RGP-000-004: WenRen - Social Content Incentivization Hub

Grants
1

Problem & Opportunity:

One thing that I think all long-term holders will agree on is that Ren is massively underappreciated as a project in the cross-chain bridging space. Ren has the foundations to become the ‘goto’ cross-chain bridge, with over 12 Billion dollars in volume all with zero exploits. Not to mention the upcoming developments in decentralization and tokenomics.

But we’re missing one major factor. Hype.

Proposed Solution:

Memes are incomparably efficient at sharing information. This is something we believe that Ren has failed to utilize. What we propose is a hub for collaboration, sharing and incentivization of short-form visual content (memes etc) with the goal of bringing more investors and users to the Ren ecosystem.

Introducing WenRen.io - A platform that enables users to seamlessly upload, share and tip Ren-related memes. Each month the community will select their favorite memes. The selected creators will receive a share of a monthly prize pool.

We will also be creating a WenRen Twitter account to increase platform exposure as well as having a separate avenue for communication between users and the development team. Featured memes and WenRen news will be posted to this Twitter.

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

WenRen.io will increase awareness of the Ren project and will benefit all stakeholders in the Ren ecosystem, including retail investors, node operators and bridge users. This is because there will be a constant stream of Ren-related content being shared on social media platforms.

Technical Approach

The WenRen.io media hub will have the following features:

  • View the latest and most shared memes
  • Contribute to the monthly prize pool
  • Share memes directly to social media (using Twitter and Instagram social sharing buttons)
  • Upload original content
  • Tip favorite memes (we would like feedback on whether the community thinks tipping should be in bridged assets, Ethereum or Ren)
  • Desktop and mobile compatible

When a user uploads an image they will be requested to provide their public address (so that they can receive tips). At this point the image will be held ‘under review’ until one of the community moderators reviews and either approves or denies the image. Images will only be denied if they are inappropriate, false or spam.

Execution Risks

Although there are no major execution risks, creating a user-friendly interface is of high importance and the community may wish to make revisions on our initial designs which could cause slight delays. Coding and deployment of this project is of low risk as both developers are beyond competent in their respective fields.

We think that it is important that the monthly prize pool will eventually become self-funded. This means that the only operational cost of this project would be server rent and domain renewal. There is a risk that the community does not step forward to fund this themselves. In which case more funds will be required to incentivize content creators. This could be reduced in value or frequency if required.

Unintended Consequences

There is a risk that the platform could be used to spread negative narratives, spam or inappropriate content. We will combat this by using ReCaptcha (to prevent bots) as well as a team of community moderators.

Evaluation Plan

During the development stage we will provide the DAO with regular reports on progress as well as seeking community feedback on the initial design of the user interface. As the platform approaches completion we will encourage members from the community to provide feedback on a private beta launch.

Success Metrics:

  • Increased Ren TVT
  • Notable increase in Ren-related memes on social media
  • Reward pool contributions

Timeline

The total time to deliver on this proposal will be no more than 3 months after receiving funding. The stages of development can be broken down into the following:

  1. UI design/feedback (estimated 2-3 weeks)
  2. Backend development (3-4 weeks)
  3. Frontend development (2-3 weeks)
  4. User testing/feedback (1-2 weeks)
  5. Deployment (Less than 1 week)

We do not want to rush any of these stages and think that open communication with the community is always the best approach. We will ensure that our progress is completely transparent through regular reports to the DAO.

Budget

Monthly Salary:

  • Jamesy - $3,000 per month (x3)
  • Ben - $3,000 per month (x3)

Monthly Prize Pool ($500 per month) - $1,500

Operational Costs (3 months):

  • Domain name (billed per annum) - $49
  • Server rent - $600* (*Server rent is an estimate based on predicted usage. If usage is below this threshold then funds can be rolled into prize pools or refunded.)

Total Cost (Development + 3 months operations + prize pool) - $20,149

Applicant Background

We are a two man team of developers that frequently work together on web2 and web3 projects. We’re excited about the future of Ren and have been long-term darknode operators that believe in a cross-chain future for cryptocurrency.

