Buckle up.

The product we’re building—contests to make, execute, and reward decisions—is now called jokerace. We have a new site, jokerace.xyz, with a rebranded twitter, along with a fancy new landing page where you can find featured jokeraces and an explainer. Check it:

And oh yes, let us assure you: big things are in store with our v3, which we describe below.

But ok first, let’s clarify. The product we’re building—contests to make, execute, and reward decisions—is now called jokerace, and it’s part of our bigger brand, joke. Just joke. So welcome to the jokeverse baby.

But ok actually, let’s clarify that one more time. The product we’re building—contests to make, execute, and reward decisions—is now called jokerace, and it’s part of a bigger brand, joke, which currently encompasses the product (jokerace), as well as a dedicated independent community of NFT holders (the jokecouncil), which is born out of a weekly jokerace for actual jokes called the jokecouncil race. This joke is getting real real.

But ok actually—well, oh boy. Damn dude.

You know what? Let’s explain.

A Quick Explainer

For the past year, we’ve gotten some understandable questions about our previous name, “jokedao.” Was it referring to the product we were building—contests? Was it an actual DAO? Was it even an actual joke?

So we’re excited to announce that as part of ongoing decentralizations in the jokeverse, jokedao will continue as a DAO operating independently from jokerace, the platform for contests that we’re building at jk labs, inc. (the development lab that runs and operates this mirror).

Let’s break that down.

• jokerace is the contest platform for communities to make, execute, and reward decisions. You can call these contests jokeraces if you like.

jokeraces can be used for any contest where people submit responses and people vote on their favorites, including bounties, hackathons, grants, awards ceremonies, prediction markets, protocol feature requests, DAO governance, elections, amendments, and so on.

• jokedao is the bicameral community of NFT and $JOKE holders that develop use cases for on-chain contests, including the weekly jokecouncil race (a contest for, yes, bad jokes).

And again, they are part of the bigger brand:

• joke is a brand that’s proliferated through an ecosystem of interconnected projects, products, and subcommunities dedicated to gamified multiplayer coordination.

Let’s also break down each of those entities.

First, jokerace. This platform is built by jk labs inc..

• **jk labs inc. **is a development lab that builds products in the joke ecosystem, with an initial and ongoing focus on jokerace. It’s cofounded by David Phelps and Sean McCaffery, who have been building the platform for the past year.

Simple enough:

Second, jokedao. jokedao is a community comprised of NFT holders (the jokecouncil) and $JOKE token holders.

• jokecouncil races are weekly contests for $JOKE holders to vote and submit on responses to a prompt for a chance to earn $JOKE, with the winner minted as an NFT and sold as an access pass to the jokecouncil. These contests typically revolve around bad jokes (yes) and enable submissions throughout the week with voting running 12-12:30pm ET on Fridays. You can get 690 free votes each week by putting “jokedao maxi” in your twitter bio and joining the guild at https://guild.xyz/jokedao-maxis. And, oh yes, you can find jokecouncil races at jokerace.xyz.

• The winning joke of jokecouncil races is minted as an NFT that gives the buyer access to the jokecouncil.

• The jokecouncil is a community dedicated to deploying its funds to incubate on-chain contests for $JOKE holders, including the jokecouncil race. They release one NFT per week on Tuesdays, here. You can see the jokecouncil multisig here, which contains a treasury of $ETH and NFTs. And you can follow the jokecouncil on twitter here.

• jokedao is the name for this constellation of communities, with its own multisig that manages the $JOKE here.

Now, let’s stress this: jk labs has no legal affiliation with jokedao or jokecouncil, and jk labs’ team has burned their tokens of $JOKE received as compensation for their work with jokedao in order to fully disaffiliate the projects. jk labs has no token affiliated with it at this time. The founders of jk labs, Sean and David, do own joke NFTs that they purchased independently, so they sit on the jokecouncil with dozens of other NFT holders.

Ok whew. That clears that. Now let’s talk about what’s next from the perspective of jk labs in building out jokerace.

What We Got Going

Year one, last year, was about shipping something fast that people use.

Year two, this year, is about shipping something beautiful that people love—and can earn them capital, reputation, and relationships.

To put that simply, our major goal in the next six months is removing every friction point to make it as easy for anyone anywhere to create or participate in on-chain contests. This will be our jokerace v3.

Our first major milestone of v3 is already here: a landing page where you can see, sort, and search contests to play in and earn rewards. The landing page hits our first three big goals for making our site as accessible as possible:

• Discoverability. You can come to jokerace.xyz every day to see what contests you can play in for rewards. We feature contests on the front page for you to check out, and again, you can search and sort for contests on the site by a variety of criteria, including deadlines, rewards, and title.

• Search and Share. You can now search for any contest by title and share on Lens and Twitter. Our new design will incorporate tags and summaries to optimize presentation and search—and offer more metrics for analyzing contests too.

• Customization. Most crucially, you can now see which contests you qualify for when you connect your wallet to the site. So our site is now customized to you.

If you want to play in contests, jokerace.xyz is now optimized for you to find any contest you like so you can earn rewards. And if you want to create contests, we can now feature you and push you to relevant players as well.

And that’s just the start. Over the upcoming months, we’ll continue refreshing our entire site with our new brand while implementing more major changes. Next up? We’re replacing voting tokens with allowlists so you’ll never need to mint and distribute a token on our site again—and will be able to run contests for communities of any size on any EVM-compatible chain, all from our site.

Thanks for listening and stay tuned.

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This article (and Mirror account) exclusively represents the perspective of jk labs, does not represent financial advice, and is always happy to be taken as a joke.**

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