Summary

Creator contests are an experiment in creating incentive systems for community creatives, builders, and artists via retroactive rewards. An eth/erc-20 rewards pool is reserved for winners of periodic contests initiated by SharkDAO. At the close of a contest submission period, SharkDAO members vote on submissions to contest prompts and rewards are distributed according to the voting results.

Creator Contests will bring more builders to the SharkDAO Community, drive positive engagement amongst existing members, and reward members for creating valuable content that benefits the entire community.

Motivations

• Incentivize creatives/artists/builders with voting power or other rewards
• Offer path to membership via proof of work which may otherwise be unattainable
  • Looking forward, it’s possible that SharkDAO membership costs (pfp / token) could price out constructive community members. Contests could be utilized to allow individuals to gain access by winning contests.
• Gamify collaboration amongst community members
  • With various tunable contest parameters, SharkDAO leaders can create scenarios that incentivize participants to collaborate. This could surface as the creation of new community projects, proposals, and efforts.
• Form a social graph that allows committee/project leads to steward creators into ongoing projects and potential contributor roles
  • As SharkDAO continues to grow and more concurrent projects are underway, project leads can reference prior contest results as talent pools to be more proactive about recruiting creatives to ongoing efforts.
• Increase voter turnout
  • Theoretically, incentivising creators and ushering them into ongoing projects will, as a byproduct, turn them into thoughtful/honest governance participants if they aren’t already.

Balanced Incentive Structure

With various tunable parameters, the DAO has ultimate flexibility to create and test balanced incentive structures that can help grow and strengthen the community.

How does it work?

See below example contest

1. SharkDAO creates a contest with a duration of 1 week and a reward pool of 100,000 $SHARK. SharkDAO defines winners as the 3 submissions that receive the most votes. 60% goes to 1st place, 30% to 2nd, and 10% to 3rd.
2. SharkDAO creates prompts for the contest. Examples of possibly interesting prompts include novel nounish artwork, SharkDAO lore, jokes, memes, development work, etc.
3. SharkDAO starts the contest.
4. Submittors visit the contest and post their submissions to prompts.
5. Submission period ends.
6. Voting period begins.
7. SharkDAO members vote on their favorite submissions.
8. Voting period ends.
9. Votes are tallied and top 3 winners are paid according to contest configuration.

Functional Block Diagram

Tunable Contest Parameters

The following are parameters that contest admins can customize.

Basic Parameters

Parameter	Description
Contest Duration	Length of contest
Contest Rewards	ERC-20 / ETH reward pool
Winner Reward Distribution	Rewards distribution amongst N winners

Advanced Parameters

Parameter	Description
Results Visibility	Are voting results visible during the contest?
Submittor Rules	(per prompt) who is allowed to submit? (restrict by discord roles / erc-20 balance / erc-721 balance)
Voter Rules	(per prompt) who is allowed to vote? (restrict by discord roles / erc-20 balance / erc-721 balance)
Voter Strategy	BalanceOf - Token allowance based on erc-20 / erc-721. Uniform - Each voter gets X number of votes for the contest
Voter Rewards	Share of rewards pool allotted to voters that correctly choose the winning submissions
Anonymous Submissions	Toggle anonymity of submissions during contest

Gamification

As previously mentioned, the tunable parameters allow DAO admins to be extremely flexible and creative in experimenting with different incentives.

For example, let’s say that SharkDAO creates a contest with the following parameters.

• 50,000 $SHARK reward
• 1 contest winner
• Winner is defined as submission with 2nd most votes
• Winning submission submittor receives 80% of reward pool
• Winning submission voters receive 20% of reward pool
• Results are visible during the voting process
• Voting power is based off of $SHARK balance

With the above parameters, a market is created in which submittors are ‘staking’ their creations, and voters are ‘staking’ their votes. There are clear incentives for both voters and submittors to participate in the contest. For submittors, nothing changes from a standard contest. For voters, strategies emerge. Voters may have to work together in order for their stake to pay off. Relationships and possibly even new projects/proposals are born from this collaboration.

The above configuration is only meant to serve as an example of how SharkDAO admins can tweak contest parameters to create complex incentive systems.

FAQ

Q1: How will transactions work?

A1: For this system, there will be 2 types of ‘transactions’.

The first will be from the DAO contest creators to transfer contest rewards into the contest smart contract. This interaction on the UX will be designed to accept transactions from either a multisig or standard wallet. The gas liability will fall on the DAO / contest creators.

The second type of transaction will be from the contest web application to the contest smart contract upon completion of the voting period. Once winners are calculated according to the contest parameters, a function in the smart contract will be triggered to disburse rewards to the winners. We will handle this gas liability.

Q2: Where will this software be hosted?

A2: This software will live in Calabara. Calabara is an application we have been developing for some time now that is designed to easily support useful community applications, like this one. Once the new website is completed, and if other contributors feel it makes sense, we will be happy to integrate the creator contest implementation directly on the new site.

https://calabara.com/sharkdao.eth/dashboard

Q3: How many contests can happen at the same time?

A3: Only 1 contest can be ongoing at any given time.

Q4: How will contest prompts be selected?

A4: Contest prompts will be selected based on the interests of community members / participants. This can be sampled via discord polls or other means. Ongoing efforts / projects in the DAO can also influence contest prompts.

Q5: Who will be responsible for facilitating contests?

A5: We are happy to facilitate contests. This will include rallying community creatives, notifying members of deadlines, and helping to choose relevant prompts. We would love to have other SharkDAO contributors help drive the contests, and would hope to eventually hand this responsibility over to other contributors.

Q6: Will contest results be auditable?

A6: Yes

Milestones

Milestone 1: Contest web application

Milestone 2: Contest escrow contract

In the spirit of building an MVP, we will first deliver the contest web application. After the web application has been delivered, we can then concurrently facilitate contests as well as work on milestone 2. The contest escrow contract will simply automate the holding and disbursement of rewards. In the period between milestones 1 & 2, the disbursement of rewards will be a manual procedure. We will generate a report from the contests which sharkDAO can then use to manually transfer assets to winners.

Budget

We are requesting 2 transactions totaling 7 eth for the completion and delivery of the product.

• Transaction 1: 4.5 eth delivered upon proposal successfully passing.

• Transaction 2: 2.5 eth delivered upon completion of milestone 1.

• Receiving address —> 0xa943e039B1Ce670873ccCd4024AB959082FC6Dd8 (calabara.eth)

Who is involved?

• Nick (nickdodson#5975) - core dev
• Yungweez (yungweez#8281) - dev, designer

Estimated delivery

• The above is expected to be completed within 60 days, with regular deliverables, reporting, and collaboration.
• All generated code will be open source software hosted on github.

Post delivery

• We will maintain, support, and continue to develop the product after the 60 days.

Risks

• We don’t deliver.
• Product is not up to standards of what is presented.
• Project takes longer than expected.

Contest Prompts Mock

Submission Prompts Mock