Minting now for free on Optimism!
The Backed Community NFT is a lovechild of a tamagotchi, a baseball card, Vitalik B, and the Backed Bunny. It’s free to mint, non-transferrable (aka soulbound), and its on-chain art updates based on on- and off-chain activity.
The goal of the Community NFT is to recognize, incentivize, and track community contribution, provide a tool for community action like snapshot voting, and articulate exactly what the community values and to what degree.
It’s also a work-in-progress, with updatable contracts, high hopes, and a pragmatic spirit. It’s the culmination of months of work and experimentation, and we couldn’t be more excited for you to try it.
You can check out the collection on Quixotic, but here’s a sneak peek at how your Community NFT may look over time:
1 When your Community NFT is first minted it starts out empty: no XP, no accessories. 2 But with a little reward for, say, attending a community call on Discord, your NFT will automatically update to display the XP you’ve earned and you’ll be able to display the special accessory of that category. 3 As an active community member, you’ll earn XP across categories and new accessories. 4 As the community and protocol grow, we’ll add new ways to earn and be recognized, and new ways to customize the display of your bunny.
How do XP work?
There are three categories of XP and points are awarded from automated tracking and manual nominations.
Activity XP track use of the protocol. You automatically earn Activity XP for lending and borrowing using Backed, and you can nominate yourself for any other Activity XP you think you deserve (e.g. “I used Backed everyday for a month straight!”)
Contributor XP track product contributions. To start, we automatically award Contributor XP if you have a pull request merged on a Backed repo. But you could nominate yourself for a much broader set of things: a great code review, a helpful design mockup, an integration, etc.
Community XP track community activity. You automatically earn Community XP points for joining one of our weekly calls, and you might nominate yourself for things like hosting a meet up or creating quality memes.
Accessories
Accessories are currently different varieties of neckwear. Some are unlocked via XP scores. For example, you could unlock this flower wreath by earning your first Activity XP.
Other accessories can only be unlocked via one-off award. For example, this Alpha-Snake is given to Backed Community members who hold earlier iterations of the community NFT that they earned for helping when the project was just on testnet:
You can find all accessories and XP info on the Backed Community page and in our community docs on Github, the true source of truth. Have any idea for a change or new trait? Submit a PR! Remember, the Community NFT is a work in progress and will grow and expand over time.
Process
By now you’re probably also thinking, “Sounds like a lot of rules and processes. How does this all work week-to-week?” Great question!
All XP and accessory changes are made by an administrative multisig made up of a group of core team and community members. In the future we plan to give admin control over to a governor contract controlled by NFT holders, but there will likely always need to be some small group managing the signing of transactions to award XP and accessories.
Today, transactions are proposed to the admin multisig in two ways:
- Via bots that automatically track various activities, such as Github pull requests, loan activity, and Discord call attendance.
- Via a committee that reviews nominations. Google form nominations go to a database where they are reviewed by a committee. The committee is similarly made up of core team members and community members. Every week or so nominations will be reviewed and the approved ones are proposed to the multisig. (We are working to publicly show all in process nominations, but do not have that ready, yet.)
Once transactions are signed, art and XP are immediately updated: all art and stats are stored on chain!
What next?
The vision of Backed is not to be the best lending protocol, but to be a community capable of the decentralized development and governance of the best things we can collectively imagine to build.
We’re not just building a machine, we’re building the machine that builds the machine.
From early on, Backed (previously, NFT Pawn Shop) recognized the importance of community engagement with early iterations of the Community NFT (view on OpenSea)
Our hope is to give our community a tool to supercharge all that we do: recognize those that deserve it, in real time! So please contribute; the best way to share your ideas is to make a pull request with suggested changes to the rubric itself on Github.
Our goal in working on this was not to ship a finished, consumable product but to ship something with the minimum viable features to spark the imagination and be a useful tool. We hope it amounts to an exciting alternative to the boom and bust, chaos and vitriol that has accompanied the “airdrop” model of community building.
There’s a lot of work to be done at Backed! If you’re interested in being involved, please, mint your NFT, tweet at Backed or hop in Discord and let’s talk.