This month the spotlight is on JokeRace, a platform for onchain communities to make, execute, and reward decisions. We invested in JokeRace exactly 1 year from today and are excited to dive into what JokeRace is, why it is important, and the role JokeRace will play in the future for onchain communities. Hint: JokeRace uniquely enables both large and small communities to grow and monetize in ways that couldn’t have been possible before.

First things first, let’s lay the groundwork for onchain communities. These are online-first communities that use smart-contract platforms to coordinate financial and human capital and are co-created by their internal builders/creators (e.g. via user-generated roadmaps). Whereas legacy online communities, such as those formed on Reddit and Facebook, rely on pre-internet financial and legal infrastructure for formation, custody, payments, and capital allocation, onchain communities have several benefits 👇

Onchain communities can be set up in minutes, making it easier to start and experiment with new ideas. They can flexibly distribute ownership, giving users upside in the value they create. They can dynamically track contributions, creating more adaptable ways to incentivize and acknowledge work. They can be open-source and transparent, cultivating trust within the network and sharing learnings throughout the space. They can automate rules and tasks to run on code, reducing the need for a corruptible centralized intermediary. They are borderless, making it easy for anyone worldwide to collaborate toward a shared goal. They are permissionless and forkable, allowing for entirely new group decision-making dynamics.

This brings us to JokeRace: it’s a simple platform for onchain communities to make better decisions. Users begin by creating a contest with a prompt – for example, “What protocol should we build on next?” or “Who should be our next podcast guest?”. Contest creators can let anyone submit responses or set requirements around respondents (e.g. token-gating for a subset within a community). During the submission period, community members can submit entries – for example, “zkSync” or “Elon Musk” – and, during the voting period, they can vote on their favorite entries. Contest creators are also able to define the parameters of the contest, including: 1/ submission duration, 2/ voting duration, and 3/ voting type (1-token-1-vote, quadratic, etc).

These JokeRace features are important because they enable bottom-up decision-making and broader participation for communities. Major projects like EigenLayer, Polygon, and Arbitrum have used JokeRace for diverse use cases, including: 1/ selecting and distributing grants, 2/ ideating around hackathon themes and selecting and distributing rewards within hackathons, 3/ co-creating user-generated roadmaps, 4/ user surveys, 5/ giveaways, 6/ content curation, 7/ co-learning & much more! 

The most exciting feature the JokeRace platform offers communities and contest creators, however, is programmatic rewards: the ability to programmatically define whether a contest will include a prize pool (e.g USDC or the community’s own token), decide how prizes are paid out (e.g top 3 ranked respondents split the prize pool), and invite others to fund the prize pool too. This is a huge unlock for online communities of the web2 era because legacy financial rails have prevented them from hosting internet-native contests. In other words, in using JokeRace, online communities have a direct path to monetization via contests.

This is particularly exciting for smaller online communities, which have previously been acts of kindness rather than financially sustainable and profitable operations. One example of a smaller community finding success in building on JokeRace to grow and monetize is Rehash, a web3 podcast whose listeners select guests via regular, viral JokeRace contests. Having their listeners select podcast guests on JokeRace helped Rehash go viral. More importantly, it enabled Rehash to determine from onchain data that 20% of its user base were Zerion users—and leveraged that insight to go to Zerion and get it to sponsor Rehash’s next season. A second example is Bytexplorers, an onchain community of data analysts, engineers, and scientists, who recently announced they’ll be using JokeRace for their airdrop by rewarding winners with their tokens. In doing so, they incentivize meaningful participation while putting tokens in the hands of the people most likely to hold onto them—the ones who have played a meaningful part in the community’s growth.

If you’re part of an onchain community, we’d love to hear from you! What do you think about JokeRace, and how could it be applied within your community? We strongly believe JokeRace can help onchain communities make better decisions, grow, and monetize. If you’re keen to dive in deeper, please join JokeRace’s own Telegram community here or send me a DM!

Framing Frames

Farcaster launched Frames two weeks ago. Since then, 85,000 frames have been cast and Farcaster daily active users have increased 10x, from ~2,500 to ~2,500. Frame hackathons are being hosted, memecoins are being created, cookies are selling out, and experimentation is at an all-time high. Frames are built using the Open Graph protocol which powers social embeds across the web. Taking the Open Graph protocol onchain is a huge unlock – as AGM explains it, “Frames are a new web3 primitive that web2 could never really power: an easy way to run app X while a user is still inside app Y, with little coordination between X and Y. The interoperable identity and transaction record of the blockchain, along with the seamless handling of money and digital ownership, makes it possible to have a real and universal graph of user actions across consumer apps, something even Facebook, at the height of its popularity, couldn’t manage.”

Some highlights from the Seed Club Ventures portfolio 👇

Daylight launched a frame that enabled users to seamlessly check for unclaimed airdrops in one-click within the Warpcast client. It’s since led to 1,488 people checking for unclaimed airdrops, 514 new users signing up for Daylight, and 220 people completing transactions. Check your unclaimed airdrops here! 

Paragraph launched a frame that lets users paste any Paragraph URL and turn it into a frame for users to: one-click subscribe to their newsletter, read the entire post straight from the feed, and visit the post online, with the original caster getting all referrer rewards.

Seam launched a framed that lets users create template Seam profiles from their on-chain data using their Farcaster accounts. 5,800 profiles were claimed and the Seam frame was reposted 53 times by different users.

Jayme from Launcher wrote a piece on how builders can leverage frames. TLDR – Frames are a superpower if your product leverages billboarding, i.e. use of your product is visible to others because it's repeatedly shared. Sharing is key because, if your URL is shared, your frame will be seen and engaged with, and vice versa if not.

SC07: Consumer Crypto

In hot pursuit of a dramatically more interesting internet, Seed Club launched its seventh accelerator cohort, SC07: Consumer Crypto. The accelerator is a 3-month program that brings together founders of weird, novel, and socially ambitious consumer crypto projects. The general focus is on projects with onchain distribution, an onchain business model, that are strongly memetic. Within that broad definition, we're specifically seeking projects exploring:
- Using memecoins as primitives for social products
- Fresh takes on prediction markets
- Everything apps (branded bundled protocols for specific audiences)
- Products for the Farcaster ecosystem
- Products purpose-built for viral ephemeral experiences
- Products unlocked by protocol rewards
- Pushing forward the onchain media distribution ecosystem
- Bringing new types of assets or experiences onchain
- The intersection of AI and onchain experiences 
- Games in traditionally unfun categories
- Points

The application submission deadline is Friday, February 16, at 11:59 pm PST.

Internet Explorers 

Internet Explorers is a new Seed Club production – a weekly rundown show where Jess, Josh, and Peacenode broadly explore the most interesting consumer crypto topics and new internet experiences. It's hosted every Friday at 10AM PT // 1PM ET. The latest episode features Brian from Unlonely, Yancey from Metalabel, and discusses where we’re heading in Crypto x AI. Catch up on YouTube and mint episodes on Pods! 👇

Until next time

Thank you for taking the time to read through the monthly Seed Club Ventures digest. Please don’t hesitate to share any feedback and suggestions – we’d love to hear from you! If you’re interested in getting involved with Seed Club or any of our portfolio projects, please don’t hesitate to DM Anthony! 🌱