Proposal: BanklessDAO 🖤 Meritverse.xyz partnership

[Brustkern]

Title: Meritverse Partnership Proposal

Authors: Bo | BanklessDAO #7210, ManuelMaccou🏴#6974, boris_be#0986

Date Posted: 21 Jan 2022

Preamble

This proposal is to gain approval for a partnership between BanklessDAO and Meritverse.xyz.

There is no financial investment required from bDAO to effect this partnership; therefore we believe this proposal requires at least 25 bDAO member votes and one week of exposure on this forum to constitute passage.

Many thanks in advance for your interest and support of this proposal.

Background

The DAOLationships team wants to get better understanding and visibility in the relationships Bankless members have with other DAOs, to more efficiently explore opportunities with other organisations. With that in mind the ‘DRM project’ was created, aimed at building a tool to fulfill this need.

While discussing the needs, the team got in touch with the people behind Meritverse, who are building the professional network for Web3. Because the product vision behind Meritverse closely aligns with the DRM requirements, the following partnership is proposed.

Meritverse and BanklessDAO will work closely together to help map the bDAO memberbase and their relationships with other organizations. To achieve that goal, Bankless will be able to help define the roadmap. Through biweekly meetings, representatives from Bankless help prioritize and scope out the next set of features and provide feedback, to make sure the product and dataset that is being built meets the Bankless requirements.

Furthermore, to incentivise people to claim their profile and link their data, users will be awarded credits which will be turned into an airdrop allocation when the Meritverse token launches - scheduled for Summer ‘22. The BanklessDAO as an organization will also profit here, as the DAO treasury will get a credit for every credit received by their Bankless members.

What is Meritverse

Meritverse is the LinkedIn for Web3. It enables DAO contributors to create a professional profile based on on-chain (POAPs, ENS, Snapshot Votes, Mirror articles…) and off-chain (Discord, Discourse, …) data. Today’s professional networks are broken because they keep your data behind walled gardens, your data is fragmented over different platforms, and because they focus too much on credentialism instead of skills (where you work > what you’ve done). Furthermore, leading professional networks like LinkedIn are built entirely on user-generated content, which is unverified and often exaggerated or simply false. Meritverse is a user-owned network that builds professional profiles based on verifiable data to create a more efficient and equitable job market. The platform will make it easy to query Web3 information, like ‘who works in DAO X and DAO Y, ranked by the amount of work done’.

What’s in it for Bankless

Help BanklessDAO team members explore opportunities more effectively. By making it easier to search and filter people in Web3, bDAO contributors can more easily find the right people to reach out to for collaborations and business opportunities.

Get to know the other members of the DAO and what they’ve been up to. When new members join the DAO, they can just link their Meritverse account to give an overview of what they’ve been up to in Web3 so far. In the same way, these new members can easily get a sense of the contributions of the other members of the DAO through their Meritverse account.This capability will greatly assist onboarding, productivity acceleration, and retention of members.

Increase the Bankless treasury. Through the credit-based reward system explained below, BanklessDAO can obtain a material share of the airdrop that will be distributed on token launch.

Proposal details

BanklessDAO and Meritverse will work together on two fronts: the roadmap, and user acquisition. The work itself will be broken up into multiple milestones, which are explained in more detail under ‘the plan’.

Meritverse will primarily be represented by boris_be#0986, who will represent the product design & development team of Meritverse. BanklessDAO will provide two members as primary liaisons to represent the organization. Bo | BanklessDAO #7210 and ManuelMaccou​:black_flag:#6974 are candidates for this position, and have been part of the ideation of the DRM tool and the related discussions since the start. To compensate the liaisons for their time and input, Meritverse may choose to remunerate them with a token allocation.

