I joined CharmVerse a couple of years ago to help realize a vision for the future of work, powered by crypto infrastructure, developed by co-founders Alex Poon and Matt Casey. We built CharmVerse as an open-source DAO tool, which many described as "Notion for DAOs." Our goal was to create a new coordination model that would enable the creation of a million DAOs. Early on, we gained solid traction, attracting both large and small DAOs, many of which remain active users today. However, the DAO tooling space has proven to be narrow, with many competitors exiting the market.
As we iterated on the product, the Optimism Grants Council selected CharmVerse to manage their grants program. This was not part of our initial business development strategy; we hadn’t envisioned CharmVerse as a grants platform beyond the bounties and proposal management features that some DAOs used for their grants. However, our flexible, crypto-integrated tool turned out to be well-suited for large-scale grant programs. Working with Optimism led us to enhance the product further, making it better equipped for this use case. Beyond Optimism’s endorsement, which attracted other grant programs to our platform, we found a thought partner aligned with our broader vision of the future of work, through initiatives like Retroactive Public Goods Funding and concepts such as "upgrading capitalism."
This collaboration extended to other projects within the Optimism Collective and across the broader Superchain ecosystem, including work with Optimism’s Project Attestations team on reputation and identity and contributions to initiatives like the SUNNYs. Through this journey, we gained firsthand insights into the future of work, especially through our work on open-source software, DAOs, grants, and retroactive funding models. These experiences allowed us to support additional grant programs via our platform and grants management services, and to exchange knowledge with ecosystems like Arbitrum, Polygon, Cyber, Mantle, Game 7, RARE and others who shared their own learnings with us.
As we gained a deeper understanding of the needs across various crypto ecosystems—from DevRel teams promoting protocol adoption to grant applicants working with limited time and resources—we developed a stable and useful grants platform. This gave us the opportunity to focus on building new products tailored to the builder side of the ecosystem. After months of planning and developing proof-of-concepts, we launched Scout Game—a perpetual, positive-sum game designed to incentivize impactful developers across the crypto ecosystem.
Scout Game is akin to fantasy sports but for open-source development. Players, or "Scouts," purchase NFTs representing Builders, and whenever a Builder they've scouted contributes to the ecosystem, both the Builder and Scout earn points. Builders are rewarded for their successful contributions, while Scouts are rewarded for identifying high-impact developers. Ecosystems benefit by encouraging developer engagement with crypto projects.
Recently, we announced a partnership with Celo, which is sponsoring a 5,000 cUSD prize pool for the Scout Game. Celo has identified a set of repositories and GitHub issues that qualify for rewards, categorized as:
Common -
50 cUSDRare -
150 cUSDEpic -
250 cUSD
Developers can select an issue, fork the repository, tackle the problem, and submit a pull request. Upon successful completion, they receive the cUSD reward, along with points in the Scout Game.
We have several more ecosystem partnerships and sponsorships to announce in the coming weeks, some of which will reward both scouts and builders. Ultimately, everyone wins: builders are recognized and rewarded, scouts gain from supporting great talent, and ecosystems thrive through increased developer participation. A vision for positive sum gaming, coordination and rewarding impact.
CharmVerse had a team off-site this week in Cartagena, Colombia—a country we fell in love with during the last DevCon, where our remote team met in person for the first time. This gathering feels particularly special, as we’ve just launched the Scout Game to a select group of users from our waitlist campaign, and will be rolling it out to the broader community over the next two weeks. We’re excited to be launching this with the crypto community and deeply appreciative of the positive early feedback.
Being together this week has given us the perfect opportunity to reflect on the journey that brought us here. Over shared meals and discussions, we’ve revisited the key concepts and features that emerged from our experience building a DAO tool, evolving into a grants platform, and ultimately discovering new insights around perpetual retroactive funding. These learnings shaped the creation of the Scout Game—a positive-sum system that embodies our vision for the future of work where people are rewarded for their impact.
