The Weekly Hop is a newsletter from the leaders behind RabbitHole, a platform onboarding the next million users into crypto while training and connecting them to work opportunities in DAOs.

RabbitHole is on a mission to be the University of the Metaverse. This mission includes onboarding new people into crypto, teaching them how to be crypto-native, credentialing crypto users for their on-chain tasks, and matching users to protocols to find the best opportunities to participate in and contribute to crypto networks.

But the truth is, this is not a mission that should be controlled by any single individual or entity. The Pathfinder program is the first step in decentralizing RabbitHole by recruiting the best community members and empowering them to look after the design, creation, and implementation of RabbitHole Quests. 

Eventually, the Pathfinder program will become the RabbitHole DAO. In today’s edition of the weekly hop, we will talk about the strategy behind decentralizing through the Pathfinder program and the experiments we are launching to progress down the path of decentralization. 

Decentralizing through atomic units of work

The Pathfinder program is a strategic way for RabbitHole to decentralize. We broke down the creation of our core offering (Quests) into the following atomic units of work:

• Content creation (Pioneers, currently live)
  • Writing tutorials for the Tasks
• NFT design & minting (Artisan, September launch)
  • Creating the NFT reward for completing a Quest
• Quest proposals (Stewards, October launch)
  • Seeking funding and creating Tasks
• Subgraph development (Navigators, November launch)
  • Finding on-chain data to verify Task completion

Whereas many DAOs start by involving people in nebulous, somewhat peripheral tasks (e.g., community moderation), the Pathfinders are driving RabbitHole’s core business through discrete bounties.

By distributing the responsibilities for Quest creation, RabbitHole is moving towards a healthy transformation into a DAO and allows Pathfinders to make meaningful contributions with little involvement from the core team. 

Experimenting along the way

After ~4 weeks of running the Pathfinder program, we identified significant areas for improvement. This experimental approach is built into the Pathfinder culture. For example, instead of “paying” Pioneers for bounties, we purchase NFTs that they mint on Mirror.

Starting with a small targeted group of focused community members has enabled us to learn and iterate quickly while pushing the envelope on what is imaginable as we grow into a DAO. As we progress, the Pathfinders will be driving more and more of these improvements themselves.

The First Experiment - The Pioneer Budget

Up until now, the RabbitHole core team has funded bounties which determined which tutorials the Pioneers created, but moving forward we will try a different approach.

Starting in September, we are going to be experimenting with a flat budget model. Instead of creating a list of bounties and paying on a per bounty basis, we are going to provide the Pioneers with a budget that they manage themselves. The core team will request specific tutorials for upcoming Quests, but beyond that, the budget will be used at the discretion of the Pioneer Treasury Workstream. 

We’re giving the Pioneers a more open directive to explore web3.

This helps achieve a few things:

• Pioneers can take more ownership over the work they are doing.
• The number of bounties completed will theoretically increase because they are no longer determined by RabbitHole, but by the needs of the community and the skills and insights of the Pioneers
• It provides a good experiment for a future DAO by introducing more novel reward mechanisms, similar to Coordinape, where community members who work with one another determine compensation in a decentralized way.

Another prolific week

We had another week with great output from the Pioneers, who may be leading the most active Mirror publication at the moment. The group created and published the following Tutorials in the last week:

• LP on Balancer (Curly)
• Swap on Balancer (Curly + Chase)
• LP on Uniswap Optimism (Alex)
• Set-up Polygon network (Vajresh)
• Mint alETH on Alchemix (Zach)
• Set-up Optimism network (Anay)
• How to Purchase on OpenSea (Jonah)

Do you want to help create the University of the Metaverse?

If you want to help bring RabbitHole’s vision to reality and be a part of the future DAO, please reach out to @chaserchapman and @flynnjamm. 

See you next week for the Weekly Hop!

Tips will be split amongst Pioneers that contributed to this post (45%) and myself (55%). Any tips I personally receive will be used to purchase future Pioneer Editions, so all tips are directly funding crypto user onboarding and education!