The Roadmap

Meritverse will organize ‘roadmap meetings’ every other week, bringing together the Meritverse team and interested members from Bankless. The goal of these meetings is to provide context to what has been shipped in the last sprint, and to discuss what will be shipped in the next two weeks. Bankless members will be able to propose new features, help prioritize the work and help scope out new ideas. This way, we can guarantee that the platform that is being built aligns as much as possible with the Bankless requirements.

Meritverse and BanklessDAO agree that these roadmap meetings will provide material ongoing direction and support for the Meritverse product, and will enhance its chances of success in the marketplace.

User Acquisition

The Meritverse platform’s usefulness is directly correlated with the number of members it attracts. In fact, Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. Similarly, the platform will multiply in its utility as it integrates other data sources that create more holistic profiles of its members.

Meritverse’s referral program is designed to attract members to claim their profiles while work is being done to enhance and enrich the data within the platform. The referral program works on a point-based system as follows. Current members can invite new users to the platform using a personal referral link. When a new user signs up through this link and also links their Discord account, the inviting member will receive 5 credits. As users invite more people to the platform, their credits increase. To reward people for their contribution, Mertiverse will Airdrop Meritverse tokens to all credit holders pro rata relative to the number of credits they have, during the token launch that is currently scheduled for summer ‘22.

Because BanklessDAO has extraordinary talent that can efficiently help define the Meritverse product; because BanklessDAO has a vast member base; and because BanklessDAO’s media reach is among the most impactful in the Web3 world, it will be the ideal partner to collaborate with. To make sure incentives are fully aligned, Meritverse proposes to extend the referral program as follows: for every successful referral done by a member of BanklessDAO, not only will this member receive 5 credits, but also the BanklessDAO itself will receive 5 credits. So the more people are invited by Bankless members, the more the BanklessDAO will receive during the airdrop.

The plan

To break down the work on each party’s side, we propose to work with different milestones. If during the biweekly roadmap meetings we all conclude that a different prioritization of features makes more sense, we can update the specifics as we go.

Milestone 1 - Due week of Feb 7

Meritverse deliverables

• Allow users to link their Discourse account(s) to different DAOs, so they can show on their profiles how many posts they have for each of the organizations they’re part of.
• Allow users to display data from at least one other data source: BANK token, NFTs, Coordinape, Bounty Board…
• Improve the search by enabling autocomplete, to make it easier to find people.

Bankless deliverables

• Announce Meritverse in the appropriate public Discord channels
• Prepare pitch for inclusion of Meritverse in the week’s community call Hype Notes, as appropriate.

We note that BanklessDAO community calls are undergoing significant change, making it impossible to guarantee that Meritverse will be included in any single call. However, we believe that the Meritverse-BanklessDAO partnership is significant and exciting enough to warrant many mentions in future community calls, newsletters and Discord announcements.

Milestone 2 - Due week of Feb 21

Meritverse deliverables

• Create ‘DAO Profiles’. Make it possible to not only search for users, but also for DAOs. A DAO profile should display some basic information like the logo, the name, a short description, the website & socials etc, and a list of members of that DAO. This list of members should be created based on public data (e.g. Snapshot votes, Discourse, …) or based on the data that users have connected to themselves (e.g. their Discord organizations). There should be some basic sorting functionality, e.g. based on nb of snapshot votes or Discourse posts etc, so you can quickly get a sense who are the active users in a specific organization.

Bankless deliverables

• Announce Meritverse on social media channels, newsletter(s), and the podcast episodes, and/or other externally facing channels.

Similarly, bDAO cannot guarantee that space will be available in any of our external media, but we will provide amplification on a best-efforts basis.

Milestone 3 - Due week of March 7

Meritverse deliverables

• Advanced filtering and sorting. Make it possible to do search queries like ‘all users that are part of DAO X and DAO Y, sorted by nb of Snapshot votes’.

Bankless deliverables

• Promote Meritverse to new users that are onboarding to the BanklessDAO, by mentioning it in the onboarding flow on Discord.

