If you’d like to know our definition of degens and regens, read our manifesto.

It is said that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Since January, LottoPGF has been helping degens and regens alike build their luck through the free-to-play proof-of-concept PowerBALD lottery that showcases our open-source protocol.

As we progress through Q2 and beyond, we’ll continue building on the LottoPGF lore while giving back to our community and the broader Public Goods Funding (PGF) ecosystem.

With that intention in mind, we’re excited to announce that we’re also taking things to the next level…

🥁🥁 Enter: OttoDAO 🎺🎺

For this next phase, we’re actively calling in new contributors and collaborators to jump in and take ownership of what’s next at OttoDAO.

We hope you join us in building a self-sustainable New Internet. Let’s keep it cypherpunk!

In this article:

1. Who tf is Otto?

2. The story of LottoPGF

3. The gap in the Public Goods Funding space

4. Bringing degens and regens together

5. OttoDAO's mission

1. gm Otto

Before we get into it, let us briefly introduce you to OttoDAO’s mascot and namesake, Otto the Jin Chan – or money toad.

An amphibian, Otto is equally at ease on land and in water. In the same way, he hops seamlessly between the deepest depths of degeneracy and the lush landscapes where regens live.

Mischievous yet amusing (some might say, sweetly subversive), Otto is memeing himself into existence as a modern echo of the Feng Shui's symbol for prosperity, while making frens with the other web3 frogs. He even has a sticker pack for Telegram!

Now he’s said gm, let’s resume scheduled programming…

2. ‘A Factory of Lotteries’ And Other Tales of Onchain Randomness

Between Balaji’s suggestions to ‘go fully decentralised’, to seizing the memes of production with contributors across Warpcast and JokeRace – and perhaps having more than a small hand to play in the creation of DEGEN chain – 2024 has been driving home what positive-sum collaboration in web3 looks like in practice.

For a rapid-fire overview of that journey, check out Otto’s evolution from hackathon project to fully fledged DAO:

In just a few months, we launched our daily PowerBALD draw, and integrated LottoPGF into Zuzalu.city’s fundraising strategy. We also raised enough funds ourselves to sponsor Giveth’s Galactic Giving round and have a potential collab with GLO Dollar on the horizon (keep your eyes peeled here for announcements). All in all, it’s fair to say that a lot has happened.

But, as with any Infinite Garden project, the fruits are the last to bear after a long process of seeding, pruning, weeding, and cultivating. Thanks to Fairy’s extensive research into onchain, verifiable randomness and Troops’ groundwork with Ethereum native communities, we’re amped to start sharing the first (of hopefully, many) harvests and invite new gardeners to grow and evolve the ecosystem further.

So, without further ado…Let’s first look into the gap that OttoDAO aims to close starting with LottoPGF.

3. A Quick Look into the Public Goods Landscape

For the past few cycles, much of the work within the PGF space has focused on resource allocation and questions such as these: How do we collectively decide what is worth funding?; what does it look like to promote diversity and avoid ‘rich get richer’ scenarios?; and how can we code-in disincentives against gaming the system?

With so many great regen minds contributing to solving the resource allocation side of the PGF equation  - Gitcoin, the Optimism Collective, and Octant to name a few - the pace of evolution has been nothing short of astounding. Quadratic Funding, Conviction Voting, and Retroactive Public Goods Funding represent the tip of the iceberg in promising innovations in this field.

However. The same can’t yet quite be said of *where* public goods funding comes from.

Besides experimentation with MEV rewards and transaction fees, as well as yields from running nodes, the capital formation side of the PGF equation has been pretty much overlooked.

As a result, it remains largely rooted in the logic of philanthropy.

By contrast, LottoPGF speaks to users’ intrinsic motivations (how we feel about ourselves => doing good) and our extrinsic motivations (external reward or punishment => $) at the same time. By doing so, it incentivises a broader base of participants to contribute to financing public goods.

…Which brings us onto how the project, alongside others, is bridging the gap between some of web3’s historically most polarised groups.

4. Building the Degen to Regen Pipeline, One  Money Lego at a Time

Plenty has been written (even by Vitalik and Owocki) and memed – including LottoPGF’s mintable degens x regens manifesto –  on the virtues and/or the flaws of both degens and regens within web3, and what it might look like to harness the best each has to offer for the common good of the ecosystem.

But what would it mean to actually do something with this potential?

Sensing a wellspring of untapped energy around these questions, we launched the degens x regens channel on Warpcast in February.

Since then, nearly 5k followers have joined the channel…

…And so, far from being the odd-project-out, it’s clear we’re part of a growing movement.

Through ongoing connections and conversations, as well as LottoPGF’s own experimentations with PowerBALD, we have come away with three observations on reinforcing the degen-to-regen pipeline:

1. Aligning incentives for the win: Balancing personal gain with social good serves as a schelling point for a diverse base of participants from across the web3 ecosystem. The result is a greater surface area for potential new proposals in PGF to emerge.

2. It’s community all the way down: Instead of hoping degens ‘see the light’ and convert to regens when they are down bad, web3’s meme culture and social layer brings people through to web3’s deeper cypherpunk vision through gamification.

3. Be the Public Good you want to see in the world: Raising funds for public goods is one thing, but doing it on top of open-source software opens up a vast horizon of potential use cases that span far beyond the capacity or imagination of any one team or community.

On the back of these learnings, OttoDAO was born.

5. Otto DAO: 1) What

LottoPGF ‘does what it says on the tin’. When people hear the name, they instinctively get what it’s about: A gamified cryptographic primitive that can be used out-of-the-box to raise funds for public goods while offering prizes to individuals.

The result has been projects and communities ranging from Mexico’s OnChain Lotería to Blockful.io, Jeeves and Zuzalu, starting to experiment with creative and impactful LottoPGF integrations of their own.

Which got us thinking…

…How many more dApps or protocols could we reach if we handed ownership of this project over to the community?

As a team, we are committed to helping scale the use of LottoPGF integrations. With the first iteration of smart contracts in the public domain, our next goal is to fund the development of the protocol in its fullest vision.

And this is where you come in, fren.

Together with our next wave of contributors, we want to actively steward initiatives composed with LottoPGF’s tooling towards projects that serve the greater good.

What’s more, we’re not stopping at onchain lotteries. We’re also here to research and support the PGF mechanisms that are yet to be dreamed in.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about what the future for Public Goods Funding holds.

For these reasons, we’re inviting like-minds and kindred spirits from across the degen to regen spectrum to vibe with us in contributing to OttoDAO and permissionless Public Goods Funding.

Contributors of all kinds will get governance rights to the DAO - through the $OTTO token.

Here are just some of the ways you can get involved:

• As funders: Keep an eye out for our Juicebox funding round and support us with your contribution - available for the entire community, not only whales!

• As builders: We want your input, feedback and support building the protocol, integrations and everything around it.

• As aligned contributors: do you have a passion for the mission of supporting Ethereum aligned Public Goods through lotteries?

• As Public Goods projects, communities, and/or charities: Run pilots with us!

• As memers, ambassadors & evangelisers: Make memes, create art or any (educational) content and connections that help spread the word and grow the community!

What are your thoughts? Hang out and make your voice heard at /OttoDAO.

And finally, make your early participation onchain and official! Collect this special moment with our commemorative Otto Polaroid NFT (mint closes 1st of June).

We’re pumped to build with you! Stay lucky, and stay cypherpunk.

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