Dear Community,
After the award of the last NFT prize, Robodonna by Simon Wan, on Friday 13th August, I would like to reflect on the NFT pool campaign and share some thoughts.
On 19th April, @AndyKaufman and I submitted a post to the governance forum laying out the basic idea of the NFT pool. This was on the basis of an inspirational post from February 23 (“PoolTogether & NFTs”). The community support, expressed both in the governance forum as well as the weekly community call, was overwhelming and after a successful governance vote, we got to work. Mid May, Andy posted a “Call for Artists” through a medium blogpost, announcing a reward of 100 POOL (back then roughly $2,000) for PoolTogether-themed submissions. On the first day, we already received two submissions.
Timing played a critical role during the whole campaign. When we started brainstorming, NFT art was just really taking off. The kickoff was even before Beeple’s epic Christie’s sale. It feels like it’s already years back! In addition to the public announcement, we reached out to various well-known artists in the hope to collaborate and spark their excitement for the PoolTogether NFT pool idea. This attempt left us pretty disappointed. Even DeFi-savvy creators didn’t respond to requests. To our mind, a $2,000 paycheck was pretty mouth watering and I also discussed with a few artists about what could be an appropriate amount. But in light of the heat of the NFT art market back then, it just wasn’t attractive to most, as a drop on one of the leading marketplaces resulted in a multiple of what we were able to offer. What disappointed me most was that very few creators really understood (or didn’t even care to understand) the potential of the NFT pool and that many didn’t appreciate participating in an OG DeFi protocol initiative due to all the fuzz.
Andy and I felt that we needed help and we were happy that @regisisland joined us and supported us in reaching out to artists. Together we managed to acquire a couple of talented and already successful artists that built the base of the prize pool. This was complemented with some of the (only) 26 total applications from community members as well as outside of the community. Again, we were really surprised by the low number of applicants, which pointed at marketing deficiencies.
The creativity of the artists is something that gave me hope. The small fish in the pool of Hans, the NoLoss hat robot Madonna from Simon - it made me happy to see that artists pick up community elements and come up with really cool artworks I certainly wanted to win and own 
… and then came @Oops. We had to push him a bit to participate, humble as he is, but when he released his artwork portraying key community contributors the hype was real. The artwork came late and the campaign was already running but it helped to catch and keep up attention.
Before launch, getting the polygon pool running caused some headache. We learned that setting a 100% reserve rate on a pool results in no prize draw at all and had to wait one more week after setting the reserve rate slightly lower. Another area of concern was how to present the pool at all. From the outset, the initiators expected that the pool gets added to the PoolTogether app and the UI can get extended through a NFT display, as presented in governance. This was then to our frustration turned down and we were forced to come up with an alternative very quickly. Thankfully, @pedrovilela. We had to push him a bit to participate, humble as he is, but when he released his artwork portraying key community contributors the hype was real. The artwork came late and the campaign was already running but it helped to catch and keep up attention.
The first prize was awarded on June 25th. The timing of the prize draws was good as it fell into the weekly community call, therefore the winner was always announced at a time when there was some attention from the community. Nevertheless, participation in the pool was disappointingly low. At peak, the pool had ca. USDT 60,000 deposits from less than 70 wallets/players. It doesn’t even make sense to start calculating the interest generated for the protocol treasury in light of this number, hence from an economic perspective the project was a complete failure. What could have been the drivers?
- Were the prizes unattractive? We tried to get the best possible NFT artworks into the pool and even enhanced the experience through the ability to win three canvas paintings on top. We didn’t manage to get pak or Beeple to participate, but still some artworks should have been appealing, and participating with a couple of hundred dollars in a polygon pool that comes with limited transaction costs should be fun regardless
- Was the timing bad? Maybe. Between idea generation and launch, the focus in the NFT space completely shifted away from art to generative avatars. During our launch, Hashmarks, Bored Apes, Bored Penguins, Pudgy Dog Beach Club and so on were launched, consuming most of the attention in the space. Cryptopunks went parabolic. In a smaller group, we brainstormed what NFT could be added during the campaign to create some hype. A fractionalised punk? A full Bored Ape? A sorare game card? Axies? The space is so broad, its very hard to pick the right NFT to get significant deposits
- Was the marketing insufficient? My sentiment tends to a definite YES. Spreading the word was performed by community members, mainly Andy, regis and me. The pool was not “officially” PT and thus may have lacked legitimacy. I am confident that adding the Pool with UI adjustments to the application as well as announcements from the official PT twitter acc would clearly have helped a lot. There were times when we felt left alone / unsupported but we had to accept it and make the best out of it. In addition to internal resources, I think in retrospect that it would be beneficial to team up with a high profile NFT project which allows us to tap into an NFT community for more attention and participant access. For example, teaming up with $MEME and integrate a NFT pool into their offering could be promising
- Polygon prize pools were quite new when we started and many people may have been uncomfortable with bridging assets and aping in. I don’t think that USDT added to this but overall the barriers to entry to non-degens were rather high I suppose
We still think it was fun. Even though it was annoying that yearn seems to have won Robodonna and not me. I received pictures from happy winners enjoying the artworks not only in their wallet but on their wall, like this:
Feedback and reflections are very welcome. What did we miss? What could be done better if there is a potential second season of the NFT pool? It would be a shame to bury the well designed landing page and the overall idea as I think there’s much that can be developed out of this.
Lastly, we have remained within budget and got 125 POOL left in the multisig. What should we do with it?
- Send back to treasury
- Hold for the time being until there may be a second NFT pool season
- Other (please specify)
0 voters