The new version of Open Format is live. It’s faster, cleaner, and doesn’t require an AI whisperer or a web3 priest to use.

In fact, you can now go from “Hmm, is anyone actually doing anything in our community?” to full-blown impact reports and reward recommendations in under two minutes. Yes, we timed it. Here’s the video to prove it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Connect your platforms - Link your Discord and/or Telegram. Your Copilot will start listening quietly in the background.

2. Get insights automatically - Your community impact report and reward recommendations are updated daily at midnight.

3. Setup your rewards - Create an ERC-20 token, Points (a soulbound ERC-20), or NFTs directly in the platform, or bring your own.

4. Reward contributors - Review the recommendations and send rewards. Reward individuals, batch reward, or use social handles or wallet addresses.

5. Let your community know - Rewards are live. Notification tools are on the way.

→ Generate your first impact report

That's it! It's an exciting time. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

Cheers,
Andy and the Open Format Team

Another busy couple of weeks working with communities to make it easier to recognise who’s contributing and adding the most value to their ecosystem. Let's get into it.

Introducing in channel rewards

Every week, we get told: “It’d be great to reward our users directly from Discord.” We got you. You can now use the /send command with the Copilot to reward onchain tokens straight to your users by tagging them.

Here’s me rewarding our dev George for fixing the subgraph. Thanks, legend 🙏

Telegram Integration

Our Copilot has been busy across Discord communities — tracking contributions, generating insight reports, and recommending rewards. Next week, we’re bringing this magic to Telegram. Same insights, new playground.

Rewarding on our new chain

Starting next week, you can reward your users on the Open Format chain, powered by our partnership with Aurora. For now, we’re picking up the gas bill, so you can stay focused on what matters — recognising and rewarding your community.

Faster path to community insights & recommendations

Right now, in our platform, you have to create an onchain community and token before adding our agents to Discord. But not every community is ready to jump onchain from day one. So, we’re changing things up: connect your platforms first, and add tokens whenever you’re ready.

Even without tokens, our agents will still deliver value — surfacing insights and generating reward recommendations across your community.

You can already create tokens and start rewarding in under three minutes. Soon, insights and recommendations will be baked right into that same flow.

Here’s some early alpha for you.

See you soon for more exciting updates!

Cheers,
Andy and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋

Curious how this could work for your community? Book a 30-min chat with me.

Today we’re excited to announce a big step forward for Open Format: Recommendations.

At the heart of it, Recommendations help communities understand where value is happening, not just where people say it might happen. They’re generated by our Discord Copilot today — and coming soon to Telegram, on-chain signals, and more.

Why Recommendations Matter

Communities today aren’t short on activity — they’re short on clarity.

People are contributing every day, but coordination is often messy, invisible, and inefficient.

It’s hard to see who’s actually driving value, and even harder to reward them fairly.

Most funding and reward systems still rely on promises — grant proposals, bounties, plans for what someone might do — not real proof of what’s already happening.

Open Format flips it.

Recommendations surface real contributions, real actions, backed by real data — so communities can coordinate smarter, reward faster, and grow stronger.

Proof over promises. Visibility over guesswork. Coordination that actually works.

How It Works (Right Now)

1. Invite our Discord Copilot into your server.

2. It monitors conversations, contributions, and signals.

3. It generates Recommendations based on real activity.

4. You log into Open Format, review the Recommendations, and reward users instantly with tokens or badges.

No spreadsheets. No guesswork. Just clear, data-backed value recognition.

Benefits for Contributors

Recommendations don’t just help community owners — they help contributors too.

Contributors finally get recognition for what they actually contribute, not just for talking about what they might do. Real actions get rewarded, and real work doesn’t go unseen.

They also build a reputation that travels. When a contributor earns rewards in one community, that proof is stored on-chain — portable, verifiable, and valuable. They can carry it with them into new communities, showing what they’ve actually done and building trust instantly.

Recommendations also enable better matching inside communities. They help answer critical questions: Who is contributing? What skills do they bring? Why are they here? What do they expect? This context helps community owners unlock the right people faster — and helps contributors find the right opportunities to grow.

In just a few clicks, a contributor can go from active member to recognised leader — across any community that uses Open Format.

Where This Is Going: Building the CommunityOS

Discord is just the first step — the vision is much bigger.

DAOs will be able to reward proven contributors instantly, making treasuries more transparent and more aligned with actual work happening on the ground — not just promises. Instead of slow grant processes and politics, treasury managers can use real-time data to distribute value fairly, as contributions happen.

Maintainers of open source projects will be able to recognise and reward everything that helps their projects grow — from code contributions to issue tracking, documentation, and community support. We’re already using this inside our own GitHub repositories to support builders contributing to Open Format.

But the opportunity is much bigger. Any community that relies on contributions — fan communities, learning groups, creative collectives, onchain games, grassroots networks — can benefit. Wherever people gather to build, create, support, or grow, Open Format can help them coordinate smarter, reward faster, and evolve stronger.