Milestone 4 and beyond

At the conclusion of Milestone 3, Meritverse will provide BanklessDAO a concrete distribution plan for its Airdrop and estimate the economic incentive provided by the credit distribution scheme. Meritverse and BanklessDAO will assess the progress they have made through their collaboration and consider whether the remuneration is sufficient given the effort and value provided by BanklessDAO.

FAQ

How do we prevent referral link spamming in Bankless?
The idea is to have a policy where members are not allowed to share their personal referral link within Bankless public channels. This policy would also be communicated on the ‘invite’ page on Meritverse. In order to reduce referral link spamming, Meritverse has created a general Bankless Link (https://app.meritverse.xyz/invite/bankless) that will grant 5 credits to Bankless and 5 credits to the DRM project working group.

What’s the difference between Meritverse and Sobol?
Even though there is overlap in the projects, they each have a different focus. Sobol is mostly geared towards getting a better understanding of the internal organization of a DAO, based on manually inputted data. On the other hand, Meritverse focuses on creating cross-DAO public profiles based on automatically gathered data. For the DAOLationships use case, Meritverse is a better fit, as it makes it easier to navigate the social graph of Web3 based on public information, enriched by users adding other data as well.

What is the value of the Meritverse token?
The Meritverse token will serve different purposes. Most importantly, it will serve as a utility token for the platform. For example, users of the platform will be able to set a ‘messaging fee’ in the Meritverse token, e.g. how much people that try to contact them will have to pay them to prevent spam. Another use case is enabling companies to set a ‘recruiting bounty’ in Meritverse token for their open roles, to incentivize people on the network to propose people that would be a good fit for this role. Finally, the token will be used for the governance of the project. As the project is still early, the exact use cases and tokenomics are still being developed.

Is Meritverse a DAO?
Meritverse is on a mission to make a user-owned professional network. At the moment, it’s run by a centralized team, but the goal is to release it progressively to the community as a DAO, similar to how other projects have done this (e.g. Maker DAO).

Links

• Meritverse.xyz
• bDAO DRM project page
• The DRM user stories & requirements

Poll: approve the partnership?

Please indicate whether or not you approve of this proposed partnership with Meritverse.xyz.

• I approve of this proposal for BanklessDAO to become a Meritverse partner
• I do not approve / this proposal needs revision

Poll: approve the Liaisons?

I approve (or nominate) the following bDAO Liaisons

• ManuelMaccou🏴#6974
• Bo | BanklessDAO #7210
• Other [suggest in comments below]

[Berg]

Fantastic Proposal! Bdao is in dire need of the tooling that Meritverse can provide and I am in favor of the proposal. However, I dont feel comfortable voting for either Bo or Manuel as their are financial implications and I dont know who is closer to the project or who would be the best fit. Additionally, I would love to see how or if Sobol could potentially be integrated with Meritverse to form a more complete product.

[ManuelMaccou]

Hi Berg. Good question regarding myself and Bo. We’ve both been part of the project since day 1. To give you a bit more background, Bo has been active in DAOlationships for a while and uses the current CRM tool that is just a notion database. We got many of the original requirements for what a “CRM v2” would look like from him. Bo and I initiated this project before Mertiverse came into the picture. We have been working very closely with Meritverse to see how their product can benefit BanklessDAO as well as the entire web3 ecosystem, now and in the future, Therefore this proposal is for the both of us to act as advisors together. I hope that clears things up.

[Berg]

Ahhh, I see. Yes, Thanks. I thought it was an either or kind of thing.

[Brustkern]

One other thing to note: there are no direct financial implications in this proposal other than that Meritverse plans to compensate bDAO for promoting its platform. The only investment we are making so far is the time & energy of myself and Manuel (and anyone else who would like to join the effort!).

[Brustkern]

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT: If anyone would like to see revisions, please be sure to note them by using the Reply feature in this post. Thank you!

[0xJustice]

Love this! Great work

[rotorless]

Brilliant . 100% with you i this. Because we build. And we cure .

