[DRAFT][GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Rebel

ARCHIVED & OLD Missions Governance Fund: Phase 1
1

Project name: Rebel

Author name and contact info: Michael Boyle, mike@rebel.fun

I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: [Yes/No] Yes

L2 recipient address: 0xaeA7e85AD73B4e8Fa2c222Bd43F129008fb0C56A

Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 8

Grant category: Tooling

Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee?
Yes, Tooling committee

Project description (please explain how your project works):

Rebel is an Optimism-native web3 content publishing and community engagement platform. Creators and community managers build their own websites on Rebel and activate features like User Profiles, Forums, Blogs, Podcasts, Ranks, Events, Courses and more.

Features like Token Gating, Reputation Tokens, Push Messages, Newsletters and Contests help keep members engaged and increase the value participating in web3 projects, especially on Optimism.

Project links:

Additional team member info:

Contributors / advisors:

Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to:

Relevant usage metrics:

Communities created: 16
Member user accounts created: 4,569

Rebel is a rearchitected version of our previous web2 creator platform. The old version achieved the following KPIs:

  • $531,617 in ticket sales
  • 83,573 product orders
  • $8,696,066 in gross product sales
  • 360,558 registered users

(note: we wound down our previous company but we’re happy to share access to the old database with the tooling committee to verify this data)

Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link):
Web3: Mirror, Showtime, Bonfire, Tellie
Web2: Tumblr, Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans

Is/will this project be open sourced?
In Future

Optimism native?:
Yes

Date of deployment:
Contracts: August, 2022
Software: September 2022

What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?
Optimism doesn’t have a native social media / community engagement platform. We have an amazing native NFT marketplace with Quix, but once people have acquired their NFTs there aren’t many places to do interesting things with them. Projects mostly use Discord or Discourse which aren’t web3 native and have many shortcomings.

How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?
Rebel fills this toolset gap by making it possible for projects and creators to spin up their own branded web3-native social networking spaces and create content and awesome experiences, many of which are only made possible on Optimism.

Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?
Having a breakthrough native social app on Optimism gives creators and users a great reason to engage with this ecosystem over competing chains like Polygon, Arbitrum, and Solana. Rebel deploys contracts like community reputation and reward tokens exclusively to Optimism. By providing world-class tools on Optimism we will draw in top creators and their most engaged members which will dramatically expand the number of consumer-oriented users of Optimism.

Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? No

Number of OP tokens requested: 100,000

Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?:
No

How much will your project match in co-incentives?
Rebel will match incentives with our utility token, $REBEL

How will the OP tokens be distributed?
Creator Rewards - 60% - 60,000
Partnership incentives: 20% - 20,000
Developer incentives: 20% - 20,000

Creator Incentives
We will track user data and engagement and reward creators for facilitating valuable activity.
By establishing value-added behaviors and analyzing end-user wallets, we will distribute rewards for activity like bringing new end users into the Optimism ecosystem. Additionally we will provide OP bonuses for value-added community member contributions like NFT mints and governance participation. We plan to distribute 10,000 OP per month to creators over six months.

Partnership Incentives
We will approach creative agencies, talent managers, incubators, and similar organizations that can onboard creators and projects they work with and offer them rewards for new communities they activate on Rebel and Optimism.

Developer incentives
Developer incentives will be used to develop Optimism-specific software and features. In order to distribute rewards in the manner outlined above we’ll need to build open-source wallet analysis tools and referral/affiliate software. Additionally, we’re working on an open-source extension to ERC721s to facilitate the creation of subscription NFTs. If we receive a grant, Optimism will be the exclusive chain that Rebel will allow creators to launch these types of NFT projects on.

Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative?
We expect to distribute this initial allocation over the course of the next six months, ending at the beginning of Q2 2023.

Please list the milestones/KPIs you expect to achieve for each initiative
Our goal is to onboard 60 optimism-native projects and creators over the next six months. Our primary focus will be on new projects/creators but we also hope to welcome many existing Optimism projects to Rebel.

Why will incentivized users and liquidity on Optimism remain after incentives dry up?
We’re distributing rewards to creators and community managers based on their creating durable communities with members that are engaging and adding measurable value back.

Creators and NFT projects who successfully leverage Rebel’s tools will have created communities with very sticky memberships. Content feeds, spaces to socialize, reputation and rewards–these are all membership flywheels that keep users engaged with projects and services they love. OP incentives will be icing on the cake for many but the real reward will be deeper connection to people and community experiences facilitated by the Rebel platform.

Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability:

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Hello Rebel Team.

Welcom!. Nice sounding project you’ve got there.

I’d rather interact with a platform like this, rather than Discord for security reasons.

Can you share more about the $REBEL utility token? (I’m not seeing any info on itin the usual places).

Thank you

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I really like the concept of rewarding creators for bringing in new users and targeting popular creators not on Optimism.

