Let's face it. Crypto onboarding as we know it is a tedious process plagued by token shillers and speculators whose only mission is to pump their own bags. And aside from centralized products like Coinbase Earn, there's no education network dedicated to teaching users the ins and outs of on-chain interactions.

Onboarding today is inaccessible, hard to understand, and owned entirely by influencers who earn outsized benefits from new members joining the ecosystem.

From an accessibility standpoint, think about the first time you heard about crypto — buzzwords galore: "How do I get started?" someone might ask. "Well," you'd say, "first you need a non-custodial wallet that holds various ERC-20 tokens. You're gonna want to go to your favorite centralized exchange, buy some tokens, send them to your wallet, swap some on a decentralized exchange to get some others, and, if you really wanna get frisky, lock em up in some high yield DeFi protocol to maximize your yield. You'll be farming in no time!"

If you don’t know a thing about crypto, you're probably staring at your screen like this:

Though the jargon and memes of crypto twitter bring insiders together, they do virtually nothing to help new people enter the space — the same things that provide inclusivity within crypto networks maintain exclusivity outside of them.

On a similar thread, this rift between crypto-native and non-crypto-native people continues to widen since we've yet to convince the public that crypto is more than just a "currency." In fact, most crypto isn't even a currency anyway — it's gas for a protocol, a utility for a specific ecosystem with no intent of ever being money.

Not to mention that our discourse around crypto is dominated by influencers whose opinions become laws. Thought leaders consistently tweet the same things: fortune cookie tweets or project shills to ensure they're never the last ones left holding the bag.

All these factors collide to create noise in the space that intimidates new users. We need an objective signal in the noise to educate the world about what's only possible with crypto.

Decentralized Identities & Crypto Credentials

As we move to a crypto-native world, we get to rethink the internet as it stands today. In creating web3, we work towards a vision of the internet as originally intended — an open web owned + operated by its users. With this vision comes the ability to have more portable online identities and community affiliations — something made possible with decentralized identities (DIDs).

DIDs let us link our various wallet addresses together, creating a more cohesive view of our online presence. Services like BrightID and ENS let us prove we’re human + add digital identities on top of our wallets, letting us “put our mouth where our money is,” but it’s DIDs that bring the disparate parts of our online identities into one. 

Using DIDs we can fulfill RabbitHole’s core vision of creating an “on-chain meritocracy” with crypto credentials — a means of proving one’s expertise or reputation based on their on-chain activity — but the main bottleneck to this vision is the centralization of our company.

RabbitHole must become a DAO to reach the necessary scale to achieve this on-chain meritocracy while remaining credibly neutral and aligning incentives between its users, investors, and the broader web3 community.

Why RabbitHoleDAO

RabbitHole is already the market leader in token distribution + customer acquisition for crypto protocols. We've given out hundreds of thousands of dollars in token rewards to users all around the world while pioneering a "learn-to-earn" model which incentivizes intentional participation with crypto projects over pure speculation + "number go up" day trading behavior. Picking up where Earn.com left off, RabbitHole focuses on a user's on-chain track record to award tokens + credentials based on their transaction history, helping find an answer to how we find the right person for the right job at the right time. At scale, RabbitHole will become the go-to source for work on the internet.

We believe the future of work is based on one’s contribution to various organizations to which they feel most aligned. DAOs open up a new paradigm for democratic governance and mass coordination of people with similar interests and values, and as such, it’s core to our vision to be a DAO, ourselves, to help usher in this new era.

Scaling mass onboarding while preserving decentralization

For DAOs to achieve relevant scale, traditional marketing isn't sufficient. So in our transition from company to DAO, we must build a tight-knit community of DAO contributors who can operate the network in tandem with (and eventually in place of) the core RabbitHole team.

Becoming a DAO not only lets us grow larger than a centralized company, but it also helps us coordinate + mobilize a task force of learners and earners who will act as sherpas for potential new crypto users. These contributors are called Pathfinders — crypto missionaries looking to preach the gospel and use their talents in design, marketing, engineering, and more to onboard the next billion people to web3.

Think of it this way: If RabbitHole is a game, Pathfinders are the game designers.

