OurNetwork: Issue #106

Jan 28

About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Click here to share your project with us.

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Network Coverage
Coverage on LooksRare, Rabbithole, and Gitcoin.

① LooksRare

Up until the end of 2021, OpenSea was the go-to platform for NFT trades. It started the first week of 2022 by being the platform behind over 98% of the NFT secondary market volume on Ethereum. However, this all changed once LooksRare launched on January 10th. The platform came as an answer to some of the recent frustrations the NFT community has had with OpenSea. Since its launch, LooksRare has generated over $8.75b of volume. In comparison, OpenSea generated $3b during that time.

The platform launched alongside the $LOOKS token. To attract users, 12% of its 1b token supply was airdropped to NFT traders based on OpenSea activity. Since the airdrop, 80% have been claimed. Users are also able to earn more tokens by staking them, with 50% of the supply currently staked.

Early users are awarded $LOOKS, which has incentivized wash trading thus boosting volume statistics. Looking into user counts, there have been 20k LooksRare users compared to OpenSea's user count of 400k during the same period. This protocol has potential, but will it survive the test of time despite the fierce competition?

RabbitHole is the guide to Web3 that teaches how to use decentralized apps, earning tokens along the way. It connects projects to participants for their community and helps these individuals understand how to use the protocols. RBH collects fees from protocols for connecting them with users and is paid in that project’s token to RBH’s treasury, which currently sits over $600k. Through RabbitHole Metagovernance, the community can participate in governance using the tokens held in the treasury.

So, is RabbitHole successful at increasing usage? Well, yes. Their Intro to Compound quest teaching users to supply and borrow on Compound V2 pushed daily suppliers and borrowers from just over 200 in weeks prior to ~500 on 9/30-9/31. But does this lead to sustained community growth?

The answer varies – tokens from quests are at times held by a majority long-term. Activity in the community varies from quest to quest. One with high sustained engagement was Intro to Uniswap in July where 88.6% of 500 quest redeemers held their liquidity position 3 months after the quest.

Gitcoin is a Web3 enabled funding coordination platform that supports open source projects in the Ethereum eco-system. Over the last twelve quarterly grant rounds, the platform has facilitated over $51m in funding for builders and creators in the blockchain space. While the vast majority of these funds go to the grants themselves, contributors also earn by participating in hackathons, completing bounties, or receiving tips for providing meaningful content.

Aggregating across more than 1,741,000 contributions, grant owners have received over $35m in funding, with $6.1m of that total coming from donations just in Q4 of 2021. Gitcoin's quadratic funding model incentivizes grassroots style contributions, supporting a median donation size of only $1.32.

As Gitcoin continues to support the Ethereum digital commons, we can expect to observe exponential growth in the development of distributed applications and community initiatives as indicated by the increasing number of projects focused on these areas.