And because Open Format is designed to be modular, decentralised, and networked, this isn’t just about single communities working in isolation. It’s about creating an open network where every action, contribution, and reward adds context and value — for everyone.

We’re building more than a feature.

We’re building a CommunityOS — an operating system for the future of communities.

One where coordination is autonomous and data-driven, reputation is portable across the network, and value flows transparently and fairly. Communities won’t just manage members — they’ll orchestrate ecosystems.

The more communities that plug into Open Format, the smarter, faster, and stronger the whole network becomes.

Let’s Build It Together

We’re live-testing Recommendations right now.

If you want to bring this into your server and help shape the future of coordination — join us in Discord or book a call with me.

The future isn’t about managing communities.

It’s about coordinating them — smarter, faster, and fairer.

Thanks for being part of this journey!

Cheers,
Andy and the Open Format Team

Hey Builders 👋

It’s your favourite token-juggling prompt whisperer, Andy, coming up for air from the simulation with another edition of Happy Hacking.

When we started building, our goal was simple: make it easy to create, mint and transfer onchain tokens. We built APIs and SDKs so developers could plug blockchain functionality into their apps without reinventing the wheel. It was solid infrastructure—but not groundbreaking.

What we learned quickly is that tokens alone aren’t enough. Onchain transactions are transparent, but without context, they’re hard to interpret. What was this transfer for? What did it represent? Who did what, and why?

So we added a layer of context—metadata for every transaction. Think of it like tagging a post. Suddenly, every onchain action became searchable, meaningful, and connected to a bigger picture.

This led us to build a no-code rewards platform on top of that infrastructure. Now, anyone—not just developers—could reward behaviour, add tags, and track engagement. It opened the door to more accessible, community-driven coordination.

But this was still just the beginning.

We’re now stepping into a new phase—where rewards become economies.

The combination of structured onchain data and tagged context makes it possible for AI agents to step in. They can read the activity, understand the value being created, and start to act on it.

We’re building AI Agent infrastructure that can verify contributions, trigger rewards, and suggest meaningful next steps. And because everything is recorded transparently, it’s auditable and fair by design.

Imagine you’re an artist trying to reward your most loyal fans. Today, you’re stuck manually checking likes, shares, Discord messages—trying to spot who’s really showing up.

With Open Format, every fan action—sharing your track, creating content, attending an event—can be logged onchain with context. An agent scans that data, verifies which fans drove the most impact, and automatically distributes rewards. No middlemen. No guesswork.

That’s the shift—from subjective coordination to verifiable contribution.

In Web3, you don’t create a new account on every platform. You use a single wallet—your account—and take it with you everywhere. That means your actions, contributions, and context can be tracked across ecosystems, not locked inside siloed platforms.

Just like in real life: you’re the same person whether you’re at work, at a gig, or helping out in your local community. Web3 makes that kind of continuity possible online—and Open Format adds the context and structure to make it understandable to both humans and machines.

Web3 has struggled to gain user traction. It’s powerful tech, but hard to use—for humans.

But not for machines.

Agents thrive in structured environments. What’s confusing or frustrating for people—wallets, gas fees, signing—can be easily handled by machines. That’s the unlock.

By combining blockchain infrastructure with agent-powered systems, we’re building a new kind of economy—where humans contribute and machines coordinate.

We call it Open Format Economies. And we’re just getting started.

Behind the scenes, we’ve been working closely with a number of partners to bring our vision into real communities—starting with communities on Discord.

We’ve been deploying our AI agents into partner servers, using them to observe what’s happening in the community: who’s contributing, who’s creating impact, and what kind of behaviour should be recognised.

Out of that work, we’ve built the beta version of our Agent API and a new Discord Bot. It can sit inside your server, monitor activity, understand context, and suggest rewards for those making waves—whether they’re hosting AMAs, jumping into support threads, or just bringing good energy to the community.

As these agents learn more about each community, they’ll start to self-optimise. They’ll begin to understand what types of contributions matter most in your context, adapt their reward suggestions, and eventually automate actions that reflect your community’s unique culture and goals. This is the beginning of a feedback loop—where agents observe, learn, act, and improve over time.

We’re kicking things off with Community Summaries and Impact Reports, then rolling out Reward Suggestions, and finally full Reward Automation.

Here’s what’s launching soon:

• 🧠 AI-powered Discord Bot that monitors community activity

• 🎯 Smart Reward Suggestions based on real activity and contributions

• ⚙ Reward Automation for actions like joining AMAs, participating in votes, or helping others

If you’re keen to get this running in your community today, fill out this form and let’s get cooking.

We also did a livestream this week walking through everything—you can rewatch it here.

🔁 Batch Rewards - You can now send batch rewards via CSV upload — perfect for event-based airdrops and campaigns.

📤 CSV Exports - Export a CSV of all rewards in your community. Ideal for audits, tracking trends, or just keeping things tidy.

📊 Leaderboard Date Filtering - Filter your community leaderboard by week, month, 3 months, or all-time to better track progress over time.

