PTIP-8: PoolTogether NFT implementation and marketing campaign

[gabor]

PTIP-8: PoolTogether NFT implementation and marketing campaign

Co-authored with @AndyKaufman

Simple Summary

Improvement of the DAI Pool loot box through NFT-related user interface changes and a marketing campaign with the aim to raise awareness of the DAI Pool loot box as a marketing instrument within the NFT creator community. The intended outcome is to attract new players, create additional value for already participating players and increase the perceived value proposition of the DAI Pool loot box for both players and NFT creators.

Abstract

This proposal will allocate 1,500 POOL from treasury to a multisig wallet to

1. Fund the development of user interface changes with 200 POOL to improve the visibility of the content in the DAI Pool loot box
2. Sponsor a series of PoolTogether-themed NFTs with creators that would be sent to the DAI Pool loot box week by week, with a targeted sponsorship of 100 POOL per NFT (in total 11 NFTs)
3. Reward 100 POOL each to the two contributors of this governance proposal

Motivation

As the world largest no-loss lottery, PoolTogether provides a valuable entertainment and service to encourage people to save money. In addition, PT participants get acquainted with crypto currencies and gain the additional exposure to the new area of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space.

A feature of PoolTogether with untapped potential is the loot box. The loot box is a donation box where anyone can donate tokens or NFTs. At the end of each lottery period, the loot box is also sent to the winner that rounds lottery. The loot box is mostly used by other crypto projects to reach the PoolTogether community for marketing purposes. At this juncture, donations of NFTs are hidden and donors only reach the c. 4,800 players but there is no additional marketing towards e.g. the c. 19k followers on Twitter.

In light of the rapidly growing NFT space, the loot box is significantly undervalued, unexplored and a missed opportunity for PoolTogether to create additional value to players as well as to contribute to the broader NFT and DeFi ecosystem.

Specification

Overview

Additional Features of loot box display to encourage more artists to contribute NFTs:

• Featured NFT on DAI Pool main page
• Gallery view integration of contributed NFTs in a separate section (to avoid the risk of too much fuzz on the main page)
• Links to artist profiles on relevant platforms including rarible, opensea, makersplace, SuperRare etc.

Benefits for artists to participate in this loot box promotion:

• Selected artists are paid 100 POOL for their PoolTogether themed pieces
• This provides artists with more exposure in the crypto world
• If minted e.g. on Rarible, the artists will still make a defined percentage on all sales as commission/royalty

Rationale

We chose this set of integrations as they both reward the artists for their commissions by actual payment for their work as well as further exposure in the crypto world. Having the loot box display NFTs through a gallery style view encourages others to increase the value of the DAI prize through their donations and potentially attract more PT players.

The web designer to implement these changes is assumed to be part of the PoolTogether Inc. team (or could this be opened up to the community?) should be compensated for their time as well. The first iteration of this PTIP comes from this forum post. In this PTIP we focused primarily on the first point (PT x NFT Artists) as it provides the greatest benefit for work & funding required. We could explore the other two options in the future.

The next steps for us are to reach out to more artists to make this a successful campaign. We have already received positive indicative responses and are hoping to find more if the proposal passes. The first confirmed artist contributing to the PoolTogether NFT campaign is Simon Wan who together with Robin Schmidt from The Defiant as well as MEME created the highly successful Rug Pull experiment in the second half of 2020 that was sold for ca. $65k (and got rekt ). Simon Wan is known for colorful neon scribbles and just announced an upcoming NFT drop under the title “OBLIQUITY”. The creators of this proposal would also like to encourage both @Oops and @qwercus as gifted creators within the PoolTogether community to also grab brush and pencils!

PoolTogether could also do a public call for artists to create PT themed NFTs in a competition and reward 5 of them with 100 POOL as compensation, decided through community vote. This creates community engagement.

To incentivise artists to continue to donate, our short term solution is to have a 11 week campaign with 1 sponsored NFT per week. We would encourage artists to use the Rarible platform to mint their NFT artwork. This way they will earn a set commission on all subsequent sales of their work, in case the loot box winner decides to sell the prize. The sponsored NFTs will be added separately week after week to the DAI Pool loot box which is the prize pool with the largest number of players (4,823).

