OttoDAO contributors been in the arena trying stuff.

The stuff: LottoPGF.

The first IRL arena: ZuVillage Georgia!

In this experiment, ZuVillage leveraged LottoPGF to fund some common goods for the pop-up village. Here’s how that went down:

ZuVillage Georgia was one of the first pop-up cities to come hot on the heels of  Zuzalu in Montenegro. The purpose of these long form community gatherings is, to paraphrase creator Vitalik Buterin, to create an environment for the kind of deeper connections, learning and engagement that can happen in the slower pace of a co-living experience compared with the hectic rhythm of the global conference circuit. The aim is also to bring people together across disciplines such as cryptography, AI, privacy, network states, and numerous other rapidly advancing related fields that aim to bring humanity forward in symbiosis with technology.

Each of the city’s 6 weeks had a theme as seen on the picture above. The attendees were both ZuVillage residents (~25) and visitors (varying between 15 and 30 depending on the week).

The content, speakers and workshops were carefully curated and involved people like Vitalik, Balaji Srinivasan and Niklas Anzinger. But that was not all. Throughout the weeks there were multiple community led experiments and independently organised talks, workshops and discussions that gave the experience an inclusive “unconference” feel.

The workshops ranged from protocol and incentive design to dissecting BMIs and even showing unclassified UAP files. Spontaneous group sports activities and game nights punctuated each week’s agenda to lift the vibe. Protocol experiments, like the beta launch of Zuzalu.city, Blockful’s Trustful and Community Graphs, made the learnings and discussions more tangible and practical for the ZuVillage citizens.

Among such experiments was LottoPGF.

LottoPGF allows communities to incentivise the funding of public goods through fully onchain lotteries, using verifiable randomness and smart contracts for transparency and unmanipulability. Just as lotteries were used to fund both ancient and modern nations, one of the goals of LottoPGF is to become a tool in the network state and pop-up city funding mechanism toolbox. The experiment at ZuVillage was to gauge the interest of participants and the effectiveness of such activity.

Throughout the six weeks of ZuVillage three LottoPGF pilots took place. The first one emerged from the first workshop and was proposed as a low-stakes initial test of the tech and experience. Yesh, one of the curators of the d/acc, AI and x-risks week, proposed to run a lottery to fund that week’s afterparty at one of the LottoPGF workshops. Not only did participants provide tonnes of value in input and feedback, they also collectively decided upon the parameters for the lottery. And, despite the short running period (3 days), the results were fantastic. The party was fun and educational. In this case, the lottery was designed as a single-round experience in which if no winner was found, the prize pool would be redistributed equally to all participating tickets. Ultimately a single winner took the ~150 USD raised by correctly predicting the winning lottery number.

The second experiment was proposed and designed by two members of the community who wanted to rent a mini-van to explore the surroundings of Kakheti, the area where ZuVillage took place. Unfortunately, in this case, the desired amount couldn’t be raised and the participants were given their money back (this was only possible, because the percentage that went to the prize pool was set to 0). But there is no failure, only feedback. And we chalked learnings up to a combination of a short running period, a relatively ambitious funding goal and low community interest. In this case the lottery was set with extremely high chances of winning to ensure all places in the mini-van are given away instead of a prize pool.

But the most successful experiment was saved for last. In this iteration, the LottoPGF implementation was evolved to include a novel feature that made it very engaging for participants: players could pick a cause to fund, while sharing the same lottery prize pool (thus increasing the overall incentive to participate).

The game consisted of:
- a daily prize draw with a low ticket price (0.0005 ETH ≈ 1.25 USD)
- 1 in 210 odds of winning
- a prize:funding pool ratio of 30/70
- the last day of the event the prize pool would be distributed equally amongst all last round participating tickets.

The causes that people funded were a pool to pay for ZuVillage’s rescued kitty Zuzi G, hackathon prizes (which was won by popup.capital, who also integrated LottoPGF!) and a delicious Georgian community dinner. Zuzi G’s fund quickly reached its goal, which can be attributed to cuteness bias (just look at her below OMG!). In the end no winner was found in any of the 20 draws, which meant that all the participants of the last round won a share of the prize pool!

All in all, the LottoPGF experiment at ZuVillage Georgia far surpassed everyone’s expectations with more than 700 USD crowdfunded for multiple causes in only 3 weeks. If experiments at this scale work already, we can only dream of how much can be funded at a long-term runnig, larger scale network state / pop-up city lottery. Some of the biggest learnings for other upcoming LottoPGF deployers is to understand very well the needs of the community as well as being realistic with timing and funding goals. Like everything, making people aware and educating them about the purpose of the game is also very important. A great way to do that is by involving the community in the decision making and game design.

So, after all the excitement of Georgia, what’s next for LottoPGF? As mentioned before, the zuzalu.city platform underwent beta testing during the event. Having some contributors from both projects in-situ allowed for a quick test integration of LottoPGF in which people could access the lottery’s frontend and see stats directly on zuzalu.city.

The next milestone in the zuzalu.city integration roadmap is to enable all event organisers to easily configure and deploy their own fundraising lottery from the same interface. But LottoPGF won’t be used only by pop-up cities and networks states. During ZuVillage multiple people from different fields ranging from Space exploration to DeSci were interested in deploying a lottery to raise funds for their causes. We really look forward to seeing those experiments taking place in the near future!

Stay tuned.