Alphaday Grant Proposal - Data Aggregator tool that serves the Ren community

Grants
1

Legal Name: Alphabox Solutions Pte. Ltd.
Address: North Canal Road
City: Singapore
State: Singapore
Zip: 059294

Live Product: https://app.alphaday.com/
Landing Page: https://alphaday.com/
Twitter (Project): https://twitter.com/AlphadayHQ
Discord (Project): Alphaday

Owner Name: Deniz Omer
Discord: Deniz | Alphaday#0697
Telegram Handle: @Denizined
Email: deniz@alphaday.com

Description of Problem or Opportunity

Crypto has exploded in popularity over the last 4-5 years and there is so much going on that it’s almost impossible to keep up with everything. Our user research showed that users are overwhelmed with information and spend a lot of time jumping from one news source to another, from one social site to another, and usually have dozens of tabs open to stay up to date with everything happening in a community.

Additional Details:

We’ve done market research and currently people’s regular crypto workflows consist of jumping from one browser tab to another to check prices, read news, follow twitter, participate in discussions. A typical crypto user will have 6 to 10 open tabs at any given time and people have referred to Alphaday as the ‘tab killer’ because all the information you’d need across all your different tabs is available in Alphaday. In this sense, we do not have any direct competitor that can provide 50 different types of services and functionality within one dashboard.

Proposed Solution

Alphaday builds crypto experience dashboards for enthusiasts, developers, and projects. Users can drag and drop from hundreds of services, news and social feeds, charts, and dapp functionality to create their daily workflows inside a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to have multiple browser tabs open to get different bits of information. i.e. imagine having token prices, gas prices, twitter feed, latest news headlines, TVL, and any other information any user could possibly want all within one single dashboard.

Having all this information in one place allows Ren stakeholders (i.e. users, developers, investors) to easily stay up to date on Ren ecosystem updates, see the latest news and developments, do research and stay engaged. In general users who can track their favourite projects more easily stay more engaged with the project which in turn supports user retention.

How would this proposal benefit the Ren ecosystem, RenVM and/or the node operators powering RenVM

Once we’ve created a Ren dashboard, we will promote this across the Ren community and start collecting feedback so that we can keep iterating and improving our dashboard. For us success is if a large number of Ren stakeholders come to the Ren dashboard to stay up to date with everything happening within Ren and then use the available data as jumping off points into the various parts of the Ren ecosystem. i.e. REN holders using the board to finding trending governance topics to participate in, devs using the resource library to dive deeper into the technical documents, newcomers listening to the latest podcasts and exploring open job positions at Ren.

The grant work will result in a dashboard dedicated to serving the Ren community by aggregating all relevant information about Ren including media communities, on-chain metrics, Ren tokenomics into one place. Our desired outcome is to provide a new end-point for community engagement and to bolster Ren’s outreach.

Technical approach

Building the Alphaday infrastructure was not easy as we pull so many different types of data from different sources. It took a team of 4 developers over a year building the engine that can pull the data, analyze it, and categorize and contextualize the data (i.e. understanding different crypto concepts like NFTs, DeFi, Staking) so that users can find it easier to navigate through all the information.

Execution risks

No foreseeable execution risks can be associated with the development and deployment of the Alphaday dashboard.

Unintended Consequences

No foreseeable unintended consequences can be associated with the development and deployment of the Alphaday dashboard.

Evaluation plan

In terms of concrete numbers, considering Ren has 127K twitter followers and using this as a very crude proxy for community size, we would consider it a success if we could serve at least 1% of them on a monthly basis (1.27k MAU).

Timeline

We would like to create a Ren ecosystem dashboard that aggregates the following information into a single community dashboard:

  • The latest Ren official announcements and blog post content.
  • A feed of all news mentions of Ren from coindesk, cointelegraph and 20+ other news sources aggregated from across the internet.
  • A calendar containing all Ren events including Ren Governance votes, meetups, hackathons with Ren bounties, AMAs.
  • Podcast feed containing the latest appearances and interviews given by Ren team members.
  • Youtube stream containing educational Ren content.
  • Ren Explorer and Bridge links and descriptions.
  • Integration with Ren Forum to show the latest and trending discussion topics.
  • Discord & Twitter Integration to show a feed of latest discussions.
  • FAQs, Darknodes docs, REN tokenomics information.
  • Ren Careers integration to show the latest open jobs listed on Ren.
  • REN metrics including TVL, token breakdowns, total unique users, and other metrics pulled in from Dune Analytics and/or Defillama.

We should be able to build and deploy the initial dashboard within 2 months so if this grant is approved we want to launch the Ren dashboard by April 2023.

