TBR-Q2-2023 - Poolers Team

Governance PT Budget Requests
1

TBR-Q2-2023 - Poolers Team
Team Name Poolers Team
Quarter and Year Q2 2023
Payout Address 0x37f2E3Eea8B705F5645E0A52bc3f223DA72BD795
Total USD Value Requested $41,058 USD

Purpose

The Poolers Team will be responsible for the development of the Poolers NFT project. This quarter we will be focused on building and deploying Poolers in tandem with V5 launch.

With the success of this team we will explore a more general “SWIM” Team that extends Poolers / SWIM Points possibilities and other gamifications for Q3 and beyond.

Overview

Poolers is an NFT project that will launch alongside the PoolTogether Hyperstructure. Users will be able to mint Poolers, choose attributes, and unlock the attributes over time by holding a deposit in PoolTogether.

Goals

  • Coordinated Optimism mainnet launch of Poolers NFTs in tandem with V5
  • Poolers Web App to mint, level up, and burn Poolers with SWIM Points
  • Poolers on-chain SVG NFT system using Friends of Pooly’s ERC721K framework

Budget

Requested Amount

Amount Token
32,000 USDC
8,880 POOL

Budget Breakdown

Team Members

This includes remaining compensation after grant distribution.

Role Commitment Quarterly USDC Quarterly POOL Contributor Contributor Discord
Team Lead / Protocol Engineer 50% $13,000 8,000 McOso McOso#7958
Software Engineer 50% $9,000 - midpoint midpoint#8536
Designer 10% Paid via Grant - noiamgodzilla noiamgodzilla#7207
Artist 25% $10,000 880 dvdsmfer dvdsmfer#8041

More Details of Poolers Proposal

Poolers Proposal

Appendix

Token Pricing

Show the token prices used for any USD calculations.

Token USD
POOL $1.02
1 Like
2

Just wondering has the NFT artist raised their price for round # 2? In your document it shows $5K for NFT’s for each round. Round 1 was already funded and now it’s showing $10,000 to the artist for this budget request.
Also noticed no mention of NFT trade royalties and wonder are those all going to the artist? to the team?

3

Yeah just reconfigured how the budget is disbursed.
So everyone is still getting their comp, including the artist of total $10k

As for the royalties, there was talk about it but nothing set in stone yet, but I personally think they should go to the artist.

4

I do not support this proposal.

I would love :purple_heart: to see all of the team presented here onboard for Q2.

The three reasons I’m against this proposal

#1 Development budget. With $10k funding the NFT art and $50k funding the App and NFT dev costs I think the value of a project like this is unbalanced. I would like to see something like $15k for art $15k for development and think that would be more onpar with where we are at in experimenting with this idea to drive and retain growth to the protocol. One option I have presented to Council is to have it be a generative collection instead of trait based. I have also suggested that if SWIM is approved we should build something that’s more open, an app for SWIM where folks can handle all things SWIM. As I understand it this is presented as only as a Poolers NFT deployment and app.

We recently funded the web3 cards for $25k and it went nowhere. I was skeptical of that as well. In my opinion we need to think more about what users want and what is going to directly impact the protocol. We have spent a lot of resources over the past year on NFT projects, and while I do think they have potential, I’m not convinced those had impact. The protocol doesn’t care about number of transactions, it wants to generate prizes. To do so it needs yield, not transactions.

#2 I’m not onboard with SWIM as it has been proposed. SWIM is presented as having no value but talked about in terms of redeeming for things that have value. A token that you can redeem for anything of value has value. This needs direction. Also as I pointed out in the SWIM thread, if there is no value, we can simply use the onchain TWAB functions to get depositor history and award based on savings activity.

#3 I do not perceive that the council is approving of the budget. I have presented an informal poll to the council of

“Do you approve of The Poolers TBR Budget?”
YES - 4
NO - 6
ABSTAIN - 3

Noting that persons in the YES camp also previously expressed skepticism for the budget.

4 Likes
5

Although I was onboard and interested in this concept to begin with it does feel like we are just trying to do what’s “cool” right now (or was) in DeFi to try and get crypto users interested in PoolTogether.
This is a cool concept but I think we are a bit behind in the NFT space to actually get attention from it. If we had this a year ago sure this could have been big!