🏷 Badge IDs on Chain - Badge cards now display the onchain Badge ID. Easily copy it or click through to view it on a block explorer.

📲 Connect Telegram - You can now connect your Telegram account to your wallet — alongside Discord and GitHub support.

🔓 Unlink Social Accounts - Linked the wrong account or want to opt-out? No worries — you can now unlink your wallet from connected platforms.

🚀 Prioritising Social Logins - Most users log in via social accounts, so we’ve made social logins the default over Metamask and WalletConnect.

That's it! It's an exciting time. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

Cheers,
Andy, Dan, and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format?

You can create a token, badge, and reward them in just three minutes on our platform. Yes, you read that right. Three minutes. What a time to be alive.

Try it for yourself here.

Andy here, back with your regular dose of Happy Hacking! Hope you're all having a productive week. Things have been buzzing here, and we've got some exciting updates to share with you. Let's jump straight in!

Okay, let's talk blockchains. We know, we know, it feels like there's a new one popping up every week! You might be thinking, "Seriously? Another chain?" And honestly, we get it. But this one is a bit special, and for a very specific reason.

We've been growing fast, supporting more and more fantastic chains for you to build on. Which is brilliant! But it also means a growing workload for us. Deploying our smart contracts, subgraphs, API, Rewards Platform – it's a lot to manage across every new chain.

While we're happy to support this broad ecosystem, we also realised we needed a solution that really scales. Our vision is for the Open Format Chain to become the go-to place for community coordination and rewards. But crucially, we want to ensure you can still reward your users, no matter what chain they're on.

And this is where the Open Format Chain comes into its own. Being on Aurora, which is itself a smart contract on NEAR, unlocks the incredible potential of NEAR Intents for us!

What does this mean in practice? Cross-chain magic! NEAR Intents allow us to make calls across different chains seamlessly. For example, we're currently exploring a collaboration with a project that wants to reward their community on Solana. Now, Solana isn't EVM compatible (and Open Format is, at its core). Without NEAR Intents, supporting Solana rewards would mean a complete system overhaul – something we're keen to avoid (at least for now!).

But with NEAR Intents? Cross-chain rewards become a real possibility, allowing you to engage your community wherever they are, while leveraging the power of the Open Format ecosystem.

Our journey with the Open Format Chain literally kicked off just hours ago when I deployed the very first community. We're already working hard, and hopefully, by the next newsletter, we'll have conjured up some cross-chain wizardry to share with you all!

Next up, a feature many of you have been asking for: Multi-Token Leaderboards! We've noticed that many communities are using Open Format to reward different types of contributions with different tokens. Makes perfect sense!

And you asked, and we delivered! Multi-Token Leaderboards went live in our rewards platform just yesterday. We're excited about this one.

What's the benefit? Flexibility and deeper insights! Previously, our leaderboards were focused on a single token. Now, you can track leaderboards for all the different tokens you're using to reward your community.

This gives you a much richer picture of community engagement.

This not only provides more granular data on contribution types but also adds a new layer of friendly competition. Community members can see exactly where they stand for each type of reward, potentially encouraging even greater participation and a clearer understanding of valuable contributions within your ecosystem.

We (and the rest of the internet) have been talking about AI Agents for a couple of months now. Recently, we started building. We're thrilled to give you a first look at the very first version of our community agent, currently in Alpha stage within our own community.

This first iteration is focused on understanding our community members better. It engages in a friendly chat, asking about skills, interests, and how individuals want to contribute within a given community.

Why is this important? Because the future of community agents is about personalised support and contribution pathways. Imagine you join an open-source project using Open Format. The community agent can understand you're a skilled developer with a passion for coding. This agent can then proactively suggest relevant open issues and highlight opportunities for you to contribute code and earn rewards!

Or, if you're a seasoned moderator, the agent could identify key conversations in a community's social channels where your expertise in community guidance would be invaluable, again, with appropriate recognition and rewards for your efforts.

This is just the beginning. It's the first step in our Learn. Coordinate. Reward vision, paving the way for smarter, more efficient, and more personalised community experiences powered by AI. We're excited about the potential and can't wait to share more as we progress!

Over the coming weeks, we'll be adding a button to the platform, allowing you to request Alpha access to our community agent and start using it in your own community. If you really can't wait, hit us up in Discord or book a call with me.

That's it! See you next time!

Cheers,
Andy, Dan, and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format?

You can create a token, badge, and reward them in just three minutes on our platform. Yes, you read that right. Three minutes. What a time to be alive.

Try it for yourself here.

It’s your resident code junkie, Andy, back with another fix of Happy Hacking. This week is all about rewarding contributions in open source projects.

Picture the scene. You've got an awesome open-source project and you're looking for contributors. Easy, right? Just build it and they will come? Nah. Don't get me wrong, some devs genuinely do it for the love of it, which I fucking love, BTW. But most have full-time jobs, mortgages, and bills to pay. So, how do you incentivise them when you have no money?

We've been wrestling with this challenge for ages – how do you really fuel open source? It's not just about thanking people; it's about making sure valuable contributions are recognised and that the right things get done! And that's where the magic of decentralised tech and AI Agents comes in. See, it's not just about slapping a token on contributions (though that's awesome for rewards!). It's about building a system where the community token itself becomes the engine for coordination. Imagine this: contributors earn tokens for their code, sure, but also for helping guide the project, for reviewing others' work, for flagging important issues – all the stuff that makes a project thrive. And with AI Agents in the mix, we can automate task assignment, prioritise what needs doing, and even help distribute those tokens fairly based on the value of the contribution. If we get this right, and the project takes off, that token isn't just a reward – it's a stake in a thriving, self-organising open-source ecosystem. And that is seriously exciting.

So, considering our tech is open-source, we're starting this process ourselves to see what happens. Those of you in our Discord server may have noticed a new channel pop up yesterday called #building-our-community-agent with messages like this:

Let's me tell you how it works.

1. Head over to https://rewards.openformat.tech/open-format

2. Connect your GitHub account (and your Discord if you want notifications in Discord). This will create a wallet behind the scenes for you. If you want to use an existing wallet in Metamask, log in with Metamask and then connect your GitHub account.

3. Head to https://github.com/open-format/ and take a look through our open-source repos and see what takes your fancy. As soon as you start contributing code, you will be rewarded.

4. That's it!

What's the Stack?

• Currently, It's an API with a POST endpoint that GitHub calls. Here's what happens:

  • Listens for GitHub Events: The API listens for real-time events happening on GitHub repositories using webhooks. This means we're instantly notified when code is pushed!

  • Securely Verifies Contributions: We use a secret key to ensure every webhook comes directly from GitHub, guaranteeing the legitimacy of the contribution and preventing fake reward claims.

  • Automatically Identifies Code Contributions: The API processes the webhook data to detect new code commits. This detection is the trigger for our reward system.

  • Rewards Contributors with $DEV Tokens: For every valid code contribution from a registered user, the API automatically rewards them with 100 $DEV tokens via Open Format, directly to their linked wallet.

  • Publicly Celebrates Contributions on Discord: Lastly, the API posts a message (see above) in our Discord community channel, announcing the reward and linking to the commit and the reward transaction!
    
    If you want to take a look for yourself, you can find the code here.

This is only the beginning. We have so many ideas about how this could evolve. The next thing we're working on is integrating LLMs to review PRs and map that against Open Format's goals to determine the reward value. Then we can give the agent a wallet itself with our community token and let it loose. Exciting. Ambitious. Mainly exciting.

However, we don't want to do this solo. We're looking for new or existing open-source projects interested in building this with us. If you know us, you know we've built the decentralised layer for token distribution. Now, we're diving headfirst from the 200ft diving board into the AI Agent space to marry community coordination and decentralised token distribution in a beautiful, long-lasting relationship that anyone can use. So, if you are interested in co-creating the future of open-source incentivisation, hit us up in Discord or book a call with me.

• Improvement: added max description length of 2000 characters and added translation for error message (8d9fe51)

• Improvement: improve community settings form validation and error handling (a7e356a)

• Improvement: Add GitHub username support for leaderboard and user handles (bda525f)

• UI: add ActiveLink component for navigation highlighting (adfb2a1)

• Fix: /leaderboard endpoint no longer returns entries with zero xp_rewarded

• Fix: resolved validation not showing by implementing field operator and blur handling (d9ce4de)

• Fix: image size validation for badge creation form (730af9d)

• CSV Import for bulk reward distribution

• CSV Export for reward auditing

• Dynamic Token Selection for Leaderboard - The Leaderboard currently shows rankings for only one pre-selected token (set by token_to_display). Users can't directly view leaderboards for other community tokens in the UI. This limits data insights and flexibility. We're improving the Leaderboard to let users dynamically switch between tokens and see each token's leaderboard - PR

That's it! See you next time!

Cheers,
Andy and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format?

You can now create a token, badge, and reward them in just three minutes on our platform. Yes, you read that right. Three minutes. What a time to be alive.

Try it for yourself here.

It’s your favourite tab button developer monkey, Andy, back with another edition of Happy Hacking. The Lab is on fire (in a good way), and we’re running out of test tubes. Shall we?

Two weeks ago, Steve Joined the Party. Since then, we’ve been honing our prompt engineering skills to make sense of the data we’ve collected. Here’s how we're doing it:

1. First, we fetch all “memories” from the past week in our data store. Here’s a example of what a memory looks like:

[
  {
    "id": "e6411868-28d7-0173-a9f2-a310a6158784",
    "type": "messages",
    "createdAt": "2025-01-16 15:53:43.992+00",
    "content": {
      "url": "https://discord.com/channels/932238833146277958/1168382458929098783/1329478702307872920",
      "text": "Thanks team for all your hard work.",
      "source": "discord",
      "attachments": []
    },
    "embedding": "[0.06096679,0.046528477,0.006353536,-0.0042828377,-0.03534897,-0.062324625,0.017244503,0.03186386,-0.033176433,-0.028967146,0.038879342,0.019982804,-0.04186658,-0.026658826,0.023694219,0.023626328,0.013476511,-0.03175071,-0.045623254,0.020254372,-0.011688696,-0.04666426,-0.00051626016,-0.007790578,-5.834447e-05,-0.018387347,-0.02292478,-0.005889609,0.049560975,-0.01982439,0.007213498,-0.026545674,0.032316472,0.03186386,0.028220337,-0.009657601,-0.024712596,-0.019699922,-0.0068514086,-0.015603786,0.02835612,-0.055309143,0.04164027,0.056214366,-0.024169462,-0.010415725,-0.07522406,-0.01963203,0.010059294,0.02912556,0.027677203,-0.017753692,0.019598084,0.050964072,0.0061272304,-0.022019556,0.029668694,0.069747455,-0.0034426774,-0.043292303,0.030076044,0.002681724,0.033289585,0.007106003,-0.02410157,-0.021974295,-0.021261431,-0.01475514,0.01804789,-0.03695574,0.020469362,0.030936006,-0.002691625,-0.02444103,0.011982894,-0.0091710435,0.016882414,0.012627865,-0.0029334892,-0.030981267,...]",
    "userId": "d25effd0-b284-00fb-ad1f-0e1968a3f452",
    "agentId": "9ce5770b-3bb4-02a1-959b-e2d97e34379c",
    "roomId": "df11d03d-4ce1-01fd-b308-6851de09d97b",
    "unique": true
  },
]

2. Gripping stuff, we know. Then we need to analyse all the messages for the past two weeks.

3. Next, we funnel all of this through our Insights Service and a Task Service, which, in theory, should extract meaningful patterns.

4. And voilà! Here’s the latest output for the Open Format Community. We’ll do our best to keep it updated with fresh insights—assuming Steve doesn’t go rogue.

This experiment is teaching us both how—and, more importantly, how not—to use AI. It’s fun, fascinating, and mildly terrifying, all wrapped up in a neat little package. We’ll keep you posted.

Ah, coordination. The fine art of getting people to work together without descending into chaos. To tackle this dilemma, we’ve been busy refining our approach. Here’s a sneaky screenshot of our latest Linear project spec:

As you can see, we’re making bold moves in the world of structured organisation (Ha!). No more endless message threads, vague task descriptions, or that one person who always claims they "didn’t see the update." With this, everything has its place, and everyone should—in theory—know what they’re supposed to be doing. Here is a "simple" feedback loop.

[Community Goals]
    → Task Suggestion (Identify needs)
    → Validation (Ensure quality)
    → Compensation (Reward Distribution) (Recognise effort)
    → [Stronger Engagement → Repeat]

Will it work? Probably. Will it completely solve the coordination problem? Absolutely not. But hey, incremental progress is still progress. Here is quick mockup of what we think this could look like:

As more community builders experiment with our platform, the bug reports and feature requests are pouring in. Here’s a peek at some of the latest things we’ve been working on:

Our platform supports Aurora, Base, Arbitrum, Matchain, and TurboChain. We originally added a handy Chain Selector in the top right, thinking that was a logical place for it. Turns out, users had no idea what chain they were on. Whoops.

So, we’ve added the Chain Selector into the community creation flow, making it impossible to ignore. And because we know you love a good visual cue, we’ve also added a badge next to the selector showing how much gas you have in your connected wallet for that chain - view commit

We love how our platform enables users to reward tokens and badges without touching a single line of code. However, it didn’t take long for users to ask, “Can we reward tokens we already have in our wallet?”

Technically, our contracts can handle this—but there was no way to do it through the platform. So we wanted to change that.

Now, you can either transfer existing tokens or mint new ones, all in a few clicks. Simple, flexible, and exactly how it should have been from the start. - view commit

We’re thrilled to be powering the Matchain x PSG Rewards community through our partnership with Matchain, enabling fans to claim Game Badges and PSG Points.

Check it out: psgclubrewards.matchain.io

• You can now update Badge metadata directly from the Badges page - #96f1156

• We updated the Aurora Block Explorer URL - #02c0a7c

• Leaderboard displaying 0 values

• CSV import for bulk reward distribution

• A small but mighty UI fix—highlighting the active page when viewing a community, so you actually know where you are.

That's it! See you next time!

Cheers,
Andy, Dan, and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format?

You can now create a token, badge, and reward them in just three minutes on our platform. Yes, you read that right. Three minutes. What a time to be alive.

Try it for yourself here.

Your favourite team of digital tinkerers are back with another edition of Happy Hacking! Grab a cuppa, and let's dive into the latest shenanigans at Open Format.

We’ve been talking about AI Agents a lot over the past few months, Dan and Andy went deep over the christmas break. Maybe a little too deep considering it was supposed to be a 'break'.

The result?
Steve...

Steve is the first version of our Rewards AI Agent and for now he has one mission. To listen and learn. Don't worry though he has plans to do A LOT more, and soon...