[0xRene]

Thanks for putting this up and connecting to Meritverse!! I love the tool and am using it since beginning this year already!

[Bpetes]

I love the mission of DRM; but based on experimenting w/ Meritverse I’m concerned about data custody, privacy, sovereignty. I’m grateful for the ‘unlike LinkedIN…’ this will be real data of contributions not self attested. But, at end of the day there’s a lot of centralized data that will be consumed and then publicly displayed that if I understand correctly is very custodial in nature. I’d love to hear Meritverse’s go forward plan on this because to me the potential centralized / custodial / public nature of this has some potential edge cases that are concerning. I love that they’re tokenizing to try to decentralize early (better than OpenSea in that regard) but not unlike OpenSea I’m sensing a centralized data platform and API approach that could be concerning regarding the generation of Web3 CV.
Happy to discuss and have shared feedback with Meritverse in some DMs back when sent a link from them to check out my profile they auto-generated and didn’t hear back which kinda turned me off a bit.
Excited to learn more and hear about Meritverse plan to address these concerns.

[Brustkern]

i’ll nudge them to reconnect with you. Meritverse & Sobol should def find ways to collab.

[boris_be]

Hey @Bpetes , thanks a lot for the comment!

But, at end of the day there’s a lot of centralized data that will be consumed and then publicly displayed that if I understand correctly is very custodial in nature.

Really good point that you raise here. Our mission is to make an open and user owned professional network. The problem we see today is that your professional data is 1) distributed over many platforms and 2) behind walled Gardens (e.g. LinkedIn charges recruiters to get your data). We believe that this makes the job market inefficient. It would be better for everyone if anyone with an opportunity can easily find people that would be a fit for that opportunity. That’s why we believe that professional data needs to be open, so anyone can access it to query it to find the right profiles to match opportunities and people. We believe in a progressive decentralization here: first build an MVP and figure out what people want, then make sure you have an open API so everyone can access this data, finally put all the data in decentralized storage so you guarantee openness and access.
Furthermore, the ‘business model’ of our network will not be charging for data. We want to allow users to get contacted through our network, where they can set their own messaging fee so they don’t get spammed, on which we would take a small cut. The other way we see monetization is to allow DAOs / companies to submit open roles to the network and to set a bounty on it, and anyone who helps fill the role would get paid for it (and we again take a small fee). This way, incentives are nicely aligned to help people find relevant opportunities as much as possible.

Happy to discuss and have shared feedback with Meritverse in some DMs back when sent a link from them to check out my profile they auto-generated and didn’t hear back which kinda turned me off a bit.

I’m really sorry about this, I just checked your DMs and realized I never answered to them. I’m doing this right after. In that period we reached out to a few people for feedback and I must have forgotten to answer. I’m really sorry about this, and thanks a lot for providing your thoughts there!!

[Bpetes]

I think based on this response you’re thinking about the right challenges up front (e.g. business model and privacy). I’m curious to learn more as this evolves but I appreciate exercising caution relative to this as we go. RE: privacy are you going on-chain (NFTs) or off-chain verifiable claims; and which way was selected and why? Who’s issuing the claims and how can they be trusted? Applaud you taking on a really challenging and important opportunity here and am very optimistic but highly skeptical.

There’s an open standards problem here and so I’m keen to understand who you’re collaborating with, this solution will only work and be properly decentralized imo if it’s a multi-party system of attesters and the data to display is open. Mertiverse will need to be concentrated on their unique value (e.g. recruiting posts and filling) and highly competitive there if the data is truly open because anyone can be a displayer and front-end for this underlying data. This is another reason why imo a play like this can’t be a solo act and has to be a consortium right out of the gate that includes some of the more prolific DAO Tooling providers already in the space.

Thanks for hearing my concerns and your thoughtful reply. Happy to talk more 1:1 if forum isn’t ideal spot for answering all this.

[intlcapitalist]

Well done Bo. Just signed up!