DIP-?: Personalized Blockchain-based Merch for Devcon Community

Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs)
1

Dear all,
we were advised to submit our proposal here as a DIP.
As the event is happening soon, we will keep it super short and straight to the point, following the DIP Format. And looking forward to your feedback!

Summary of Proposal

We’d like to provide Devcon attendees an opportunity to get their memberships @devcon as their personalized digital merch issued via Proof of Membership Ethereum dApp, so even after the event is over, people could feel like they belong to the Devcon community.

Abstract

Proof of Membership (PoM) is a public good project operating on the Ethereum mainnet, which aims to provide Account Tokens for web3 communities and their members. It’s created and developed by BEAST DAO (see links below).

We have already “reserved” the devcon community at PoM.
So any attendee now can go to Proof of Membership dApp, enter their name, and paying just gas fees grab their account token with a nice customizable illustration like this one.

PoM account tokens are not just personalized digital merch, which fully on-chain illustration could be customized by a community admin anytime, but they also could be used for multiple activities to increase engagement of community members after the event:

  • to vote together (via Snapshot)
  • to get token-gated access to exclusive community chats (via Guild)
  • to get access to perks and benefits provided by community (for ex. Airdrops etc.)
  • to submit reviews of the community to Community Base curated via PoM
  • and more to come.

Motivation & Rationale

People in web3 are now scattered across multiple social platforms where communities have their groups/servers/pages etc. To boost identification for community members, we want to enable a global decentralized community, which at the same time resembles more natural and familiar to people experience with their own accounts in this community.

So, we aimed to create an account token that is personalized just like ENS and free to get just like POAP. And which of course while being a token can enable various features common for tokens.

Talking also about Devcon specifically: many people attend the event multiple times and there is already a community formed around. PoM account token @devcon will help to boost people’s identification with a global Devcon community also between the events.

Implementation

PoM is a new project that isn’t yet publicly launched, but we are actively using it for BEAST DAO community for now.
PoM is operational on Ethereum mainnet, available as a public good and current functionality can be checked in the PoM dApp.

Operational Requirements & Ownership

  1. PoM could be used by Devcon attendees right away as a public good, no additional preps or development are required. BEAST DAO members are taking care of PoM operation and development.
  2. In future, PoM account tokens metadata could be used to populate Account info at Account — Devcon SEA, when people sign in with a wallet.
  3. What’s needed from Devcon team:
  • during the event and/or after it to communicate to attendees that they can get their digital merch via Proof of Membership dApp,
  • take over ownership of the “devcon” community at PoM to be able to customize token illustration’s colour scheme or “pause” tokens issuance and so on. For this, we just require an Ethereum Address, which will be set as a new “Admin” of the community.

Links & Additional Information

1 Like
2

What is preventing someone that does not even attend DEVCon from becoming a Member?

3

Hey @ligi,
is it really needed to prevent someone? Why would one on purpose exclude new or potential members?

I believe any community, including Devcon, want to grow and attract new members and that’s why it’s in most cases totally permissionless to have a membership/account in a community or a merch of the community.
And if people are ready to pay transaction fees to get their account token @devcon, it means they are either was or are or will be participating in the Devcon event or somehow associate themselves with the broader Devcon community.

There was no need for such functionality till now, though if it will be needed, we can figure out a solution, probably utilising ZuPass or PODs somehow.
For now there is an opportunity for the community admin to “pause registrations”, so when we will transfer community ownership to Devcon team, you can make it impossible for people to get memberships sometimes after the event (and of course later on “unpause” the community for new members again).

4

I got the impression from the “Proof” part in “Proof of membership”. So I wanted to know how this proof is working. So far the only “Proof” I saw is the proof of being willing to spend money/gas for the tx.
So far I fail to see what this would provide to our attendees that cannot be done with the POD system we have in place. Maybe you can enlighten me here.
Also the in the current phase it is quite difficult to onboard new DIPs that are not no-brainers that do not put load on our team. Currently you are very late to the game and we are busy executing on the plan we already have.
Maybe we should revisit this (months before) our next event.

5

So far I fail to see what this would provide to our attendees that cannot be done with the POD system we have in place. Maybe you can enlighten me here.

Sure. 2 things come to my mind right away:

  • With PoM unlike POD, attendees get something tangible and familiar, i.e. a token, that is kind of native for the industry thing. This token is associated with a nice customisable illustration and a person’s chosen name, which could be used further as their web3 name or be just a nice digital merch.

  • ZK proofs is a pretty nicht thing. As we see, many projects in this area are dying (like ones from the “Projects” section on the semaphore.pse.dev page) and their databases getting unavailable after that.
    The same risk exists for POD system, which is using a PostgreSQL database. With closure of their server, all the data will be gone.
    Unlike to that, PoM is initially designed resilient and all its features will be available to users as long as Ethereum mainnet up and running.

Got you regarding timing though, maybe we will get back to this in the future.

1 Like