We've unleashed Steve into three communities so far: one's a top 50 blockchain, another is one of the most talked about AI x web3 projects, and then of course we let him into our Discord. (Join us!)

Why is Steve eavesdropping? He's gathering intel to help community builders be smarter with their community rewards. By understanding all the valuable contributions users are making across all the communities channels, he will allow community builders to reward in a much quicker and more automated way. More on that next time!

Why is he called Steve? If you know, you know.

To give you a tiny glimpse into our vision for Steve, here's a video we whipped up. Spoiler alert: The future isn't as far off as you might think.

In other news, our Rewards Community Hub is now in Closed Beta. It's your one-stop shop to onboard, reward, and monitor your community.

In literally 5 minutes (time yourself... we did...) you should be able to create an onchain community, token and badges, integrate your social channels, start rewarding, customise your community page, add tiers, leaderboards—all without writing a single line of code.

Below is a bit of a teaser, but if you're keen you can start using it now with this link (we're in closed Beta remember so keep it on the hush hush 😉). Please come chat to us about it in Discord!

The team got access this week and started building some hilarious and pretty useful communities:

Sarah's (not) boring points...

For context, Sarah (Open Format's CEO) gets pretty frustrated with us for not doing what we refer to as ‘boring’ tasks, basically anything that is actual work. Tasks like updating basecamp, sharing notes and generally keeping our admin up to speed. So she is now handing out (not) boring points.

Izayah's community for true Bristolians...

If you want to see how we built the Rewards product using the Open Format toolkit you can... we recorded basically the whole process and streamed it to Youtube. You can check out the playlist here.

It goes from us having quite literally nothing all the way to a conversation with Ollie (our UX magician) where we explored all the ways we can improve the user's experience as they build and reward. We'll definitely be doing this for future projects going forward too!

We've expanded our chain integrations. Rewards by Open Format now supports Aurora, TurboChain, Matchain, Base, and Arbitrum, with many more coming soon. If you have any other chains in mind that you would particularly like to use please let us know and we'll see what we can do!

And that's all for now. Keep building, keep innovating, and as always, happy hacking!

Cheers,

Andy, Dan and the Open Format Team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format?

You can now create a token, badge, and reward them in just 3 minutes on our platform. Yes, you read that right. Three minutes. What a time to be alive. Try for yourself here.

Hey Builders 👋

It's your hybrid human-AI web3 nerd, Andy, back with another edition of Happy Hacking. The last few weeks? Three words: Building, Breaking, Innovating.

We’ve been pushing boundaries (as always), building in public, and playing with the latest open source AI tools. Here’s what’s been cooking at Open Format:

Transparency is everything: from brainstorming to debugging to live demos. We’ve been guilty of tinkering in the shadows, but we’ve finally seen the light. Now, we’re all about building in public—streaming our platform’s creation and showing off our AI experiments. No more secrets, just slightly awkward live coding.

👉 Watch our streams: YouTube Live
👉 Join the conversation: Discord channels #building-our-platform and #ai-x-web3

Stop by to see what’s cooking—or drop your ideas on what we should tackle next!

You may have seen this announcement in Discord:

What could’ve been a web2 nightmare turned into a validation of our decentralised approach. In web2, platforms hold all the data—and the risks. But here, your interactions and data are truly yours. They can’t be deleted, stolen, or lost by us.

Building decentralised tech isn’t always the easy route, but moments like this prove why it’s worth it. Platforms shouldn’t be gatekeepers of your data 💡

Here’s the problem: Open Format uses an event-driven architecture, meaning rewards are sent automatically when conditions are met—no claiming required. Sounds great, right? But in the EVM world, transactions are processed one at a time, using a counter called a nonce to keep things in order. If a new transaction is sent before the previous one is finalised, it can accidentally overwrite the earlier one because they end up using the same nonce. This means some rewards might never get sent. Not great.

The solution? Nonce management using Redis. Here’s the magic formula:

• Redis nonce counter: Ensures unique, sequential nonces across servers.

• Atomic increments: Prevents race conditions when multiple servers request nonces.

• Sync checks: Keeps Redis and blockchain nonces aligned, resetting when needed.

• Retry logic: Smooths out nonce errors with exponential backoff.

Result: 50 transactions every 10ms from a single wallet—limited only by my Alchemy RPC. It likely could handle more without the rate limit. Check out the code here.

Remember Eliza from the last newsletter? Well, Dan’s been busy, and things just got a whole lot more experimental.

• Voice-Powered AI: Tested adding an AI agent to a Discord voice channel, complete with a custom Eleven Labs voice. It knows everything about Open Format. Could this be our first AI DevRel you can just chat with? Maybe. Goodbye documentation—almost.

• Integrated Wallet Rewards: Tested AI agents in Discord and Telegram to reward points and badges. For now, it’s just a concept—next, we’ll figure out rules and conditions.

• Contribution Tracking: Experimented with tracking wallets, points, badges, and actions in real-time within social channels. Still rewards-focused, but it could eventually track entire process lifecycles to uncover trends.

