This series of articles lays out a system of gamified work and token voting at Fight Club. Do tasks to earn CAKE 🍰, level up your Fighter, and gain enhanced governance power.

• Part 1: Sophisticated Voting Systems in DAOs

• Part 2: Fighter Tier System: Theme, Design, and Considerations

• Part 3: Implementation: CAKE 🍰 and Fighter Tiers

Part 2: Fighter Tier System: Design, Considerations, and Effects

Cover image by TonyTegz

Theme

Bankless DAO uses an L1/L3/L4 Discord role system to reflect the financial holdings of the BANK token and L2 as a social Proof of Personhood (PoP) system. It’s all very functional and bland. DAOs, especially, benefit from a THEME, so let’s spice it up. Themes help people remember mechanics and goals in these games of DAOing it.

Fight Club Theme

Fight Club fighters get heavier by eating CAKE 🍰 and eventually weigh enough for the next weight class. Flawless video game logic.

More contributions = more weight = higher social standing.

• There are five tiers of contributor experience:

  • Fighter 0: Flyweight - 0 🍰

  • Fighter 1: Lightweight - 25 🍰

  • Fighter 2: Middleweight - 50 🍰

  • Fighter 3: Heavyweight - 125 🍰

  • Fighter 4: Sumo - 250 🍰

Tiered NFT Governance

In the Fight Club project, every NFT has inherent governance power, and holders vote for proposals similarly to other projects. The new addition is that accumulating these soulbound tokens from a history of contribution will earn contributors multipliers on their governance power.

Fight Club uses a bespoke ERC-721 multi-registry strategy on Snapshot, built by BanklessDAO contributor MantisClone.eth.

The Numbers

The exact numbers used for multipliers are still being debated inside Fight Club and will finalize according to community consensus on team recommendations and discussion.

The numbers recommended by the Fight Club 🥊 governance team are here.

Design Considerations

NFT Governance Values - The Senate

• Defines nftGovValue for each NFT

• Define voting blocks to prevent a takeover from new joiners who may lack context in their voting decisions

  1. 40% black glove, 30% red glove, 30% gold glove

• Also defines the difference between black glove and gold glove contribution multipliers will overcome

Multipliers

• Defines cakeMultiplier values for each contributor tier

• A highly active black glove should be able to overcome the voting power of an inactive gold glove holder

  • i.e. sumo black glove = lightweight gold glove

The Result

Resulting numbers:

The Game of Work

So far, we've looked at the utility of CAKE 🍰, but how does one get it?

How Do We Get CAKE?

Project managers (PMs) will love to hear that we are leveraging their frameworks. We use Agile “story points” to assign relative worth to tasks within a workgroup. The group can account for the effort, time, and skill involved in accomplishing those tasks. They are best suited to make those decisions internally due to their proximity to the work.

Ideally, a skilled PM facilitates a discussion so the team can collaboratively determine the ‘worth’ of various tasks relative to each other. Without that conversation CAKE 🍰 points can be assigned instead.

These ‘story points’ are tracked in PM software. Fight Club 🥊 uses the ‘task points’ function in Dework.

Issues with Story Points

Story points are inconsistent. They are deliberately ill-defined to allow for each team to define what they value from that.

These story points are unreliable across organizations; what determines the specific amount of story points between teams?

What happens when marketing gives 10,000 task points and dev only gives 20? Won’t the teams be uneven and governance power will accrue to the biggest inflators?

Yes, there is an issue here. But we can account for it across teams using math.

If we divide each task’s assigned points by the total task points given out by that workgroup (normalization) we get a percentage of the whole for that workgroup. Multiply that percent by a “CAKE 🍰 budget” of governance points given out by that workgroup for the epoch to get a consistent total of governance points given out by the organization, but with local autonomy for how to allocate those points to tasks within their workgroup. Push autonomy to the edges!

Local autonomy for governance allocation with known governance emission schedule for org planning purposes 💪

Story Point Normalization

Normalization creates a standard budget that can be accounted for at the organizational level (we know the governance emissions schedule) but allows for team autonomy for labor incentives with governance.

CAKE 🍰 Budget

We assign a “budget” of CAKE 🍰 that will be distributed according to each workstream team’s local determination of the relative worth + effort involved in each task.

But how much should we allocate? Here, we should default to what thousands of PMs already know: effective teams are small — about five people, to reduce the number of human combinations.

Ideal Team Budgets

We can define an ideal team size of five and build our governance incentives around that team size. To make sure Fight Club 🥊 is accessible -- providing social mobility for new joiners -- a new contributor should be able to earn the lowest tier of social recognition throughout a season. This is the Lightweight Fighter tier at 25 CAKE 🍰.

So a team’s budget should be 5 members * 25 CAKE 🍰 (Lightweight) = 125 CAKE 🍰 each season.

Incentives for Labor

The limited CAKE 🍰 allocation means teams have the incentive to remain the most effective size. If too many join a team, each individual will likely earn less than average, and social agreement to form a new team is encouraged. The percent system also offers an incentive to join understaffed teams to receive a larger than usual CAKE 🍰 allocation.

These labor incentives depend on people understanding the incentives and having the information available to make informed, rational decisions about where to allocate their labor.

i.e. Playing games optimally requires understanding the rules.

Gaming the System

There is a vector for this system to become unbalanced within a team — the Project Manager. PMs have a clear incentive to game the system and inflate their tasks for more CAKE 🍰.

We realign their incentives by making their CAKE allocation role-based, rather than task-based, with a performance incentive at the end of the season. They get role-based $CAKE with a bonus incentive, based on NPS assessment from their team at the end of the season. For example, a PM might earn 12 CAKE for their role, plus another 13 CAKE for scoring 60+ on NPS from their team at the end of the season.

Gamified Work

Variable rewards are more effective motivations for people. Governance rewards for a given epoch are variable because your earned CAKE 🍰 will depend on how much work everyone else in your workstream completed that epoch.

So, no one knows the exact amount until the data is analyzed and published. Humans love the sense of anticipation, so contributors know they’re earning some CAKE 🍰, just not exactly how much.

Summary

Let’s Review:

• Agile story points from team conversations to assign relative value to tasks within team workstreams

  • Autonomy at the edges 💪

• Track story points in a PM tool

• Give out a “CAKE 🍰 budget” to each working group

  • An equal budget is given to each working group

• Normalize CAKE 🍰 within each working group

  • Each person gets a % of the total from each working group they contribute to

  • Multiply each contributor’s completed task story points by the “CAKE 🍰 budget” for that workstream

• Sum up each contributor’s CAKE 🍰 earned

• If a contributor has reached the next contribution tier, grant them a soulbound token commemorating their lifetime contribution

• Make all the data and calculations visible to the community

Part 3

Part 3: Implementation: CAKE 🍰 and Fighter Tiers

Notes

iSpeakNerd is an educator, wordsmith, and DAO techie at Bankless DAO. He is the Content Director of Bankless Academy, and helps with Operations and tooling for multiple DAOs. His background is in physical science and education.