Project Title
MetaGame
Description
We’re defining it as a “massive online coordination game” with the goal of finding the most optimal ways to play life on an individual as well as the societal level but you can also think of it as a sort of a real-life MMO-RPG.
If this sounds too vague, the main thing to understand is that we’re starting by building an onboarding & navigation system for the EVM ecosystem which doubles as a modular open source platform for composable societies.
Manifesto/Vision
The general idea is that Ethereum should be used for building a new kind of socioeconomic system & this is our vision of it - a decentralized community building a platform for decentralized societies focused on solving problems & helping people coordinate at scale.
Tl;dr of the actual manifesto
In a game of chasing profits, we forgot what the economic system was supposed to achieve; prosperity. Instead, the game is optimized for maximum value extraction at the expense of the planet & all life on it.
MetaWorldview
The Earth is our spaceship, keeping us alive. We need to start acting like it’s crew and not competitors in a game of who’s-best-at-exploiting-it. Bitcoin halving is cool but wildlife halving isn’t.
A Decentralized Society
A place where people come together & build the future we want to live in. From knowledge and teammates to investors and users; anything you’ll need to build decentralized applications & organizations.
Be Autonomous
MetaGame is about taking things into our own hands & not waiting for others to solve our problems. People in the old world like to complain; we like building solutions. So find a problem you care about & solve it.
Why now?
We’re running out of time to steer humanity away from catastrophes. The technologies allowing us to coordinate at scale are at reach. We need to start a new game before it’s too late.
Full version here.
Problem
- Onboarding & navigation
- People have no idea why this technology matters besides numba go up
- It’s hard to find a path towards contributing
- It’s hard to find everything/everyone you need for your project
This is a problem at the individual DAO level as well as the ecosystem level.
I have personally experienced this problem by taking a long time before starting actively contributing to the ecosystem & then again, when trying to join specific DAOs.
Solution
An Onboarding Machine & A Decentralized Factory.
Our main two memes; the first one is about teaching people why this technology matters & helping them find their way. The second one is about bringing into one place anything that people need for starting a dApp or a DAO in the EVM ecosystem; from links to educational resources & programs, to information on tools & frameworks, help finding teammates & connections to product or service-providing DAOs such as DAOHaus, Raid Guild or MetaCartel Ventures.
In more concrete terms, we’re building a platform for onboarding people into the EVM ecosystem & helping them navigate it, find projects to contribute to or start their own.
Meanwhile, we’re organizing events, producing content & most importantly - shipping open source code. Everything we’re building is fully open source & the idea behind MetaOS (more below) is to build modular stack (of web3 building blocks) for running composable coordination games/decentralized societies, where each community could deploy & customize its own “MetaGame” but they would all be interoperable.
Product Features
Community & content
- Newsletter
- Podcast
- Guides
- Events
MetaOS
- MetaSys aka “the XP & Seeds system”
- MyMeta Profiles (decentralized profiles based on Ceramic)
- Skills
- Time availability
- Timezone
- Personality type
- DAO memberships
- NFTs
- Escrow contracting between people (not finished)
- Dashboard
- Community news & content
- Calendar
- Token stats
- XP stats
- Leaderboard
- Player leaderboard (work contributions)
- Patron leaderboard (financial contributions)
- Guild pages (project profiles based on DAOhaus & discord server)
- Onboarding Game (text based choose-your-own-adventure, not finished)
- Quest Chains (finished but not integrated yet)
- Questing system
- ChievMints (for minting achievement NFTs)
Validation
We’ve helped a bunch of people find their way & inspired a bunch of projects with our ways of operating. The first validation goes back to May 2nd 2020, by one of the people that got their crypto career started in MetaGame.
We’ve heard people say they earned their first magic internet money through MetaGame &/or got their first NFT in MetaGame.
Some of the most prominent Patrons of MetaGame include Griff Green & Michael Zargham.
Progress
Community/content
- 100+ community gatherings with 50+ guest speakers & projects
- Recorded & published 50 podcast episodes
- 20+ member organizations
- Shipped 100+ newsletters, got over 5000 subscribers
- Organized a virtual conference with 60+ speakers
- The first DAO hackathon
- A month long virtual festival (a week of gaming & social events, a week of conferencing, a week of workshops & 3 weeks of hackathon)
- Another MetaFest, with 130+ sessions
Technical
- Pioneered a contribution tracking & rewarding system, [MetaSys],(https://wiki.metagame.wtf/docs/Guilding/metasys) which can also be used for bootstrapping DAOs/economies, using SourceCred, ERC20s & AMMs.
- Built MyMeta Profiles
- Built the first version of MetaOS
- Incubated Quest Chains, the first project spinning out into its own DAO, will be used for building things such as DAO onboarding paths, playbooks & skill trees with NFT attestations etc.
Differentiation (from other projects)
Building for almost 3 years with <$200k in funding.
In an ecosystem overflowing with easy money, we did a shitton of things without ever raising any VC money or doing an ICO & over time, cultivated a community of true believers, as cringe as it sounds. Our token, Seed, can only be produced through labor.
Grant Request $
$50k
What the Funds Are For
Honestly, I’m tempted to repeat I see this as more like a retroactive funding proposal for our contributions to the Ethereum ecosystem over the past few years.
Though our long term goal is to become a general coordination platform & “seeking the most optimal ways to play life”, our beginning is firmly rooted in the Ethereum ecosystem.
This is what we’re building our tools & platform on, its what we create educational content about & pretty much all projects we’ve been spotlighting through our podcast, newsletter & events have been those based in the Ethereum ecosystem.
That said I’m happy to be more specific about how we will use the funds (which is subject to change by the community):
- $3k for building the Web3 Onboarding Game
- $3k for MetaOS outreach
- $6k for MetaOS cleanup & maintenance
- $6k for 6 new MyMeta & MetaOS integrations
- $1k for 10 more podcast episodes (until we find a sponsor)
- $1k for 10 more newsletters (until we find a sponsor)
- $15k for Coordinape
- $15k for watering Seeds
Given MetaGame is insanely frugal, these $50k should feed us for about 6 months.
Help Requested
Members of Moloch DAO to become patrons &/or advisors individually