Project name: Karma
Author name and contact info: Mahesh Murthy, mahesh@showkarma.xyz and Stablenode
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: Yes
L2 recipient address: 0x627f84bb4bBA3333f253F09fe22A445F195bCF34
Grant category: Tooling
Is this proposal applicable to a specific committee?: No
Project description: Karma is a reputation system for DAO contributors. We aggregate delegate activity by aggregating and curating data from various tools the DAOs use, such as Snapshot, Discourse, Discord and on-chain voting contracts.
We pull these metrics for each delegate, assign weights to these metrics and quantify the activity by generating a Karma (reputation) score. These weights are customizable and determined by each community. Also, the scoring logic is open source, so anyone can audit and verify the scores for themselves. The aggregated data is exposed through APIs anyone can consume.
Project links:
- Website: www.showkarma.xyz
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/showkarma_xyz
- Discord: Discord
- Mirror: Karma
Additional team member info (please link): Arthur, Amaury, Andre. Our team of devs have experience building high quality, scalable software systems. You can find our team’s work by looking at our product on www.showkarma.xyz
We are also closely working with the team at Stablenode who are actively involved in the governance at Optimism and various other DAOs in the ecosystem.
Please link to any previous projects the team has meaningfully contributed to: Few notable use cases of how DAOs use our product include:
- Gitcoin DAO: The steward health cards at daostewards.xyz are powered by Karma. All the stats are calculated by Karma and exposed through API that is rendered by their frontend.
- ENS DAO: The ENS DAO uses a discourse forum plugin we built that is powered by Karma. Data aggregated through the Karma platform is used to display governance stats of users in the forum on the user’s profile.
- Idle DAO: The Idle DAO uses our product for governance mining (to reward active governance participants).
Competitors, peers, or similar projects (please link): Boardroom, DeepDAO, SourceCred. All these products are great, they show various governance stats along with delegate information. We go a lot deeper into surfacing delegate activity. For example, we have the ability to look at a delegate activity at a granular level on the forum (proposals created, discussed, posts created in various categories) and assign different weights to these metrics to get a true picture of a delegate’s contribution on the forum. Similarly, we have integration with Discord to understand their activity on that channel.
Most importantly and relevant to this project, we are offering a whitelabel solution, i.e, the website will be run on optimism’s subdomain and can be customized fully to meet Optimism’s requirements which no other competitor offers.
Is/will this project be open sourced? The frontend site that will be built will be open sourced. It is a work in progress but you can find the code here: GitHub - show-karma/dao-delegates-app: Whitelabel application to display delegate stats for DAOs
Date of deployment/expected deployment on Optimism: Oct 1, 2022
Ecosystem Value Proposition:
- What is the problem statement this proposal hopes to solve for the Optimism ecosystem?
Optimism DAO has an active community with hundreds of delegates who participate in the governance of the DAO. An ideal delegate participates in the DAO by actively voting on proposals (on-chain and off-chain), participating in proposal discussions on forum and discord, attends community calls and is generally involved in decision making.
As a token holder looking to (re)delegate their tokens, they need a way to evaluate a delegate’s involvement in the DAO. Having a single place where they can find all the delegates, with an aggregated view of their activity will simplify a token holder’s workflow in delegation. Even delegates gain by looking at their own aggregated activity across various channels so they can improve their own involvement in the DAO.
- How does your proposal offer a value proposition solving the above problem?
Gitcoin’s steward health cards have gained popularity in their community where token holders can learn about all the delegates in the DAO and with relevant information can make a decision on whom to delegate too. Gitcoin’s health cards display Karma’s reputation data aggregated across Discourse, Snapshot and off-chain voting. We propose to set up a similar frontend website on Optimism’s subdomain (example: delegates.optimism.io) which will consume data aggregated by Karma’s reputation system to display all the delegates and their stats.
Token holders can see who the delegates are, their activity in the DAO across different time frames (lifetime, 30 days or any other time frame) and delegate or re-delegate their tokens. This will also provide visibility to delegates into their own activity in the DAO and help them improve their contributions.
Karma has already implemented the backend that aggregates delegate data from various sources for Optimism. This grant is to build the frontend website that will hosted on Optimism’s subdomain to display all the delegate stats and give token holders an easy way to delegate their tokens.
- Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?
To grow the Optimism ecosystem, you need a well functioning DAO and delegates will play a key role in it. As Optimism grows, delegates will become key players within the DAO. Providing visibility into Delegate health will hold the delegates accountable, help them improve and help token holders delegate their tokens to the right delegates.
Since this site will be hosted on Optimism’s subdomain, it is much easier to garner feedback from the community and iterate to meet the needs of the token holders and delegates.
Implementing Karma will help set a standard for the DAO, since it provides a much needed transparency into delegates. Ultimately, this will help token holders understand whether they need to re-delegate.
Has your project previously applied for an OP grant? If successful, please link to your previous grant proposal and provide a brief update on milestones achieved with the grant. If unsuccessful, and this is a resubmission, please specify how you have incorporated significant changes in accordance with feedback.
No
Number of OP tokens requested: 10,000
Did the project apply for or receive OP tokens through the Foundation Partner Fund?: No
If OP tokens were requested from the Foundation Partner Fund, what was the amount?: N/A
How much will your project match in co-incentives? (not required but recommended, when applicable): N/A
Proposal for token distribution
This project is purely to improve the governance by providing more visibility into delegate activity. We are requesting a grant to support the development of work of this project and do not plan to distribute the tokens. This is in-line with what is mentioned in the proposal template.
Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability
We will use the funds for enhancing the frontend to support Optimism and enhance and maintain the entire backend infrastructure to aggregate Optimism delegate reputation data.