getting that OP is v nice.

I need to coordinate with @Tjark on delegation to 10 wallets. Will do that ASAP.

I think Gnosis is to up the sponsorship and ideally add POOL incentives to match whatever the number is that they’re boosting.

For Scroll, I’ve pitched them an Onchain Summer type mint. I just need to follow up on this.

The goal for Gnosis and Scroll is to find traction with a product and then lean into that product. I think once we start running down hill we can set a PPC goal.

A good goal for Gnosis is to get them to double their sponsorship. I just want something to happen with Scroll that we then can expand.

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First of all, thank you for all the great work done in the past and that you are continuing doing!
I have to agree with some of the critic though, our number one metric is/should be PPC (Prize Pool contributions) and that ideally be done through sustainable real yield sources and not one time Meme Vaults or even sponsorship which will also be gone at some point and which only function is to attract more natural deposits.

I think incentives (ideally provided not only by us but by third parties as well) are here the more straight forward way, it attracts mercenary capital but also regular users that stick around after the incentives end, that’s probably what we found I would assume/say.

Also I think you mentioned in the past also that it is actually quite hard to gather sponsorship (from protocol treasuries for example) vs incentives because other people are a bit afraid of putting too much funds into PoolTogether sometimes themself, risking it to smart contract exploits, which I can kind of understand.

Overall what is in this proposal I would want to see less:

  • Meme Vaults, NFTs, User attraction campaigns, Sponsorship
    More:
  • Attract TVL and high PPC (meaning good yield with good APR) in normal deposits, talks with good yield sources like Morpho on Base to find a way to get them integrated, users being eligible to earn points.

I think stuff like Sponsorship and delegations are cool but have shown to be too convoluted to attract and retain users. PoolTogether is a simple concept, instead of yield you get the chance to win prizes (+atm incentives).

The wstETH-ETH Prize Vault for example, we are providing 19% in OP rewards + the win chances and our TVL is “only” 1.8M of the 2.1M Beefy TVL and the 3.1M total Velodrome TVL. Growing this Vault to $7M will be quite hard.
https://app.beefy.finance/vault/velodrome-v2-wsteth-weth

1 Like
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I don’t think we have to make a choice here. The thing about finding a vault with great APR and then incentivizing to get the TVL is that generally that juicy APR will go away, and we’re off to find another vault, incentivize, rinse & repeat. I’m fine to continue to do this, but I really do think that getting projects to directly contribute PPC is another avenue that we need to continue to explore. Also vault integration requires dev work and I can’t do that, and I don’t think it’s in the G9 contract, and it’s rare to find ready to go yield sources. Happy to continue to navigate this with the community!

Experiments failed on Base because of the competition with Prize Boosting. I think on other chains they can succeed. Same for the Onchain Summer promotion. Tons of mints based on just the idea of a chance to win! That’s all it took for the bots to go cray.

It was very easy to get Gnosis to do it. It was practically their idea. It’s just another tool in the toolbox. Most won’t. Some will!

What do you mean by points?

Definitely open for suggestions on this. I think the easy fix is for you to move $5 milly in there and we’ll be good to go!

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That said, I can add pursue juicy yield sources to the PTBR and reduce some experimentation if the community wills it.

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Just gonna take the little bit that was talked about on the community call. Use the incentives that were forced to pass as a way to boost that beefy vault so we can get those OP incentives to leverage.

Other than that, I think this is a great direction. Like many I think there needs to be some ranking of priority and some metrics put in place to measure success. Top of the list is the wstETH/ETH vault. I think next is working the wallet partner relationships like Zerion and Rainbow, both their wallet apps are starting to really feel buttery smooth so if we can integrate and incentivize anywhere on those then that’s just pure win.

I hope we can make this happen for you Tim.

PS this was cool to see in my inbox

PT BCard
PT BCard690Ă—751 73.9 KB

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I like this a lot. I’ll edit with the feedback and include prioritization.

That card is indeed very cool!

2 Likes