A Web3 Foundation DF proposal that combines direct collaboration with the Polkadot community and targeted business development to drive new projects, activity, and liquidity into the ecosystem.
Overview:
At this point it’s abundantly clear that Polkadot needs focused initiatives that drive sustainable growth to the network and value to its community. Many solutions presented so far look to address these issues in their own distinct ways, but don’t take advantage of the compounding network effects already present in the ecosystem. Greenpoint Labs aims to take a different approach.
We are a team of past and present Polkadot BD and Community contributors that want to move the needle forward, along with and not in spite of the community. Our team has worked with companies like Parity, D1 Ventures, Moonbeam, Astar, and just about every other Polkadot team you can think of. We’ve also done BD for non-ecosystem teams in Ethereum and Polygon. At our core, we’re DOT-natives and want to lead a growth engine that benefits the ecosystem while providing unique incentives for new teams to join.
Here’s how:
The lack of a smooth business-focused onboarding process has created a great deal of friction for new projects looking to enter the ecosystem. At its best, the ecosystem thrives when parachain teams are well coordinated, but with opinionated BD this ideal becomes unworkable. Even if a new project somehow gets high-quality support, they often fail to see how a Polkadot deployment can serve their current user-base or larger business goals. User activity and liquidity in the ecosystem is slim, and often these external projects turn to parachain teams for undeserved grants and funding to build something they have no incentive to maintain.
The rise of airdrops and activity-based rewards has recently helped change the latter. Even outside Polkadot, in ecosystems like Solana and Eth L2’s, these initiatives have enabled users to get active again, while giving the projects a viable business case.
We at Greenpoint Labs will operate at the intersection of these two points.
First, with funding from the Web3 Foundation’s DF Program, we will create a streamlined Business Development engine that conducts targeted outreach to new and established crypto-native companies. We intend to be the boots-on-the-ground for the Polkadot ecosystem, with a focus on offering a seamless onboarding experience for crypto businesses. This involves coordinating with parchain teams and infrastructure providers, and other DOT stakeholders (including other DF recipients). We will create business oriented materials and playbooks for potential partners, and will ensure Polkadot is represented across platforms like DefiLlama, DappRadar, etc.
Second, we will work closely with the wider Polkadot community to create what we are calling (for now) the Polkadot Beta Testers Program. This program will pull from the parachains, DOT DAO’s, and the wider community of users to connect new deployments to active testers. Projects will receive the instant benefit of having beta-testers ready to play with their products, and the community will be rewarded through exclusive airdrops and participation rewards. Essentially, we will coordinate activity-based incentives and airdrops for our Beta Testers, offering partners high quality usage in return. This way, the community can have constant access to innovative Polkadot applications, while also serving to decide which ones are worth sticking around. This enables us to coordinate a highly iterative Business Development process that helps partners find clear Product-Market-Fit in the ecosystem.
Having been active participants of communities like ChaosDAO, Moonsama, and Polka Haus, we know there are high quality participants in the great experiment that is Polkadot. We at Greenpoint Labs, believe that they deserve better and more engaging things to do on the network. We will work to enable that reality.
What’s next:
While this post offers a high-level overview of our proposal, there are the details that we have worked out with various stakeholders to make this effective in practice. In execution, we will focus on bringing in user-facing, crypto-native applications and app-chains. Our incentives become more effective when we prioritize good benefits for Beta Testers, and optimize for high quality participation. Ultimately, our success will be measured by added liquidity and activity to the network driven by a positive growth flywheel that attracts new teams and non-natives.
We’re happy to elaborate on any part of the proposal and will share more details as we go through the DF process. If you would like to get involved with the Polkadot Beta Testers Program, either as a participant or as an administrator feel free to drop a comment. You can also reach us on Twitter @DaBricksz, @0xrojo, @dillonhanson12.
Let us know what you think, everything goes.
Let’s build the next chapter of Polkadot together.
