Building Contests with Jokerace: Use Cases
Contests for communities, big decisions, games and user acquisition
Contests for Big Decisions
Grants rounds / incubating new projects
Chains can offer grants rounds to builders, communities, and projects—including those who are already building with Chains and those who are considering it. For example, chains have developed use cases with us to:
give grants to top communities on their chain
pick projects that they would feature for anyone to fund
give grants to communities looking to move to their chain
launch metacontests for the best contest ideas—so that winners would win funds to create their own contest with rewards to draw more users to the chain.
Grants rounds don’t just incentivize and incubate major communities to build onchain. They also incentivize projects to submit applications to get public attention, campaign to earn votes from a jury or larger community, and ultimately get funding to build—all of which can serve as powerful marketing for both the projects and the chain.
Hackathons
Builders can submit hackathon projects in a contest with a jury voting on their favorite to earn rewards—enabling both onchain rewards and onchain reputation that can be the basis of future airdrops, access, and resumes. These hackathons can be gamified with onchain credentials letting developers compete at higher ranks for higher prizes—even letting token-holders vote from home. Bonus: tier hackathons at different levels to boot incentives and prizes.
Onchain protocol decisions
Chains can enable fully onchain decisions through us, including:
Elections: having communities apply and vote on delegates and representatives
RFPs: having communities share and prioritize their top objectives for the chain
Amendments: letting communities amend proposals to vote on their favorite version that will be most likely to pass
Bounties: enabling community to apply to fulfill tasks and get funding if they win
Passing proposals: letting communities vote onchain to approve or reject proposals
Giveaways, Games, and User Feedback
Chains can offer users their first opportunity to transact through giveaways, prediction games, or even fun contests to pick communities and collaborators, etc. These contests can be especially powerful for incentivizing onchain transactions when done on a recurring basis.
Creating Games Onchain
At their heart, contests are just data about user preferences. So using votes to determine a winner is, in fact, just one use-case among many. For example, what if we thought of votes as “points” that players give to favorite entries? Many other options for games might become possible.
Weighting Traits or Data Sets
Let’s say you want to train a bot on data sets—or create an NFT with traits. You could propose, say, 10 options to your community and let them vote on their favorites. But instead of making the top-voted entry the winner, you could enable *all* data sets and traits to win… weighted by the votes they get. So for example, if the winning trait or set gets 40% of votes, it could have a weight of 40% in your bot or NFT. Etc.
Word Games
Rather than vote on a single winning entry, you could ask each entry to build off the previous one—in a kind of jenga-like game of endless branches and digressions that gets harder and harder as players struggle to come up with qualifying entries based on those that have come before. For example, this word game asks players to submit major cities that begin with the last letter of the last entry—an easy enough task at first, but a harder one as more people play. Similar games could be devised using comments to create jenga-like, labyrinthine exquisite corpse games for players to build off each other’s work.
Collection Games
Each “vote” in a contest could instead be used to collect the entry. So for example, if you wanted to create a user-generated collection of animals (a la Pokemon), players could each submit a creature, and voters could each have, say, 3 votes to collect three entries. The least popular would end up the rarest, and to prevent everyone from voting at the end (to try to collect rarest items), some kind of max could be implemented: so only the first 100 votes on any given entry could be minted. From there, everyone would have their own characters to trade, showcase, and play in games.
Point Games
For any given contest, players could be informed that each vote they give will count as a “point” they earn in the project. Additional game mechanisms could be layered in: for example, you double your points if you vote on winning entries, or are one of the first to vote, or consistently participate in contests. Longterm these “points” could be used as the basis for access, opportunities, and airdrops in your project.
Contests: A User-Acquisition Tool for Chains
We designed JokeRace to be the best way for communities to make, execute, and reward decisions. But for chains specifically, we designed JokeRace as a one-click, no-code smart contract deployment platform—so that anyone can deploy a contest as a contract within minutes, with incentives for users to submit and vote on entries in just a few seconds. And that means that chains can leverage JokeRace to incentivize users to bridge and start transacting onchain immediately. We intend to be the best way for chains to go to market.
In one sense, our job is to support chains in acquiring traffic with a low-commit, low-effort, and low-friction way for users to engage onchain. But in another sense, our job is also to support chains in incentivizing and identifying top contributors through high-quality, high-stakes hackathons, grants rounds, and group decisions. Marketing contests alone, for example, incentivize users to use their products, share data on their priorities, campaign publicly to win, complete actions to be allowlisted and earn votes, and develop on-chain reputation about their own value to companies.
Really, any time anyone is looking to build onchain community engagement—whether that’s your own community or communities building on your chain—JokeRace can make that process easier and, more importantly, more fun.
Here are some examples of how chains have leveraged us to engage users and bootstrap activity:
Polygon made JokeRace their grants platform to decide which projects receive capital.
Arbitrum DAO also made JokeRace their grants platform to fund to projects directly,with over $100,000 of grants prizes given directly through JokeRace.
Arbitrum DAO additionally ran four contests (one, two, three, four) to determine their goals that elicited tens of thousands of transactions on our site.
Mode went to market with an entire hackathon run entirely on their chain on JokeRace.
Mantle ran a contest for best tweet on their new program, Journeys, and incentivized their community to write 100s of tweets by offering just a few hundred dollars in $MNT.
Unique went to market by offering 1000 $DOT for the best NFTs created on their chain.
Lens hosted a $50k holiday hackathon for devs to hack on the Lens network which they followed up with a demo day for participants to win even more rewards.
Skate let the community choose and vote for which EVM apps they should take to altVMs–and made over ~$3300.
As you can see, there is a whole range of seriousness in these contests—JokeRace supports any use case that involves decision-making.