What is JokeDAO?

JokeDAO is a protocol that provides tools for communities to have bottom-up, on-chain governance. The main tool that JokeDAO provides communities is the JokeRace. A JokeRace allows a person or protocol to distribute one-time voting tokens to a community and then pose a topic for these users to vote on in each time period. Currently JokeRaces are being used for user-generated roadmaps, grants, endorsements, bounties, curation, and community-driven decisions, but there are more use cases for this type of voting.

What is Optimism?

Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. The technology that powers this scaling solution is optimistic roll ups, which bundle large amounts of transaction data into digestible batches. Optimism is much cheaper to use than Ethereum because of how they compact the data before putting it directly on the chain. 

The Experiment

This experiment was to give JokeRace voting tokens to members of MetricsDAO and allow them to post answers and vote on answers to the question “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about Optimism‘’. The submissions that receive the most votes in this race would be rewarded with USDC. The JokeRace was done on the Optimism L2 which had the effect of greatly reducing the gas fees paid by users creating proposals and users voting on proposals. 

Set up

Danner.eth minted 5,000 voting tokens with the symbol jMETRICv1 and distributed them to a list of users that include anyone who:

• Asked a question on bounty.metricsdao.xyz
• Submitted an analytics bounty
• Performed peer review for submitted analytics 
• Received contribution payments from MetricsDAO
• Was a multisig members

After the tokens were minted, the Contest contract was created to allow any user to submit their hot takes on Optimism. The wallets with jMETRICv1 tokens in them were allowed to vote on up to two submissions. To post submissions or vote on the Jokerace, people had to log into Joker Contests (jokedao.io) using their wallets.

To submit, users had to post on Twitter and then share the link to their post in the proposal box. They were then prompted to sign the transaction with their Optimism wallet. Then to vote on others’ submissions, they can click vote to the proposal they like and then sign the transaction with their Optimism wallet. Both of these transactions require gas on Optimism, which could limit participation for some. 

Results 

In total there were 9 written submissions out of the possible 100 submissions. Out of the 10,000 possible votes there were 69 votes cast, and the top three submissions got 22, 21, and 12 votes respectively. The participation in this first race was good but could use improvement for the next rounds.

Takeaways 

1. Optimism is a good blockchain to do jokeraces on because it offers low fees. The high transaction fees on Ethereum would be too high for it to be worth participating. Adding a gas faucet for users who receive the voting token could increase participation. 
2. We need to increase outreach about the race to more people with voting tokens. Only about 0.7% of the available votes were cast. This means that most likely many people who received voting tokens did not know that they could have been involved or it seemed like too much work for them. Here are a few ideas to improve participation:
   1. Create a discord group of people involved in the race. 
   2. Create an Optimism Gas Faucet for people involved in the race. 
   3. Make MetricsDAO’s content easier to find from their website. 
   4. Run weekly jokeraces.