Who are the people that can benefit the most from PoolTogether?
Is that a target audience of NFT flippers & influencer types or something else like savers?

I understand some of those questions and my points are out of scope for this / out of your control.

I often hear the narrative “david made some really cool art for X” and then all of a sudden we all jump on funding or supporting it retroactively. If someone wants to make cool art or projects for PT then awesome! But we shouldn’t set expectations to reimburse it every time.

At this time this doesn’t make sense to me to support. Grants team did have the right mindset to get community sentiment first. I don’t see much support from the wider community for this!

3 Likes
6

I understand the long game of this initiative, and it has some merit. It will take a lot of cross-functional effort to make it a success.

What’s the outreach/marketing plan?

I’d love to see you reduce your scope to smaller deliverables that are usable and stepping-stones for the grand vision. For instance, making the Pooler customization UI with limited traits for a simple ETH cost (similar to PoolSuite Grand Trunk initiative). Then next season, add SWIM points+additional traits.

Love the art direction, love the enthusiasm, looking for less upfront risk.

1 Like
7

Thanks everyone for the feedback so far throughout this process.

I would like to suggest a change in hopes to gather more consensus before going on-chain. Would more of the ‘NOs’ be in favor if we keep the same scope for project but adjust the budget more from USDC to POOL with a 1 year lockup?

So the updated overall budget would be $30,000 USDC and 18,880 POOL of which 18,000 POOL would have a 1 year lockup.

Are you in favor now with a 1 year POOL lock?
  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

8

As mentioned in the proposal the app will have a SWIM point claiming and tracking page. Further development of a SWIM app could be possible but would be slated for Q3 team.

SWIM is the tokenized version of how much a person uses the protocol. This is a great primitive to leverage and offers flexibility where a function call would lack, one of which being the function call is limited to the chain it is being called from. I do think SWIM needs direction and that is why this team is being formed; we dont have all the answers up front. So let’s form this team to explore and develop what is best for the protocol. Right now, the plan for SWIM is to be distributed based on how much you use the protocol, and used to mint Pooler NFTs and then roll for traits to add to those NFTs.

1 Like
9

I’m excited about every one of the listed team members. It’s a community dream team. For this perspective the team feels like a great way to get this talent closer to the core.

I do believe it can make sense building fun things on top of bonus point-type systems. As mentioned in my feedback in the SWIM points thread, I see potential in being able to connect the social and protocol layers, and having the NFTs as online identity for Poolers.

Agreeing with @links that this project/product will take a lot of cross-function effort.

It feels like some fear that we end up over-investing in something we don’t end up deeply using or fully integrating. I, for my part, think we can get there but wonder what we can do to get the core community on board and get to that level of cross-functional super coordination we need.

It would be cool to see more work on research on the User Experience and potential impact.

Based on the information that’s public it feels like we have a plan how we’d like to roll out. Did we look at who’s doing something similar? What do they do to make it great and keep it fun?

Maybe some of the early budget for development can be shifted towards research, so someone can focus on that, before having to re-do things at a later time.

In sum I am in favor of the team. I’m bullish on its members and the narrative they want to build. I trust the team to figure things out along the way.

3 Likes
10

We will coordinate with the growth and community team to execute an action plan. The specifics of which will be determined closer to Poolers launch in Q2.

Reducing the scope is an option, but I dont think moving away from SWIM points and towards ETH is a good option. This completely defeats the point of this project, being a fun way to upgrade your Pooler based on your usage of the protocol.

I can offer another option of compromise in the hopes for more consensus. We can reduce the scope to remove the feature for the Artist to add more trait layers in the future. I can make it in a way that adds some additional hard typed layers instead. Even though this isn’t much scope reduction, I will reduce the overall budget by $8k.

My comp would go to $13k USDC and total budget will go to $41,058.

Would those who previously voted “NO” be in favor with the reduced budget?
  • YES
  • NO
0 voters
1 Like
11

Hi everyone! Sorry for the delayed response. I have been busy with the baby so while I have been following along with the conersation, haven’t had a chance to sit at my computer and respond in detail.