Jamesy - Backend developer:

  • BSc Computer Science
  • Experienced with Python and Rust
  • Engaged in the cryptocurrency space since early 2017

Ben - Frontend developer:

  • Experienced with JS, HTML and CSS
  • Part-time developer at a UK-based web development firm
  • Ren holder since public sale in early 2018

Endnote:

Thank you for taking the time to consider this proposal. We are looking forward to hearing any feedback or questions you might have and will make ourselves available daily to answer questions in the Discord or forum.

Vote (yes/no):

  1. Approve Funding
  2. Reject Proposal
1 Like
2

This is an interesting proposal. Thanks for putting this together. Should not this be coordinated as part of RGP-000-003: Marketing Campaign and renDAO Marketing Group? Did you discuss with @cowboy ? Could this be overlapping some of that work?

3

I don’t believe our active community is nowhere as big for such project to be warranted.

Besides same can be achieved via discord tipping bot and a #memes channel. And that will result in about $20k less money spent.

1 Like
4

Thanks for the reply! I’m currently in discussion with @cowboy on Discord with the aim to figure out how we could possibly work together. I know that myself and Ben can deliver a high quality page with a seamless UX. We’re open to feedback and I’ll give you a better update after some more discussion with cowboy.

5

Appreciate your feedback. In my opinion, the reason you provide for not passing this grant (community not big enough) is the exact issue we aim to solve with WenRen. If users are incentivized to post they’re going to do just that. There’s no better marketing than referral from a trusted person. That is what this should provide.

This project idea is actually heavily inspired by a Zcash community grant which can be found with the keyword ‘zeme’. It’s a similar concept that had great success in bringing attention to Zcash from the Latin American community, especially. If we had even half the response that Zeme had, this would be a huge success.

I also think that once the site is built it would be extremely easy to add other content such as TikToks, Instagram Reels etc which can reach an even wider and younger audience that Twitter sometimes misses.

6

Love this idea!!! Seen it work very well over on Zcash with zeme.team. Would be cool if you could add Instagram content too! Or maybe TikTok? Will be voting to approve. Thanks.

7

Hey Jamesy and Ben, thanks for putting together this proposal.

I’m all for creative approaches to marketing and there is no doubt that Memes have been used effectively in the crypto space as a way of spreading the word about some projects.

Why does this need it’s own website though? I think this could be done more effectively with less costs to development and more to content creation by directing the efforts to the channels where our community already communicates (discord, telegram). The way the funds are allocated there is a huge emphasis on the creation of this portal but very little on incentivizing content creation. I think what Arviee is pointing to is that our community is small, so the creative pool for meme creation is small. If you are to attract meme mercenaries how far will $1500 go?

In order to warrant the costs of $18,000 for development I think the DAO would need to see concrete examples of this model already working, and a detailed breakdown of why a portal like this is necessary over doing it on discord. There is no doubt you’ve put a lot of work into this, and I hope you can take this feedback kindly, my take is this will need another pass and some re-thinking and re-framing before it makes sense.

1 Like
8

I’m unclear why the focus is on developing a platform to upload REN-specific memes when the end goal is to have such memes created and spread on social media. Will the platform directly accomplish such distribution, i.e. social media mining?

9

I believe someone in our community once shared a forum post of another DAO where they experimented with social media engagement farming within their community. This was an extremely insightful and detailed case study to follow and learn from, unfortunately I cannot find this anymore. I really hope someone knows what I’m talking about and can share this link :pray:

In summary though, what they did was setup certain rules of engagement and at the end of each month participants could get paid for the number of impressions they made, for example with Twitter posts about the project. Key take away for me was that it is only beneficial if there are secondary motives to impressions because they were achieved at both a more expensive rate and higher effort than using ad platforms. Of course it was a lot more nuanced than this so would be great to find the source so we can learn from their experience, or any other similar project for that matter.

1 Like