If the initial campaign turns out to become a success, the community can vote to increase budget to sponsor more and/or higher profile creators.

Technical Specification

The proposal does not require changes to contracts as the NFTs will be awarded as per the current DAI prize pool strategy.

Status

Vote on PTIP-8

• For
• Abstain
• Against

[AndyKaufman]

Glad we got this going! Here is where the idea for this proposal came from. We focused on the first portion as it had the highest potential and also be attainable now!

The only thing to change is that @Leighton mentioned the team will implement the NFT viewing on pooltogether.com without any need for compensation . So actual adjusted budget is 1300 POOL.

Excited and ready to get this going~

[Torgin]

This is really awesome and has my full support.

One thing I would like to add is that the featured NFT should also be displayed on the “winners” page of past pools. Example: PoolTogether App

A featured NFT should also come with a guaranteed tweet from the official Pooltogether twitter account, tagging the artist. With 20k followers, this will surely be an attractive prospect to up-and-coming artists.

[Brendan]

I think this marketing campaign is a brilliant idea; especially in light of how popular NFTs are right now.

When PoolTogether V3 first launched we promoted the loot box heavily, and it received a healthy amount of donations. However, it’s usage has died off to nearly nothing. It’s largely marketing-driven, so having a continuous marketing campaign makes a ton of sense to me.

We were very careful about adding NFTs to the app, because:

1. Opening the app up to user generated images is very dangerous. It requires curation, and in no way can it be permissionless.
2. It’s not core to the product. NFTs are cool but it’s just a side show to the cash prizes.
3. It’s a lot of work to do it right.

Being an 11-week campaign, I think this would make way more sense as a separate pool. The people who join will be specifically interested in NFTs or the artists themselves. The users will be way more engaged and have a higher chance of winning, rather than being diluted by the whales in the main prize pools.

Additionally, this could be launched on Polygon quite easily. OpenSea supports NFTs on Polygon, so you would be able to trade / display them easily.

This is what I suggest:

• Create new prize pool for the NFT campaign.
• Create a landing page for the campaign (Webflow makes it super easy). The landing page can link to the prize pool site and show the current NFT prize and past winners.
• Award the artists in POOL, as you outlined.
• Announce the new prizes and winners on Twitter / Discord
• Crank up the reserve rate to 100% on the pool to cover gas costs (hopefully!). Only the NFTs are the prizes.

You also have the option here to instead create a pool on Polygon. Much cheaper.

The real work here is in the artist selection and promotion.

So, to summarize:

• I love this campaign idea. However, I think it should be a focused effort for NFT-lovers and art fans in a separate prize pool
• Being a short run of only 11 weeks, it should have it’s own landing page and be pushed constantly through to social media. The landing page can have all of the info and link to the prize pool page.
• Gabor and Andy need a budget of POOL to run the campaign.

My big push back is that adding NFTs to the flagship app is much more complex and opens us up to all sorts of problems. It’s not worth the effort for a short campaign.

[chriscrypto]

@gabor - you have my support! I’ve been a fan of this for a while now. Ready to help collaborate with designers to help make the NFTs too.

[AndyKaufman]

This is a great set of ideas and it makes a lot of sense to implement it this way. Seeing as NFT’s can be a whales game gas is something they will have to eat. Although polygon does sound appealing I believe keeping the prize on ETH is important especially for NFT ownership & artists ability to mint with Rarible to maintain their royalties on sales.

Unless there is some roundabout way to have the pool on polygon yet award it on ETH?
Seems unnecessary but curious to know more.

[Brendan]

Unless there is some roundabout way to have the pool on polygon yet award it on ETH?

That’s an interesting idea.

What if you simply created an Aave Dai prize pool on Polygon? You could configure it to be one winner, and just manually transfer the NFT to the winner each week. Once the NFT prizes run out, it just converts to a regular prize pool.

If someone has some basic coding skills you could fork the reference app repo and add some explainer text to it, then host it at a cool domain. So the domain could be something cool like app.nft.lotto then have the webflow landing page at nft.lotto

Hmm…that would be fun.

