The time has come for us to explain the joke.

This will take two announcements.

Announcement #1:

Starting next week, the jokerace will return in beta on our own platform.

Our incredible dev Sean McCaffery has been working tirelessly for the past month to develop our own platform for the jokerace after Mirror paused work on the write race. The Mirror team has been nothing but supportive of our efforts, and we’re grateful to them that we got to work with them on the first version. There would be no jokerace without them.

Because we’ve gotten to build out the jokerace as we like, this new jokerace will look a bit different than the old one:

• Anyone can submit a joke directly to platform for others to vote on
• We’ll run on Polygon with low gas fees that enable on-chain voting and (eventually) penalties and rewards that would be prohibitive on eth
• You’ll be able to delegate your votes to yourself or other addresses to vote on behalf of your tokens (which you’ll keep)
• We’ll be entirely open-source so anyone can fork our code and build their own version
• It’s an MVP. We’ll continue to update the UI once we’ve secured funding to bring on a frontend dev, and you can follow our preliminary designs as we work on them here, but we want to emphasize this: our goal is to build for accessibility and legibility, not sleekness. 

Over the next week, we’ll release fuller instructions for bridging your $JOKE to Polygon and delegating your votes to yourself.

But here’s the fun part—you’ll get to help propose and pick our next features… using the jokerace.

We’ll hold periodic contests to vote on the next features you’d like to see. If you vote on the winning choice, we’ll airdrop you $JOKE.

Penalties and rewards? Multiple winners? Quadratic voting? Vote decay? Downvoting? Unstaking votes?

Part of the fun of being a DAO is that our tokenholders will get to choose what we work on—and get rewarded for building consensus with each other to vote on a winning option.

And that leads to our next announcement.

Announcement #2:

We’re building a platform for all DAOs to perform gamified governance on-chain.

Yes, jokedao will remain devoted to weekly jokeraces, our NFT collection of winning jokes, and governance to decide the rules of different contests.

But we’re also building the platform these contests will run on—a platform that can be used not just for jokeraces but for all DAOs that want the full benefits of on-chain voting.

Because on-chain voting isn’t just about keeping open-source records of votes and contributions that can be used to build the reputation of DAOs and contributors over time.

It’s about enabling whole new forms of governance that have never existed before. 

In our case, we’ll be building a platform for gamified governance that enables DAOs to reward participants for working together and building relationships to come to the right decision for the group. Those who vote on winning options can win tokens.

We’ll write more in the future about the implications of this system, but let’s point to three to start.

First, acquisition: DAOs can reward newcomers who propose decisions and work with DAO members to vote on winning options. Our contests become a DAO acquisition tool for people looking to get into web3, work on DAOs, and learn about the DAO itself as well as the process of on-chain governance.

Second, retention: so many DAOs lose members now because they don’t build relationships, have little to do, and go elsewhere. Gamified governance solves all three of these issues. Because it’s only possible to win contests by collaborating with others, contributors will have to form teams to win—leading not only to longlasting relationships but better consensus-building mechanisms to make decisions.

Gamified governance operates on the principle that the best decision in a DAO isn’t necessarily the one that builds the most revenue or growth—but rather the one that builds social consensus among DAO contributors so that they remain excited and dedicated to pursue it. What about those who can end up penalized for disagreeing with consensus? Our hope is that they’re extra incentivized to find each other and rechallenge the winners or fork the DAO to build the vision they care about. Then again, we don’t pretend this system of incentivized collaboration is right for every DAO or every decision, and that’s why we’ll leave rewards and penalties optional. We want DAOs to have maximum modularity to build the contests they want to build.

And finally, gamified governance can be used for a multitude of use cases that incentivize communities to become actively involved in the projects of builders and creators, including:

• Endorsements
• Bounties
• Competitions
• User surveys
• Film festivals and curation
• Customers picking a product’s features
• Readers choosing a writer’s next piece
• Fractionalized NFTs developing fan fiction around their art
• Choose-your-own-ending stories

And so on.

We’ll also be building tools for anyone to deploy their own token for voting, including one-time-use tokens for single contests.

So anyone can enjoy the magic of web3 in dissolving the boundaries between fans and creators, community and builders, investors and workers—including those who don’t yet have a tokenized community or are looking to build one.

Next week we’ll announce fuller tokenomics—ahem, jokenomics—for our redeployed jokerace, and in the meantime if you represent or know of projects that might want to help fund our mission or DAOs that might want to play the jokerace, we’re both looking to get grants to fund our work and looking to give grants (of $JOKE) to DAOs that want to form teams to play.

Please be in touch, and lfj.

— Management