#Budget

1,200 USD upfront costs for development including integrating the discussion forums, blog post, social feed, jobs listing, TVL and other on-chain metrics.

100 USD per month for 12 months for maintenance including having an Alphaday content analyst quality-checking the dashboard every day and ensuring the Calendar widget is up-to-date with latest Ren events, all news mentions across the internet are captured by the dashboard, any updates not automatically captured by the Alphaday aggregator engine is manually added to the board, and other maintenance tasks.

Total Budget Requested: 2,400 USD

Applicant background

I, Deniz Omer, have been involved in the Ethereum space since early 2016 and joined Kyber Network in 2017 as Head of Ecosystem Growth before quitting to start Alphaday full-time in 2021. Previously I worked at Thomson Reuters for a decade building financial products that rivaled the Bloomberg Terminal. I am currently also a Venture Partner at IOSG.VC

My co-founder Felipe has also been involved in Ethereum since 2016 and was a Developer Advocate at Pegasys and Consensys before quitting to work full time on Alphaday.

Alphaday’s third co-founder is DeFiDude who used to be a community manager at both Aave and Kyber Network before co-founding Alphaday.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/denizomer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/faraggi/
https://twitter.com/defidude
Pitch Deck: https://bit.ly/Alphadaydeck

1 Like
2

Thanks for reaching out @Alphaday-Mike. Interesting concept. Who would you say your competitors are? Sounds a bit similar to what they are doing at Messari.

I’m not sure if we can allocate any grants right now though while we are in our governance transition, at least my personal feeling is that it would not be appropriate (others can disagree ofcourse).

Nevertheless, few questions if you don’t mind:

  • When will you launch? If you launched already, when and how many users do you have?
  • Why would it take two months to build the REN dashboard, is it not as simple as configuring the twitter account(s), Discourse URL, some static information to our docs/community resources etc? Most of this you can probably already scrape from existing websites such as coingecko to automatically generate dashboards for every community.
  • Can other users browse existing dashboards and find the REN board organically?
  • Would it (eventually) be possible on the platform for users to create custom dashboards and share these (similar to Dune)?

Thanks!

1 Like
3

Hi @Thomm, thanks for the questions!

Regarding Alphaday sounding like Messari, Messari is focused on qualitative/quantitative research to make an investment decision on. You can’t listen to your favourite project’s latest podcast, consume their media, see the latest twitter/discord/reddit discussions, look at open job positions, read developer material on Messari. Alphaday’s philosophy is to recreate a typical crypto enthusiasts workflow within a single dashboard so when you want to catch up on your favourite project you don’t have to jump from their homepage to their blog to their twitter to their discord to coingecko etc etc, its all available under one single UI.

When will you launch? If you launched already, when and how many users do you have?

We launched our beta version in August. Since then monthly active user numbers month-over-month since August have been as follows: 500->1,232->2,146->2,921->7,212->10,019(February to date) and we believe we’re going to grow significantly once we release dashboards for our board partners.

Why would it take two months to build the REN dashboard, is it not as simple as configuring the twitter account(s), Discourse URL, some static information to our docs/community resources etc? Most of this you can probably already scrape from existing websites such as coingecko to automatically generate dashboards for every community.

It takes two months a) due to our current backlog building dashboards for partners like Avalanche, Aave, Zcash, Dfinity, Rocketpool, the Graph, and a few others. And b) it is definitely not as simple as scraping from existing websites especially not when we have 50 different widgets with a dozen different data types. APIs have to be hooked in one by one, some widgets like events calendar need manual curation by our content analyst, and there’s a dozen different challenges to building a dashboard with such variety of data.

Can other users browse existing dashboards and find the REN board organically?

Yes, we have a dashboard library where users can browse between boards related to NFTs, DAOs, L2s, DeFi, etc etc (top right corner ‘Boards’ button). Users can then pin their favourite boards to the top favourites bar.

Would it (eventually) be possible on the platform for users to create custom dashboards and share these (similar to Dune)?

Users can already create custom dashboards and save them to their favourites. We’re releasing a feature in our current spring to let users create url links so they can share their dashboards with others.

1 Like
4

Hi everyone, I wanted to follow up on our proposal above and see if anyone else had any other feedback/comments/thoughts. We’d really appreciate any input and to ultimately get to build out the Ren Ecosystem board on Alphaday. Tnx!

1 Like
5

The project has no money to support its own trousers (to pay for servers, etc.).

Even if you ask for a very small amount, are you not aware that the project has no money and they want to print more tokens to find money?

Grants are handed out by those who have extra money… and those who have no money cannot give out grants.

6

We were not aware of this, thanks for letting us know.