• Dynamic Recognition: Trialed an AI agent monitoring activity across Discord, Telegram, and on-chain interactions to auto-reward contributions (1–500 points).

• Broadcaster Bot: Our first AI influencer, ready to share updates on Open Format across social media. Who knows, it might even write the next newsletter. 😉

• Automated Rewards: Building an API to give agents context, tasks, rules, and potentially a budget for automating reward distribution. Essentially, a decentralised personal assistant in the making.

• Cross-Platform Insights: Tools to track engagement across Twitter, Discord, GitHub, and beyond.

• Sandbox Experiments: Letting agents loose in Discord to interact, reward, and build reputations. What could go wrong?

The AI future is looking bright—and just a little chaotic. Stay tuned!

That’s all for now, builders. Thanks for joining us on this wild journey—your feedback means the world to us. See you in Discord, and let’s keep building cool shit together. Have a great holiday break! The new year is just around the corner, and it’s going to be an exciting one. 🚀

Happy Hacking,

Andy and the Open Format team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format? Did you know you can use our SDK to create on-chain badges (NFTs) for decentralised proof of attendance—in just 7 lines of code? What a time to be alive!

async function createBadge() {
  const params: Reward_CreateBadgeParams = {
    name: "Pottery Workshop Completion",
    symbol: "POTTERY_CERT",
    description: "This badge verifies that the holder successfully attended and completed the Pottery Workshop on Dec 6, 2024. Proof of your hands-on creativity and craftsmanship!"
  };

  const badge = await sdk.Reward.createBadge(params);

  console.log("BADGE_ADDRESS:", badge.address());
}

Hey Builders 👋

Your resident web3 internet nerd is back with another edition of Happy Hacking! It’s been a wild few weeks in the Lab—collaborations, chain releases, building out our dApp Metrics & Insights API, exploring AI agents, and so much more. Let's crack on shall we?

We’ve been following the AI Agent hype for a while and figured it was time to dive in. Naturally, this led to several rabbit holes. Izzy has been experimenting with Eliza, while Dan spent last weekend building everything from a GitHub agent that decides whether it “likes” a project (and stars it) to a team of content agents—a researcher, project manager, critic, and writer. It’s genuinely mind-blowing what’s possible.

All this AI tinkering got us thinking: as builders, we love building cool shit but rarely talk about it. That is, until someone from marketing drops by and says, “Do you know how cool this is? Why aren’t you shouting about it?” Sound familiar?

So, we’ve decided to tackle the problem head-on in the best way we know how. By building an AI agent to handle all our marketing of course. We’ll give it the tools, content, and (very important) guardrails it needs, then let it loose. Best-case scenario, we’ve just created Open Format’s first cohort of AI-powered Ambassadors. Worst case? At least we’ll have some entertaining stories to share.

We’ll stream the whole process and share how it’s done. Keep an eye on our Discord for updates.

Our Dashboard is getting an overhaul. It’s overdue. So, we’re turning the process into a live workshop of sorts.

Next week, we’ll start streaming the entire build process. You’ll get to see how we build using our own tools, and it’s a good excuse to show you how to build your own dashboard too.

We’ll announce in Discord when we kick off. Here is some UI to give you an idea of what to expect.

Imagine this: you’re an independent artist, your latest banger is out, and you want to promote it. How great would it be to have your own digital street team—your most loyal fans—sharing it with the world?

We’ve been working on exactly that: a way for artists to directly reward their fans for supporting them. It’s been a really fun collaboration, and we look forward to sharing more about this soon.

George has been tinkering with a metrics dashboard for Open Format. It’s got all the essentials: transactions, active dApps, points, badges—you name it. You can even filter by app, user, date, or duration. Handy, right?

If you’re feeling curious, you can have a play with our metrics subgraph for Arbitrum Sepolia here.

Also, Dan's been building some UI components, which you'll soon be able to see in our dashboard. Here is a taster of what's to come:

• 🚀 Deployed contracts to Base – All our contracts are now available on Base and Base Sepolia - #144

• 🏆 Deployed points contract – Implemented an ERC-20 contract tailored for on-chain points and reputation systems - #145

• 📊 Metrics dashboard upgrade – Try it out!

And that’s all for this week!

Happy Hacking,

Andy and the Open Format team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format? Did you know you can use our API to generate leaderboard data for any ERC20 token rewarded or transferred via our contracts? Simply rank users by the number of tokens they hold. What a time to be alive!

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.openformat.tech/v1/leaderboard?app_id=0x9716fb655f2a72b1fc1b4db02b8ad20b6747442a&chain=base&token_id=0xb3caca9c5cead35754d693072edeb5baf7ad7e56' \
  --header 'X-API-KEY: <YOUR_API_KEY>'

Hey 👋

Welcome back to another edition of Happy Hacking! Thanks for joining us in our new home. It’s been a big couple of weeks, so let’s dive in, shall we?