#1 Development budget. With $10k funding the NFT art and $50k funding the App and NFT dev costs I think the value of a project like this is unbalanced. I would like to see something like $15k for art $15k for development and think that would be more onpar with where we are at in experimenting with this idea to drive and retain growth to the protocol.

I’m happy with my compensation here. I’m definitely delivering more than that in terms of my workload but more importantly I want to see Poolers released to the world.

One option I have presented to Council is to have it be a generative collection instead of trait based.

What did you mean by generative? AI generated? People don’t really value those as much as trait-based collections. It would also majorly increase the scope of the project. If not AI, I think there was some misunderstanding because it is generated randomly on mint out of a possible 500,000+ possibilities.

3 Likes
12

This is a cool concept but I think we are a bit behind in the NFT space to actually get attention from it. If we had this a year ago sure this could have been big!

I feel like this is actually cutting edge for the NFT space. I can’t think of any up-gradable PFP projects out there (other than Pixel Pooly). With the ERC721K standard that these will be using, we are also able to add things I have never seen done before. We have the ability to swap out someone’s NFT for something new. Maybe this is a 1/1 from another artist or a Golden Pooler that comes with a prize delegation.

Who are the people that can benefit the most from PoolTogether?
Is that a target audience of NFT flippers & influencer types or something else like savers?

The NFT crowd could be a new target audience. Why not?

I often hear the narrative “david made some really cool art for X” and then all of a sudden we all jump on funding or supporting it retroactively. If someone wants to make cool art or projects for PT then awesome! But we shouldn’t set expectations to reimburse it every time.

Fair enough. The idea for a gamified NFT that was more tightly integrated with PoolTogether than any of the previous PoolTogether NFTs came long before the art and McOso’s concept for Swim Points came long before that.

4 Likes
13

I’d love to see you reduce your scope to smaller deliverables that are usable and stepping-stones for the grand vision. For instance, making the Pooler customization UI with limited traits for a simple ETH cost (similar to PoolSuite Grand Trunk initiative). Then next season, add SWIM points+additional traits.

Budget-wise, I can only speak for the art and they would both be the same amount of work.

I’d just like to clarify the difference of this and Pool Suite. They were customizable but were locked in after the mint. Poolers are and will be ever-evolving. You can keep saving on Pooltogether to collect more Swim Points to re-roll your traits and hope for a rare, burn your Pooler to get your Swim Points back to start again or use for something entirely different, we are able to replace your NFT. For example, a Golden Pooler which increases your chance of winning a prize.

A cost in ETH is against the idea of an inclusive project that I wanted this to be. It should be open to all depositors for free (well… for the cost of depositing in PoolTogether). The point being to incentivize usage of the protocol, not sell anything.

.

WHY I AM EXCITED
I was going to do this as a separate post but I’m not able. One more post to share why I am excited about Poolers.

ALLIGNMENT
Poolers is true to what PoolTogether is all about. Incentivizing savings. The more you use the protocol, the more Swim Points you earn, the better chances you have at winning a rare Pooler.

COMMUNITY
This is the more important one to me. Seeing how everyone has rallied around Pooly showed me how strong NFT’s can be in building a community. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same sense of familiarity when you see that purple bird in someone’s profile picture.

PROMOTION
Speaking of, it’s subtle but all of those Poolys out in the wild are building PoolTogether’s brand. PoolyNFT is under-used as a profile picture because they are all the same, pfers and Pixel Pooly are more widely used but aren’t as closely tied to PoolTogether as Poolers would be.

GAMIFICATION
Having them as dynamic NFTs allows us to do some pretty cool things for gamifying and promoting PT. One example I would like to see included is a Golden Pooly. This could overwrite a different Pooler each month and come with a delegation to increase your chances of winning a prize. We could release new traits every 3-6 months, bringing everyone back in for more.

FsYSVi1aYAEM0xC
FsYSVi1aYAEM0xC2048×2048 183 KB

7 Likes
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The TBR is live for voting
Onchain: PoolTogether Governance
Gasless voting: Snapshot

1 Like