Name: Smol Phil (Philip)
Position I am applying for: Council
TG: @smolphil
Twitter: @shrozart
Affiliations (Currently I am working with, invested in, etc.): I am a member of TreasureDAO’s ARC (Arbitrum Representative Council). Regarding investments, I have a long list of angel and market investments, of which Treasure assets comprise a large share.
Why You
Why would You be the best candidate for this position?
I have been very involved in Treasure governance, and have become more involved in Arbitrum governance especially since becoming a member of TreasureDAO’s ARC.
I have angel invested in various web3 projects, and have regular chats with team members to catch up on developments and exchange thoughts. This has given me experience in recognizing the challenges that web3 projects face from its inception, which can be implemented in determining the viability and feasibility of incentive applications and their effects.
I have an academic degree in Psychology with a focus on Behavior Change. My education equipped me with insights into human behavior, cognition and emotions that are invaluable in developing technology that is user-centric, ethical, and aligns with the needs and expectations of the community at large. Furthermore, knowledge on effective strategies that drive behavior are key in approving incentive applications that are more likely to achieve desired outcomes and create positive community impact.
What do you think a good incentive application looks like?
Public funding that breeds creativity and inclusivity is what welcomes participants with different interests to Arbitrum, and will breed culture that makes people want to stick around. To attain this, incentive and rubric design should not merely focus on directly funding the end user as a way to reduce the cost of protocol usage, but instead incentivize well-proven or innovative designs that attract users because of the underlying changes that the incentives facilitate.
Creative, inclusive and cooperative alignment
Incentivizing creativity is important for mainly two reasons:
- Giving projects the freedom to think of innovative incentive designs that will attract users on the merits of the design itself. Furthermore, this experimentation will help projects iterate and improve not just on incentive structures but also on ways to improve the project itself, which is important in the rapidly evolving sector that is crypto.
- Arbitrum itself has always been a strong proponent of decentralization, bottom-up iteration and giving power to its users by giving them the keys to governance ($ARB). Therefore, having the DAO as a public fund to help the Arbitrum ecosystem innovate is inherently aligned with the Arbitrum ethos, and something we should intensify over time.
From a user perspective, creative incentive designs can be targeted towards diverse motivational needs. Every individual is different, especially if you compare cohorts of users from different projects. Creativity in design can help cater in capturing the attention of a specific userbase, making them more engaged and excited. By aligning incentives with intrinsic drivers, projects can foster sustained intrinsic motivation and commitment that persists beyond the initial incentivization period.
Crafting creative incentive designs will also help projects/protocols that are active in the same sector to be less head-on in terms of incentivization, to avoid incentivization breeding a zero-sum game and a race to the bottom culture, and instead be more cooperative in thinking of sustainable designs that could work synergistically.
For the above reasons an incentive application should:
- Clearly articulate the creative aspect of its incentive design, how its design impacts the project itself and why the project believes that this design targets the (intrinsic) motivational needs and wants of its users.
- Explain how the incentive design impacts other projects and their accompanying user bases within the Arbitrum ecosystem, i.e. what is the social return on investment. If there are any potential negative side effects (farming, vampire attacks, sybil attacks or other harmful practices) of the incentive structure, the project should explain what is being done to mitigate these practices.
Clarity and transparency
- A good application should be transparent and clear in what goals and objectives it wants to achieve, justify why the chosen incentive structure is the most effective structure to achieve these goals and objectives and how these goals and objectives can be achieved successfully.
- The project should detail where the funds are going and to what end they are being used.
Sustainability and accountability
- The application should detail how the chosen incentive structure is beneficial for the long-term growth of the project itself and the Arbitrum network.
- Explain if and how the incentive structure accelerates the process of user acquisition and retention.
- There should be clear and objective measurements (KPIs) set out in the proposal, with possible contingencies on goals/objectives reached.
Biography
The proposal should detail a description of the project, relevant metrics used to date, project establishment date, date deployed on Arbitrum and why it has chosen for Arbitrum as its base of operations.
What are your goals for this program?
- Helping projects get the funding they need to thrive financially and culturally.
- Bringing public funding to the next level and having Arbitrum be a place where financial gains flow back to the DAO, the project and its users; thus minimizing the need for VCs in the long run.
- Foster a cooperative culture by incentivizing proposals that create and share open source tooling, and promote interoperability and synergy between projects.
- Using the data on past and present incentive structures to build towards a future with multiple verticals having their own public fund and council.
- Setting up a rubric that is specific enough to make a proper judgement on the quality of an incentive application, yet be broad enough in scope to be able to judge projects from all verticals as equitably as possible.