[McOso]

I am available to assist on the development side if need be.

[gabor]

@Brendan - very good input! I thought long about this and basically I end up in seeing two alternatives, using 1) DAI Pool or 2) create an NFT Pool. Both options have pros and cons.

1) DAI Pool

Your concerns regarding safety are understandable and the intention is that it is indeed curated. On the main pool page, only a featured (curated) NFT should be displayed and upon click on a gallery view button, the other NFTs would appear. Although censorship is against our beliefs, PT shouldnt be exposed to reputational damage from inadequate content displayed, so also in the gallery view there should be the ability to filter to some extent. With this approach, the risks should be manageable. NFTs in any case will remain a side show regardless of being integrated into the DAI Pool or a separate pool.

Still, I see the following pros for going with the DAI Pool:

• DAI Pool loot box is relatively established
• The DAI Pool has by far the largest number of players who wouldnt need to withdraw some DAI (and pay gas) to join a new pool

A big disadvtantage still is:

• very whale heavy - but if they want the NFTs they will easily make large deposits in the NFT pool, too. A solution could be to allow - if technically possible - each wallet only participate with 1 count regardless of number of tickets

2) NFT Pool

Conceptually an NFT Pool could also be a very interesting idea and actually create value for the POOL treasury. At a sponsoring of 100 POOL, at current market prices such Pool should operate sustainably (i.e. self funding) through interest generated on c. $1m AuM if no interest is paid out. In theory such pool could run perpetually and fund artists as long as the interest generated is enough to cover the costs. If the NFT Pool becomes a success (imagine someone like pak doing a feature and whales depositing millions to increase chance of getting it), the treasury could actually even make a decent profit. I can also imagine that such pool can attract larger deposits. Instead of paying numerous ETH on NFTs, a no-loss deposit to increase the chance doesnt sound bad to me.

Pros:

• Dedicated Pool may catch more awareness, less “side show” character
• Potential to generate profit for the treasury if deposits are large enough
• Could be implemented on L2, making it cheaper to join (but less straightforward for average user?)
• No tainting of main pool in case of questionable content
• less whales from the start - but I would assume that large deposits will follow in case of attractive NFTs, opportunity costs will be weighted against chance to win NFT instead of buying

Cons:

• Opt-in requires action from players whereas in existing pools the base of potential winners is already there and large
• doesnt support the loot box in the main DAI pool
• if its not a pool governed/sponsored by PoolTogether but a separate lending page, there is a risk that it will be on Google Page 2 and perhaps very limited players will find it / care about it

Correct me if I’m wrong but the Polygon DAI Pool so far has seen very limited adoption with less than USD 100k deposits. Cant find the number of players but assume its rather low? Participating in the NFT campaign should be as easy as possible which would be an argument for Option 1.

Will take a look at webflow over the next days. I must admit that the idea of a dedicated landing page is appealing.

[AndyKaufman]

Hey sorry on the late reply @gabor

You’ve clearly defined benefits and setbacks of both options. I do believe the NFT pool itself will be the most beneficial as a whole especially with the 100% reserve rate and pure focus on the NFT’s being put up for winnings. There should also be a set period between deposits being live and first prize being drawn. I think 2 weeks after first deposit is reasonable. With the 100 POOL sponsorship that will also still incentivize players to park their money until 1st prize is drawn.

Other option could be to set a timelock for the reserve rate to begin at 50% and then go to 100% after the first week, with first NFT prize drawn on week 2? So week 1 prize is from the yield, 2nd week onwards is strictly NFT.

We are getting closer and closer to defining the PTIP requirements.

There should still be a light implementation of the lootbox on the main DAI prize pool as that was the original intention of this proposal. A simple UI warning making users aware that the content they see is not sanctioned by the PoolTogether team & a flagging system by users could do the trick.

[Brendan]

Correct me if I’m wrong but the Polygon DAI Pool so far has seen very limited adoption with less than USD 100k deposits.

The Polygon pool had over $500k at it’s peak, but after the rewards stopped people began withdrawing.

The other really valuable point to make is that by creating a separate prize pool for the NFTs we can directly measure the success of the campaign.