Pathfinders are made up of several core working groups:

• Pioneers — content creators building web3’s Library of Alexandria, a knowledge hub complete with anything you’d need to know to get started in crypto
• Artisans — a diverse collective of designers + artists crafting NFT rewards for RabbitHole Quests + outsourcing design services to other DAOs in the web3 ecosystem 
• Stewards — scouts + alpha hunters sourcing + partnering with crypto protocols, representing RabbitHoleDAO through metagovernance + DAO expansion efforts
• Navigators — web3 developers engineering Quest templates with built-in crypto-economic incentives to upskill developers + help them participate in DAOs
• Explorers — data analysts finding signal in the noise, exploring various blockchains to compile case studies that show off the value of RabbitHole’s Quests + Protocol

We’ve already “stealth launched” Pioneers + Artisans, and we’ll be opening up the remaining roles soon. If any of these resonate with you, please reach out!

On their own, each working group provides avenues for new crypto users to get started working in DAOs while offering more experienced contributors new work & mentorship opportunities. Together, these working groups create a vast network of web3 resources, both for individual contributors and the crypto ecosystem at large.

As a result, RabbitHoleDAO can reach a larger scale than most other DAOs in the space while providing an on-ramp for members to showcase their skills and share upside in the community’s growth. But for that to be worthwhile, our DAO + protocol must be credibly neutral, allowing members to dictate the direction + depth to which it grows.

Aligning + empowering core contributors

To remain credibly neutral, an org needs to align + empower its core contributors. For RabbitHoleDAO, alignment + empowerment becomes a flywheel:

• Stewards source protocols we work with, earning a % of the value they bring to the DAO. 
• In tandem, Pioneers create tutorials + editorial content to guide RabbitHole users through various Quests while Artisans craft artwork for NFT rewards, earning tokens in exchange. 
• As a Quest is created, Navigators develop the subgraphs necessary to verify proof-of-completion + otherwise maintain the RabbitHole Protocol.
• Finally, Explorers query those subgraphs, creating case studies to share with potential partners Stewards help source.
• And the cycle continues...

These groups work in tandem to service the core RabbitHole protocol, earning more ownership + governance power in the DAO while building a credentialing protocol that fits their needs. 

At its core, this ethos of how work gets done in the DAO aligns perfectly with our vision for an on-chain meritocracy + the future of web3 work. And once we’re sufficiently decentralized, we can use our protocol to issue objective, verifiable, interoperable credentials for the broader web3 ecosystem — credentials created by the community, for the community.

Creating a credibly-neutral credentialing protocol

Credentials from centralized institutions are subjective — they're only valuable because the institution issuing them is valuable. It's a reputational ponzi scheme.

On the contrary, credentials from decentralized networks are more objective — they let people observe work completed without a subjective value judgement on the work itself.

To create a true meritocracy, we need less of the former and more of the latter. And to get there, we need to have open discussions + build relationships with members of our community to open the door for their participation (and eventually our own company's decentralization).

Decentralization is the only way to have open + transparent networks with objective credentials. In turn, these networks align incentives between all their participants, making it easier for new people to enter the space.

Consider this: most of your crypto friends already want to bring their friends into the space (because everyone wants to be seen as a missionary), but there's never been an easy way to do so, nor has there been an easy way to track their progress as they learn. Not to mention that people want to be a part of something, and while traditional communities are great beginnings, real ownership comes with both financial and social rewards.

RabbitHole has an ethos core to web3: positive-sumness, transparency, and alignment across networks through true ownership of contributors’ work and community affiliations. When everyone owns a piece of the network + the success of that network is dictated by their actions, missionaries opt in and mercenaries opt out.

Decentralization is just one piece of the web3 onboarding + credentialing puzzle. It lets us be more transparent in our processes, align incentives with our users, and creates objective measures of work completion which, in turn, push us towards the meritocracy we've always hoped for.

If this mission resonates with you, please don’t hesitate to reach out on twitter, or join our Discord to keep up to date with all developments related to our DAO. We’d love to find ways to get you involved in whatever capacity is most meaningful to you.

Down the RabbitHole we go… 🐇 🕳