We’ve been thinking—what if you could build your own web3 workflows? Choose a trigger. Pick an action. Select a notification channel. Your apps, bots, or AI minions could reward users with tokens for completing tasks or exchange assets directly, no middleman required. And the best part? No need to write any smart contracts or a single line of code 🔥

We’d love your input on this and will be rolling out something for our Beta testers very soon! If you’re interested in joining our Beta testers programme, reach out to us on Discord. Hopefully, we’ll have something spicy 🌶 to share in the next newsletter!

Following on from the no-code web3 onboarding toy I shared last time, Dan has built a couple of plug and play templates that you can deploy in a couple of minutes without writing any code.

The first is a leaderboard template that displays users' points and highlights any changes in their position over the past week.

The second is a tiers template that visualises a user's progression based on their points. Tiers are a great option when you want to reward steady progress rather than fuel competition. As users reach a new tier, they could unlock anything from early access to a podcast to a custom role in Discord. Dan even created a mini toy using v0 to help you generate the tiers.json file, making it easy to customise tiers—for example, Amateur, Pro, Expert, and Legend.

Got a template in mind? Reach out to us on Discord—we’d love to chat about it!

One of our builders, Izzy, has been experimenting with Farcaster Frames.

For context, Farcaster is a public social network similar to Twitter or Reddit. Users can create profiles, post "casts," and follow others. Crucially, they own their accounts and relationships with other users, giving them the freedom to move between different apps. This means you can seamlessly hop from one app—say, Warpcast—to another, like OpenCast (coming soon? 👀), without losing your connections.

Frames take things a step further. They’re mini-apps embedded within a post. Imagine Tweeting (sorry, Farcaster-ing?), but inside the post is a quiz, a game, or a widget that rewards your friends with Andy Points. Pretty fun, right?

Izzy’s already built a quiz frame that rewards points for correct answers. Now, he’s working on a template so you can create your own Frames. Exciting stuff is on the way—stay tuned 👀

We’ve been tinkering away, experimenting with different communities. Turns out, there’s a lot to learn about how they want to handle rewards, incentives, and payments. These little experiments are also helping us figure out which features to add to our Dashboard and package up nicely as templates.

One such experiment could give 94,000 artists the tools to build meaningful, direct, and deeper connections with their fans. How? By triggering rewards based on fan actions across platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Shopify.

Blockchain UX is tricky. Wallets and ownership are sadly still unfamiliar concepts for most users of the web. Services like Privy are helping make this much easier. Here’s what we aim to achieve:

1. Gas sponsorship for all builders and end users

   Gas fees are essential for securing blockchains, but managing them can be a hassle. We aim to take that complexity off your hands, bundling the fees so neither you nor your users need to worry.

2. Delegated transaction signing

   On the blockchain, every transaction needs to be signed by someone with the correct permissions. When you create a dApp or token using Open Format, only you have the authority to control it, secured by your private key.

   For the workflow builder above to work seamlessly—allowing you to trigger actions by simply calling our API—we would need access to your private key. However, we don’t want access to it, and sharing private keys in API requests is, of course, not safe.

   Delegated transaction signing solves this. It allows us to sign transactions on your behalf, so you can call our API, while we handle all the blockchain complexity behind the scenes. You maintain full control of your private key, with the ability to revoke our permission at any time.

3. Ownership at our core ❤

   Your assets, connections, and audience are fully yours. If we disappear or do something you don’t like, you can take everything with you and move elsewhere without losing any value. Your ownership stays intact.

• Deployed Contracts to Aurora 🚀

  Our contracts are now live on the Aurora Testnet and Mainnet. (Base is up next—stay tuned!)

• Reward Any ERC20 🔥

  You can now reward any ERC20 token via our rewards system.

• Timestamps to Block Numbers—Solved ⏰

  We did the impossible: converting timestamps to block numbers efficiently. This seemingly simple task is absurdly tricky at scale (seriously, 18k views on this StackOverflow post). Most block explorer APIs only let you do it one block at a time. We needed loads. So, we built a custom micro-service to handle it—and open-sourced it.

  This was the missing piece for generating dApp metrics snapshots at any given time (yes, that means block number).

• Docs Revamp Complete 📄

  We’ve reorganised our documentation, clearly splitting API, SDK, and no-code resources into their own sections. Finding what you need is now faster and easier than ever.

That's all folks. See you next time!

Happy Hacking,

Andy and Open Format team

Psst 👋 New to Open Format? Did you know you can use our SDK to send micropayments in your own token with just 14 lines of code? What a time to be alive!

async function triggerMicroPayment() {
  const token = (await sdk.getContract({
    contractAddress: "0x00a95dc03363726b3b197b520fd5d91663c93c7f", // your token address
    type: ContractType.Token,
  })) as ERC20Base;

  const tx = await token.transferFrom({
    from: "0x387aB03Ec0E9b58ab05145B58bF0894220f1F056", // Sender
    to: "0x70997970c51812dc3a010c7d01b50e0d17dc79c8", // Receiver
    amount: 0.000001,
  });

  console.log("transfer complete", tx);
}