I wanted to share some thoughts on what I see as a great potential for Octant’s growth, and get input from the Octant team and broader community on strategy etc.
What I mean by “growth” is: (1) more people familiar with Octant and its mission (2) more people actively engaged in the Octant community/public goods funding, and (3) more people holding/locking GLM (ie. driving demand for the GLM token).
My thesis is that the key to driving growth in all these metrics is harnessing the open social graph - in particular the one implemented on Farcaster Protocol.
(Fair disclosure: I have no financial interest in promoting Farcaster. I am however building a public goods project on Farcaster for the same reasons I’m outlining here - because I believe that the open social graph is a key component for creating an effective and self-sustainable public goods funding mechanism - more on that later).
What is Farcaster?
Farcaster (FC) is a “sufficiently decentralized” social media protocol (meaning that user posts are censorship resistant but display of the posts is client-dependent). FC currently has about 500,000 registered users (though I estimate the number of “real” accounts is probably around 100K)
Why Farcaster?
Octant’s main venue for community engagement right now is through Epochs (and to a lesser extent the nascent community fund). Epochs recur on a quarterly basis. For a short period, projects (and their respective communities) compete for a share of Octant’s ETH staking rewards. This brings some engagement and publicity to Octant but it’s not persistent.
While Epochs are the core of Octant, I believe that to have sustained growth on all metrics we need to have persistent community engagement - and preferably it should be driven by the community itself rather than top-down - this is where Farcaster comes in.
FC obviously has a tiny fraction of the users of a platform like Twitter. It does however have a large (and growing) base of the Ethereum community (Vitalik, for example, casts there much more often than on X), and it’s one of the most exciting ecosystems in crypto in my view. I also believe there is a much greater potential to build and grow an active and engaged Octant community there thanks to the open social graph and everything that can be built on it and integrated with Octant.
What’s the Strategy?
What I’m proposing here is a very rough outline with a few suggestions just to get a sense of what’s possible. I’d love to have a lot more community/team input on this so we can make it into a more robust plan, and look into what resources Octant would consider dedicating to this (if that is indeed a path that Octant would want to pursue in the first place…) I’m putting it out here because I believe it’s worth pursuing and has a lot of potential. I don’t think it should necessarily be the sole focus of Octant, but I do think it should be a major element in Octant’s overall growth strategy.
The key elements of the strategy include:
- Growing awareness of Octant on FC through contests, games, and other forms of community engagement.
- Periodic partnerships with other communities on FC (eg Purple, Regen, Greenpill, Lotto, etc.) to both build the Octant brand and fund public goods.
- Harness FC’s tipping economy toward activities that align with Octant’s growth goals and funding public goods more generally
- Use the open social graph to get quantitative (eg. GLM locked by FC user, number of Octant-related casts etc.) and qualitative data (eg. quality of content posted or benefit to community provided) on users which can then be used for Octant’s effort to decentralize its governance (as well for sybil resistance in Epoch voting)
- Set up broad categories of how community members can contribute to Octant’s growth (eg. memes, tooling, data analysis, Frames, etc. etc.) on FC and then periodically reward community members (both through the community tipping those users and through Octant funds) for their contributions. We can then use (shameless plug:) Impact App’s (free) curation tools to get the community itself involved in estimating the effect of the contributions (this is especially useful at scale, when the team will not have the capacity to review many posts, and it’s also a way to promote bottom-up involvement/potential governance for the community). Then measure the efficacy of the campaign and adjust accordingly.
So these are just some ideas and of course we can brainstorm other ways to harness the open social graph for Octant’s growth (I think there is a lot of potential with Frames, for example).
This strategy would obviously require both time and funding from Octant. But I think that it is flexible enough that it can be adjusted over time (based on KPIs) for both the time and resources invested in it.
Thoughts?