Retroactive Grant: Morph

by 0x8b257b97c0e07e527b073b6513ba8ea659279b61 (Morph)

Should the following $4,800 grant in the Social Media Content category be approved?

Abstract

Hello!

I am proposing a retroactive grant for the Decentraland research/marketing/livestreaming/evangelism that I have participated in over the last 2 years.

While I plan to continue my work well into the future, this grant is purely for retroactive purposes to recover a portion of the cost incurred in both time and funding.

Grant size

4,800 USD in DAI

Project duration

1 month

Beneficiary address

0x8B257B97C0e07E527B073b6513ba8Ea659279b61

Email address

morphbot2000@gmail.com

Description

I hope to ask for an amount that is smaller than the value I have personally brought to Decentraland, here are a list of contributions I believe should be considered.

Twitter marketing - twitter.com/morph_bot

Decentraland post reaching over 100K impressions and over 2 years of metaverse coverage, this content is positive and often acts as a counterpoint to misinformation.

Avatar Interop research

After investigating VRM in 2021, I was able to successfully modify the DCL avatar into VRM format, this research proved invaluable in testing the viability of DCL-VRM and was my main motivation for gathering community sentiment for implementation:

https://decentraland.org/governance/proposal/?id=bdafe1c0-1d6b-11ed-96c7-2fa07c6df25b

I continue this work by providing technical implementation concepts for shapekeys/jigglebones for increased avatar expressions and upcoming VR social requirements.

DCL standards propagation

One of my core initiatives has been to step outside Decentraland and attempt to build bridges with other metaverse standards groups:

• Voicing DCL standards and implementations at M3Org (https://twitter.com/m3org)
• Giving technical presentations on avatar composability to groups such as MSF (https://metaverse-standards.org/) and OMI(https://omigroup.org/)
• Covering events such as Metaverse Fashion week to external parties within metaverse orgs, containing members from MSFT/Meta etc.
• Marketing DCL avatars via interoperability and attempting to build understanding with previously hostile groups such as VRChat

Consistent Live Stream

MorphBotTV has been a consistent stream promoting DCL every Thursday for coming up two years. This show is now one of the longest running DCL livestreams and serves as a valuable marketing resource for both DCL avatars & the platform itself, here are some rough stats:

• 20-30 average concurrent viewers per stream (mostly active on https://kick.com/morph-bot)
• 10+ unique chatters per stream
• Peak viewership of 75-100 concurrent viewers during special events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HE4sRmL61I
• ~300 lifetime stream hours

Weekly top-3 event, 2 years running

I founded Diamond Hands Thursdays as a way to livestream Decentraland and foster a community event, after several months of organizing this event I was able to legitimize it via DG where they upgraded it with a verified schedule and music acts/prizes - it continues as the staple of my livestream as I host a table every Thursday and is often found in the Top 3 most active scenes.

DCL Avatars in the mainstream

MorphBot will be appearing for non-profit in a mainstream triple-A game alongside SpongeBob and other major IP characters thanks to DCL's unique IP system, he is a boss character in the story mode that must be beaten multiple times.

Roadmap and milestones

As this grant is retroactive, I hope the milestones and work above speaks for itself. I believe my presence evangelizing DCL in external metaverse groups has had a positive impact on how Decentraland is viewed in the larger metaverse community, as well as propagating our standards and concepts beyond the platform itself.

As I am a smaller streamer, I have proposed the grant with this in mind and attempted to keep the value to a fair market rate. I do believe I have brought consistent value as mentioned above, and that it has been a successful marketing endeavor, albeit at a smaller scale than many influencer level initiatives.

Finally, I believe having a DCL avatar in a mainstream video game (Over 1,000,000 races during Beta wave 1) will be a significant presence in yet another non-metaverse community, potentially leading to further excitement around DCL's wearables engine and VRM avatars.

Whether this grant is successful or not, I will always continue to stream and attempt to improve Decentraland's avatar system. I hope that I can continue to bring value to this space and others, as it has done much for me as well.

This proposal is summarized due to technical limitations. To view it complete and vote on it, visit the DCL DAO Governance dApp