Dear crypto writers,

We are organizing a writing contest with Devconflict, one of the most interesting Devcon side events.

Devconflict is a conference that promotes honest (and heated) debates about the most important Ethereum challenges, such as staking, protocol ossification, MEV, and so on. It’s organized by Gnosis, one of the most OG projects in crypto responsible for Safe, CowSwap, Gnosis Pay, and many more. 

Kiwi feels ideologically close to Devconflict’s format because, since the beginning, we have wanted to be Ethereum’s Hacker News. That means being open to debates and clashing ideas, even if it requires diving deep into complex, technical subjects. So we are very happy to cooperate with Gnosis on Devconflict.

The contest will focus on debates from the conference. The writers will be able to win 1,500 xDAI prizes and receive distribution from the Kiwi & Gnosis communities.

The contest will be available to everyone - both people who attend the event IRL as well as those who will watch the talks online. 

Here’s how it’s going to work.

How the contest works

The contest submissions start on the 11th of November and end on the 8th of December. 

The contest is called “Arena: Devconflict writing contest” and aims to collect critical and creative responses to the questions raised at Devconflict.

Here’s how you can take part in it:

1) Write a post that discusses the Devconflict debates.

The debate points:

• Gnosis: L1 vs L2 - Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation) and Martin Köppelmann (Gnosis), moderated by Bartek Kiepuszewski (L2BEAT)

  Link:

  Play Video

• Vanilla Staking vs Liquid Staking - Nixo (EthStaker) and Dmitry Gusakov (Lido), moderated by Brian Crain (Chorus One) 

  Link:

  Play Video

• Protocol Ossification vs Agility - Odysseus (Phylax Systems) and Uma Roy (Succinct), moderated by Sebastian Bürgel (Gnosis)

  Link:

  Play Video

• Onboard the Next 1B vs the Next 1M - Remco Bloemen (Worldcoin) and Vadim Koleoshkin (Zerion), moderated by Kartik Talwarn (ETH Global)

  Link:

  Play Video

• Local Apps vs Cloud Service - Andreas Tsamados (Fileverse) and Michelle (Mosh) Lee (Protocol Labs & IPFS), moderated by Lefteris Karapetsas (Rotki)

  Link:

  Play Video

• Larger Blockspace vs Low-Spec Device Compatibility - Nick Dodson (Fuel Labs) and Toni Wahrstätter (Ethereum Foundation), moderated by Pol Lanski (DappNode)

  Link:

  Play Video

• Should MEV be Tackled at the Application Layer or Protocol Level? - Felix Leupold (CoW Swap) and Tomasz Stanczak (Nethermind), moderated by GregTheGreek.eth (Chainsafe)

  Link:

  Play Video

Here, it’s better to dive deeper into one subject than touch a few more shallowly. So please choose only one debate subject for the essay. There are no restrictions on the subject or form of your writing as long as it responds to the key debates in some substantive way. So you can agree with the debaters, disagree with them, or shed new light on the discussed subjects.

2) Add a line about your post taking part in the contest.

Link to this contest announcement with the words: “This post is taking part in the Devconflict x Kiwi writing contest” at the beginning of your post.

3) Share your post on the platform of your choice.

The contest is platform-agnostic, so you can post on apps such as Paragraph, Mirror, Substack, X, Warpcast, Zora, private websites, and so on. 

4) Submit your post to Kiwi.

To submit links to Kiwi, you need to have a Kiwipass. You can buy one here. If you face any technical problems, please DM Mac on Telegram or Warpcast.

5) Remember about the deadline.

To qualify for the contest, the author must submit their post to Kiwi between the 11th of November 00:00:01 CET and the 8th of December, 23:59:59 CET. [Edit: previous deadline was the 1st of December, we added an extra week so that people can recharge after Devcon]

You can also add the contest to your calendar via our Luma event.

6) There will be three prizes in one track.

The winners will be determined by the number of upvotes received on Kiwi. 

The prizes will be divided as follows:

1st Place:  750 xDAI

2nd Place: 525 xDAI

3rd Place: 225 xDAI

7) Users will be able to vote from the 11th of November. After the submissions close, we will have extra time until the 12th of December, 23:59:59 CET, to vote. Then, we will reveal the winners in the next few days. 

Every Kiwi Pass holder can vote, but not every vote will be calculated for the final contest results. We will count upvotes only from the most active Kiwi and Gnosis community members. 

Here’s what we mean by this:

Most active Kiwi community members are those who, before the 6th of November, collected at least 3 Kiwi karma points. You can check the user's Karma score, just bear in mind that this is a real-time board, not the timestamped one.

Most active Gnosis community members are those who, before the 6th of November, owned at least one token from the list:

- Gnosis Pay OG NFT: link  

- Dappcon 24 POAP: link

- Dappcon 23 POAP: link

- Gnosischain Shapella upgrade POAP: link

- Gnosis Chain merge POAP: link

- Gnosis Chain Dencun upgrade POAP: link

All writers are also welcome to share their posts on X and Farcaster. Our profiles will repost the best submissions.

If you want a retweet on X, you should tag @KiwiNewsHQ and @GnosisDAO.
If you want a repost on Farcaster, you should tag @kiwi, and @Gnosis-DAO. It might also be a good idea to post your submission in f/GnosisDAO

Summary

Devcoflict will be the home to some of the most needed debates in all of Ethereum. Since these discussions will happen IRL, they will help us go beyond Twitter “gotcha” takes and focus on nuanced conclusions.

We are happy to run the contest and hope it will spread the ideas from these discussions far and wide. 

If you have any questions related to this contest, feel free to DM @macbudkowski on Telegram.

PS: Authors can use AI for brainstorming or editing, but please don't share fully AI-written essays :)