New year new frontiers! With the completion and passing of our Nouns Esports 2024 proposal we would like to share our plan to become more sustainable and rally community engagement through the Nouns Esports Pass.

In case you missed it, we dropped a 2023 Recap video alongside the proposal that you can mint to celebrate our victories this past year and support our future!

Overview

The Nouns Esports Pass is a gamified "passport" to a community member's journey through Nouns Esports allowing them to collect badges for attending events, level up, claim rewards, and show support to their favorite teams. The core of the experience will live independently from nouns.gg and interface with it for certain features and unlockable experiences.

All of the concepts shared in this post are early ideas that we are thinking about and are subject to change.

Motivation

Nouns Esports has been a pioneer in bringing esports onchain and with the pass we want to take that a step further by shifting governance responsibility down to our community. However, it is very hard to discern which fans are most deserving of this responsibility. We hope to solve this by creating sybil resistant mechanisms in the pass that serve as a form of “proof of work” and can help curate a group of fans that have proven a high level of engagement in our organization. With an engaged group of fans and the use of onchain governance structures seen throughout the crypto industry we can create a highly aligned DAO that can push our org even further!

There are a couple other objectives we are trying to achieve with the pass:

• Give our fans a platform to interact with external onchain applications such as Warpcast and Zora

• Leverage this new platform to become more sustainable through new monetization mechanisms and partnership opportunities

An Optimistic Vision

Like Base, we share Optimism’s vision for a Superchain future and currently plan to deploy all pass related contracts to either Base or OP Mainnet. Optimism is experimenting with many projects that we believe will prove to be valuable in the future such as:

• Identity with attestations

• Interoperability with chains on the Superchain

• Retroactive Funding with RetroPGF

On launch, the pass will be build using a hybrid of on/offchain tech. As Ethereum scales and Superchain interoperability infrastructure improves we hope to push more and more of it onchain and eventually “protocolize” the platform in a way that other communities can built on top of it.

Chrome Extension

Much like a wallet is the centerpiece of ones onchain journey, the extension will be the cornerstone of a community member’s journey through Nouns Esports. The pass will live in the extension to start, and will include support for a mobile app later on.

Browser extensions are extremely powerful as they allow us to run scripts on any website even ones we don’t host. This enables us to do really cool things such as:

• Track livestream interactions and inject custom pass related badges next to their usernames

• Connect to external onchain apps such as Warpcast and Zora

• Tightly couple the extension with nouns.gg simplifying the UX on various interactions

• Send notifications to fans when matches start or big events are occurring/upcoming.

A majority of our fans are desktop native which makes them the target audience for a browser extension. Furthermore, a browser extension removes friction for users wanting to routinely access it as opposed to jumping around from site to site.

Smart Wallets

The current plan is to give each user an ERC-4337 Smart Wallet when creating their account. This wallet will also give them a platform to interact with other applications outside of Nouns Esports. Smart wallets also enable us to provide an onchain user experience that is without wallet popups and transaction fees.

The signers for this wallet will be Thirdweb Embedded Wallets which allow traditional OAuth accounts to be mapped to sharded private keys which live on the users device and behind authorization with their accounts. These “shards” can then be combined to form a complete private key that can be used to sign transactions on the smart wallet. This process ensures that the complete private key can't be lost and allows users to recreate that key on another device without the need for seed phrases.

Another approach we are looking at using is Passkeys signers, which leverage the EIP-7212 precompile to validate onchain signatures that are compatible with the P256 curve that passkeys use. Unfortunately, browser extensions currently lack support for some Passkey features limiting us from practically using this approach. Ultimately, we want to provide the most seamless user experience for our fans and will adopt these new innovations as they become practical.

Considerations

This approach doesn’t come without its drawbacks, and the biggest one here is that participation in the pass will be limited to extension users only. Someone with a MetaMask won’t be able to just mint the pass and start participating as the core experience would be in the extension itself. This design choice is intentional as there are many roadblocks that prevent us from building a Nouns Esports Pass like experience that is entirely onchain. The pass is going to require integration with many offchain sources like Twitch, points, the shop, etc… and mixing on/offchain features will end up muddying the user experience unless we can tightly control those features for all users.

Furthermore, scoping new user accounts to nouns.gg instead of an external source means that onboarded users won’t be able to use their newly created wallets on external apps, limiting them to only what we provide natively.

If one of our goals is to onboard new users to crypto, then separating these dynamics is very important. This doesn’t mean existing crypto users won’t be able to participate, it just means everyone has to go through the same account creation flow.

Challenges

Completing challenges is the most significant way for a user to receive points and XP. A challenge can be anything from “mint a certain NFT on Zora'' to “watch a stream for at least 15 minutes.” Because challenges can be based on both on/offchain interactions, it makes sense to keep them offchain, at least for now.

XP

XP is the metric by which we will track sybil resistant engagement from our fans. It will serve as a form of “proof of work” to help us gauge who our most dedicated fans are. Users will earn XP by participating and engaging with things that are hard to game, like attending a contributor call.

Ranks

We will also design a ranking system which will serve purely as a UX layer on top of XP. These ranks will allow users to better track progress of key milestones which unlock certain experiences and rewards such as Prop House governance.

Points

Points are the native currency of the Nouns Esports economy. They can be purchased, awarded for completing challenges, watching streams, or other incentive mechanisms. Points will live offchain to start, but may be brought onchain later as a token. Once users start to accumulate points, they then can be used to purchase items or gated experiences from the shop.

Shop

The shop will be the first app-like experience hosted at nouns.gg/shop, and users will be able to connect their extension and purchase items using points awarded from completing challenges. There is room for plenty of experimentation with the shop and incentive mechanisms. For example, we could allow the purchasing of items using traditional payment methods and off a discount to those who purchase with points. Using a shop as a mechanism for users to claim rewards is advantageous because it gives us more control over the supply of rewards as opposed to claiming them via challenges where it is hard to predict how many people could claim such a reward. A shop could also allow us to capture value through partnerships that enable other organizations to sell items where we may take a fee.

Prop House

Another experience we plan to integrate with the pass is Prop House. Currently, we run two Prop House rounds to help esports community members raise funding. These rounds are governed by a few trusted members of our organization, but we want to take them to the next level by getting our fans involved in the voting process as part of our mission to empower our fans with the inner workings of Nouns Esports. The sybil resistant mechanisms used in the pass will let our most engaged community members have a say in the governance of these rounds.

Ideas

All of this is just to start, but we have even more ideas around experiences we can create with the pass such as:

• Changing the ways fans interact with players (e.g. NFC enabled jerseys). Allowing them to collect personalized digital collectables when they interact with their favorite players to commemorate the moment.

• Use Farcaster and the Nouns Esports channel to build a social layer on top of the pass.

• Identify changing demographics and swings in fan behavior. Focus rewards on a fans favorite players/teams.

  • i.e. Does someone watch more Counter-Strike than Dota? Focus their rewards on Counter-Strike. (Skins, team signed content, bts content.)

  • Does someone only watch Dota and only watches Gunnar stream? Focus their rewards on Gunnar and Dota (signed jerseys, meet and greet, etc)

  • Does someone make a transition from only being a CS fan to suddenly watching our Dota matches on a consistent basis? Pivot their rewards to recognize this change.

• Offer/integrate other esports teams, communities, sports teams into pass as a long term goal. Create an experience that others want access to for their fans/users.

Looking Forward

We’re excited to start this journey in building the Nouns Esports Pass and creating new ways for our fans to get involved in our org! If you have any feedback, suggestions, or just want to learn more, join our Discord server or reach out to Sam on Farcaster.

Authored By: Sam & Mach