A little over a year ago I launched poidh with a $5 bounty posted for my 500-or-so Farcaster followers:
It sat for 24 hours, no one submitted a photo, I posted a photo of my son to close out the bounty, and we were off to the races:
Since then, we’ve come a long way. As of today, ~$15,000 of value has flowed through the protocol and 1,195 unique wallets have interacted with poidh’s contracts across Arbitrum, Base, and Degen Chain:
These are users either creating bounties, claiming bounties, or adding funds to bounties via our v2 contract’s multiplayer functionality.
While the unique user numbers are small in the grand scheme of crypto projects, I still take great pride in what we've accomplished. These aren't users speculating on an airdrop or number-go-up technology. It's real people using the app for real economic activities and seamlessly posting their proof-of-work onchain.
poidh has incentivized food bank donations, regenerative community service projects, small business appreciation, personal fitness, and buckets in countries around the world. And we've discovered some amazing fans along the way:
where we've been
To me, all of this is quite literally a dream come true. I'd never built a crypto app before poidh. I've been in crypto for over a decade, but mainly as an average retail participant (and sometimes freelance writer), not a builder.
But after the FTX fallout, I was a frustrated fan. The industry was once again heading into the bear market and as I looked around, there wasn't much to be excited about on the application front. I loved speculating on coins and NFTs as much as the next person, but that wasn't something I could share with my friends and family as a "this is why you need to try crypto". Gambling isn't (and shouldn't be) for everyone. We needed use cases that solved IRL problems.
At the same time, something I'd been brainstorming for a while was how people could crowdfund in a decentralized manner for specific tasks:
As I hung out on Farcaster sharing my opinions, people seemed aligned with what I wanted to work towards. I published a few blogs (Why DAO UX Sucks + Let's Remove Middlemen From Governance), workshopped my ideas, and by the Spring of 2023, I was confident I could move forward on building a real prototype.
I met my cofounder Jose, simplified the idea down to its basics, and started small with v1 of poidh:
The v1 release proved that the basic idea worked. People could escrow funds, find people to do their tasks, have people upload photos to "prove" their work, then confirm the bounty and collect the pics as NFTs.
280 bounties were completed and 3.7 Arbitrum ETH flowed through the protocol. We even captured some iconic moments in crypto history along the way:
With the initial momentum from v1 (and timely funding from Degen DAO and Deploy on Degen Week) we moved ahead with realizing the full vision of what poidh was meant to be from the beginning. A platform for multiplayer micro DAOs:
Beta poidh v2 was launched in June with fully functional "open bounty" support, multichain capabilities (Arbitrum/Base/Degen Chain), and a fresh new look created by our friends at FLOC*:
Check out the whole lifecycle of a bounty on poidh v2 via the demo video below 👇
And that, in extremely condensed form, is how arrived at where we are today in Summer 2024.
Again, this has been a rollercoaster ride for me. To go from an idea I felt passionate about building to a real, decentralized app with people incentivizing each other to complete IRL actions onchain is huge (especially as a non-dev). A massive thank you goes out to everyone who helped make it a reality đź’™.
where we're going
As we look toward the future of poidh, the current priorities are:
Fix bugs
Improve social features
Our GitHub issues list is a transparent inventory of known bugs, big and small, that need to be addressed. We're in the process of completing a total refactor of the codebase at the moment and, once that is completed, we will continue tackling all the friction points that users currently run into when using poidh. Our mission is to provide the most seamless way to incentivize IRL actions onchain and we won't stop until we're there.
On the social front, we recognize that poidh is a social app at its core. For people to feel comfortable creating and claiming bounties, there need to be clear signals in-app that allow users to judge account reputations and validity at a glance.
The first big step towards accomplishing this goal will be the release of our poidh bot on Warpcast. Developed by the fantastic /FBI crew, this bot will provide real-time updates on poidh bounties and claims directly within the Warpcast feed. Furthermore, when users make transactions with a Farcaster-connected address on poidh, the bot will automatically tag their handle when it makes a post related to their in-app activity.
We also have plans to integrate account connections on profile pages. Users will be able to opt into displaying verified social profiles directly within their account pages to build trust around their in-app activities:
Encouraging and surfacing discussion about specific bounties is also critical. With this in mind, we'll be adding a comment section below each bounty page that will have similar functionality to the comment section you see at the bottom of this very Paragraph post.
If anyone shares a poidh bounty URL on Farcaster, the bounty page will pull in and display that post (and all child posts). This will be another tool for bounty creators and claimers to connect and strategize regarding the tasks they are trying to accomplish.
Finally, the long-term goal is that poidh in its "endgame" state will look much different than the app you see today. The homepage will have a Reddit-style layout, with the ability for users to upvote/downvote different bounties and sort them in various ways:
We also want to allow users to own "poidh subpages" that organize content in a similar manner to subreddits. Users will be able to mint NFTs that grant them permission to moderate these boards, and they will have total control over the types of bounties that are displayed on the poidh front end for their specific board.
They will be able to grow communities focused on bounties that tie into unique overarching goals, all on top of the reliable base-level poidh smart contracts. These subpage NFTs will be transferrable, allowing users to trade ownership of the moderation controls for the subpage communities they build to other users if they so desire.
These are the big initiatives we're planning, but some other projects worth mentioning include:
An in-app NFT marketplace for poidh NFTs
Moderation capabilities for bounty creators (hiding off-topic claims)
Warpcast frames for profile page URLs so users can share their profile stats and let other people browse their collected poidh NFTs in-feed
poidh Telegram bot to send notifications regarding your bounties and bounty claims
Solana and Bitcoin support
how we get there
I do SEO consulting with much of my time and try to have a life beyond work. Jose works full-time on other projects as well. This means that poidh is still a side project for both of us. Nonetheless, it's a mission we fully believe in and won't stop working on any time soon.
We've considered fundraising to have more time and resources to put towards the app (feel free to reach out if you're interested), but we're also comfortable with bootstrapping for the foreseeable future. We have a clear path and, even if we're not moving as fast as possible, our goals are in reach if we stay consistent.
This means continuing to make technical progress at a solid pace while never abandoning the core value prop that's got us this far: a fun, easy-to-use app built on the cypherpunk values of decentralization, censorship resistance, and permissionlessness.
And what are the overall goals? I firmly believe that poidh can become one of the most important dapps in the entire industry. We offer a unique product that sits at the intersection of online entertainment, crowdfunding, and collectibles. A product that is only possible with crypto, not one with "blockchain" strapped on as an afterthought.
More importantly, the product (specifically our v2 "open" bounty system) enables a first-of-its-kind governance mechanism for confirming the completion of IRL tasks. You won't find a more seamless system anywhere else in the world that lets you pool money with other people to fund tasks without also losing control of your money. If widely adopted, the potential of this system could change everything about the way humans organize.
I know that's a big statement, but it's one I'm confident in. If poidh doesn't succeed, I have no doubt that something that looks a lot like poidh will still become one of the most heavily used applications for crypto in the real world. And with that in mind, I can't think of a more important mission to work on.
So cheers to one year of building and, hopefully, many more. We hope you'll join us in proving that crypto is one of the most impactful inventions in the history of human coordination (while also making plenty of silly bounties along the way) 🍻.
special thanks
the early fans
There are many more than just these 15, but these are some standout OG users that never hesitated to put in a good word for poidh. They kept me going with their support for a new idea:
the devs
I'm no dev, and poidh is one of many projects for Jose. We wouldn't be here today without these other open-source contributors who have lent their time (many out of the kindness of their hearts alone) to further our mission:
