As part of Decrypt’s mission to help bring Web3 to a global audience, we continue to test out the decentralized technologies we cover, and have been actively looking for ways to implement user-friendly versions of this complex (and sometimes confusing) crypto world.
In March, we launched our DCPT reader token, which our readers could earn simply from browsing and sharing our content. Token holders could then redeem their tokens for special NFT (non-fungible token) artworks. Now, in our latest experiment, Decrypt is looking to reward our NFT holders by giving them a bigger say in the educational content our editorial team produces next.
The crypto world has been experimenting with DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) as a way to involve their communities in the decision-making process.
For the crypto-curious, participating in DAOs often involves a complex array of steps: finding active DAOs, navigating the rules for participation, and then buying and staking the relevant token. We want to simplify that process.
We decided to use Snapshot, a free platform where projects can let community members vote on proposals. In the industry, this process is called “vote signaling.” Voting using cryptocurrency typically incurs fees to process the movement of currency from one wallet to another; on Snapshot that doesn’t happen, thanks to the clever use of the decentralized storage network IPFS. Because Snapshot doesn’t use “on-chain” verification, any votes are fee-less.
While Decrypt has its own DCPT token, its functionality doesn’t allow for tokens to be staked on Snapshot. However, the NFTs that we offered to token holders do, as they live on Ethereum’s mainnet. So in our first iteration of a DecryptDAO (we’ve been referring to it in-house as “DAOcrypt”), we invited our NFT holders to vote with their NFTs. And for the first vote, we offered up a list of Learn guides (our excellent educational section) we’ve been thinking about doing.
We used Decrypt’s Discord channel to invite readers to participate in the Snapshot poll, giving these potential Learn articles to choose from:
- What are rug pulls?
- How to stake tokens?
- How does DeFi insurance work?
- What are flash loans?
- What are liquidity pools?
The campaign ran for two weeks and we invited all NFT holders to participate. Just over 10% of NFT holders voted in the campaign. You can read the first DAO-selected article here.
As a first step, the experiment mostly matched our expectations. Decrypt will be running further experiments to help bring Web3 technologies to our millions of readers.