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Hi!
It sounds great. I have a question, All platforms around Rebel: blog, websites, forums, etc. will be build on Rebel or It’d be some interoperability with existing web2, web3 platforms?
Thanks and good luck

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Thank you for your comment, we’re very concerned with security as well and it’s a big reason we think a web3-native social platform is so important.

Eventually Rebel will have premium features that community managers will be able to unlock. The way they’ll pay for those features is by using our utility token, $REBEL. We will reward creators and community manager who help grow the Rebel ecosystem with $REBEL tokens so they can unlock these great additional features without having to pay out of pocket for them. One note, while we’re still in a “soft launch” phase we aren’t charging for any of that functionality. We probably will keep everything unlocked for life for the first 500 communities that onboard onto Rebel.

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I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #66 by quixotic] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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@mboyle

Voting Cycle #7 wraps up October 19th!

Voting Cycle #8 will start that same day and follow the below outline.

Week 1: Community and Delegate Feedback

Week 2: Committee Review (in order to have your proposal reviewed by a committee you will need to get two delegate approvals then copy and paste those approvals to the voting cycle 8 roundup thread (has not been created yet)

Week 3: Voting

@mboyle has been kind enough to join @espresso and I for our weekly @web3xm Twitter spaces Monday October 24th at 7pm ET which just happens to be during voting cycle 8’s Community and Delegate Feedback week.

Hope to see you all there as it should be a good conversation as we will overview the rebel.fun app and discuss Rebels funding proposal above. Then at the end we will open it up for community questions!

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OyKAVakLjDGb?s=20
image

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hello @mboyle, thank you for your proposal and its exciting to see a project like Rebel get built. Web3 native engagement platforms are definitely lacking so I do see a need for Rebel to thrive.

My feedback to you is on the following points:

  1. Metrics

From my understanding of reading this phrase is that you have a current user-base and sales happening, but that you are operating under a different brand. I might be wrong, but I believe you might want to rephrase this to clarify that those were different platforms, and linking those platform if possible as well.

You are asking for incentives to attract more creators and developers, but the proposal does lack the numbers to support the current engagement that you have achieved so far.

I understand a social network is very hard to start because you need to solve the chicken and egg problem (who comes first, users or creators). My advice is to show that you are able to gain some traction by on-boarding a percentage your stated goal without the incentives: strong active creators and a strong active user base.

  1. Distribution

Clarify the current distribution among the creators. Will all creators receive an equal allocation on signup? how about on engagement? or how much users they attract to Rebet?

Clarify the current distribution for devs and partners. This part is not so clear. Why does Rebel want to incentive wallet analysis tools and smart contract wallets?

  1. Co-incentives

Is the token launched? Will you match 1:1 USD or OP value? What’s the utility of the token for Rebel, its creators and users?

  1. Why the incentives will last
    Improve your current paragraph on why the incentivizing creators to join Rebel will increase adoption and usage on Optimism. You will need to make a more solid case on why users only if the creators join. Maybe there’s something more than just providing tools to produce engagement and meaningful content. I look forward to seeing what Rebel is capable of doing
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We need one more delegate to make it into the current round of voting. If we could get approval from one of @mastermojo, @katie, @linda, @jackanorak, @lefterisjp, @krzkaczor, @david, @mjs, @cryptotesters, @GFXlabs I would greatly appreciate it. Approval is not an endorsement of the proposal.

Additionally, I’m thankful to have been able to join The Web3 Experience for a twitter spaces to discuss Rebel and this proposal specifically for those interested in hearing more about the project:

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Thank you for your feedback–will address your questions below.

Thank you–I’ve rewritten this section to be clearer as well as added some numbers around the current Rebel usage.

Distribution will be based entirely on performance. To your question about the need to build wallet analysis tools, the reason for this is because we want to measure community member activity and reward creators based on how much network value their members create in aggregate. For example, if Creator A brings 500 measurably new users (wallets) to their Optimism project they will get 500 units of rewards for having done that, if Creator B signs up 500 existing optimism wallets, they would not receive “new user” bonus rewards. This goes for all measurable activity like members participating in governance, subsequently minting new OP stuff, creating engaging content, and anything else we can measure that adds value to the optimism ecosystem. Creators and project leaders will only earn OP rewards for value they create, so it will not be equal distributions among creators.

The same is true for partnerships–the same rewards will apply and be distributed to partners based on the performance of the communities that they refer / onboard.

The token contract is launched but we haven’t created a liquidity pool or anything like that yet to support it. It’s still early on the details of how our REBEL token will work and on reflection I’d clarify by saying our intention is to eventually distribute REBEL alongside of the OP rewards but until we have our ducks in a row on how that works, we’d be happy to match the dollar value with our access pass NFTs, which seems to have been established as an accepted method of co-incentives.

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