• People who deposit into the NFT prize pool will do so specifically because of your promotion
• We’ll be able to see the ROI for the POOL spend in terms of the TVL increase.

Keeping this as a separate experiment will make it much easier to measure.

There should still be a light implementation of the lootbox on the main DAI prize pool as that was the original intention of this proposal.

I’d prefer to keep this proposal laser-focused on the NFT marketing campaign. The NFT campaign will also show whether there is interest in NFT prizes, so we can use that information to properly plan our NFT strategy.

[RegisIsland]

I have been thinking about the best way to get the maximum number of entries into an nft drawing and the gas fees keep popping in my head. Without some solution to this problem I can’t imagine too many regular users spending 300$ to get in and out of the pool for a small chance at winning the nft. I know it has been proposed to take 100% reserve from this Pool, but I think we would attract more entries if we found a way to reallocate that interest back to depositors. I know balancer has a gas reimbursement in place currently. Perhaps we could use that to help entrants with gas cost. Either that or allocate some amount of POOL to the nft pools. If we allocate POOL and keep 100% reserve our protocol still gains money for the treasury. This idea will greatly increase exposure to PoolTogether with good artists contributing. I think this is an amazing application for PoolTogether and I want to see this succeed.

[AndyKaufman]

Just double posting this here. Can also be found on discord at #swim-meet-team

Discussion between Gabor, myself & Torgin, with input from RegisIsland as well.

notes from our ptip8 discussion
-gas fee reimbursement would be too expensive on ETH most likely?
-if on polygon prizes simply send the NFT manually on ETH from a multisig wallet. Polygon pool, ETH reward seems to be the choice.
-Make an account on opensea or rarible for PT collection. PT inc would set up the account? or a multisig if possible. Up to artist to decide if they want to mint or have PT mint.
-Scale the release of artists based on popularity
-Potential POOL drip (or other token, based on yield) on polygon/matic, since you are not losing anything, chance to win NFT and still receive DAI or POOL. Take small % of yield to drip. about 50 POOL equivalent drip per day?
-Own landing page on polygon for the NFT Pool
-PT inc. member to help set up pool if needed?
-Pipeline for artists
-Write up for call to artists on medium article (for PT)
-Lootbox usage, encourage artists to still submit to lootbox if not selected. Art will be displayed through new lootbox UI
-wait list of sorts from call to artists if not selected for this first round. We can contact them for future rounds if continued.

[qwercus]

@AndyKaufman

Although polygon does sound appealing I believe keeping the prize on ETH is important especially for NFT ownership & artists ability to mint with Rarible to maintain their royalties on sales.

I don’t know about rarible, but opensea is actively working on bringing polygon NFTs into the same site/app so creators could still create a collection, set up their royalties, and put them in the polygon pool.

I know that I can see my NFTs from polygon already, but I haven’t tried to create/buy/sell them.

[Torgin]

Can NFTs from Polygon be bridged to Ethereum? I think if we get contributions from big artists, we’d want the NFTs to be able to be put onto Ethereum. That’s where the main market for expensive NFTs is.

[qwercus]

Looks like some can. Matic - Marketplace

It’s currently shaping up that the more stereotypical art pieces are on mainnet and the NFTs for gaming are being used/originating on layer2.

This doesn’t give anyone a firm answer on what to do though.

[RegisIsland]

I know there is a bridge from ETH to polygon but I’m not sure if you can mint on polygon and then bridge to ethereum if that’s what you mean.

[ericreid9]

Loot box is a killer feature of PoolTogether I agree. Could be a great marketing platform for other projects

[RegisIsland]

I was thinking it might be a good idea to put one of our really popular artists first. Really build hype and get people to join the first pool. They will be more likely to stay once they’re in. Also with how much activity is on matic now I think we can do the lottery there. We could be one of the first NFT “drops” on matic. Could be good marketing strategy. We can mint it on Ethereum and bridge it over to polygon.

[AndyKaufman]

I am still a firm believer that minting on ethereum is better and more legitimate. Can still draw prize on matic and then use multisig to simply send the NFT to said winner.