Author
DeFi Dave & one of the many matts
Proposal
Grant $30k of FXS to fund building the MVP for the sticker protocol and premiere demo of it at ETHDenver 2024 or at a future event when Fraxchain is live.
Background and Motivation
the sticker protocol prints digital stickers, imbues them with value, and facilitates the swapping of stickers across the web
Stickers are frxETH-backed non-fungible digital objects that can be traded IRL and around the social web, as collectibles, memorabilia, and visual reactions. Because stickers communicate emotions and not explicitly value, the traditional mental transaction costs associated with social micropayments are eliminated and financial value piggybacks on our natural emotional reaccs.
When people receive stickers as reactions to posts or messages in chats, they can choose to keep them—perhaps this sticker is from a dear friend, or perhaps it’s from a rare early set—or burn them to receive the backing frxETH, realizing the monetary value embedded within.
As non-fungible stores of frxETH, stickers have an insane monetary premium and therefore increase the monetary premium of frxETH itself. Yield from the frxETH embedded in the sticker protocol is automatically redistributed amongst participants and stakeholders by the protocol.
Stickers are an adhesive art form, a unique medium of creativity and social expression that helps the p2p web stick together.
During the FraxBUILD Hackathon, the Sticker Protocol came in first in the Consumer Adoption category. So far, only smart contracts have been created for it. The purpose of this is to build out a full-fledged MVP with the goal of launching a first edition of the project next year on Fraxchain.
By funding this project, it will act as a way for frxETH to increase in market share from the angle of social demand rather than purely economic incentives all while using the Frax protocol as the underlying primitive.
Technical Details
What follows is a summary of the technical details outlined in this notion doc, so click through to see the full details.
The Sticker Protocol
The sticker protocol is deployed on Fraxchain because of a) L2 gas for nft transfers, naturally, and b) built-in sfrxETH staking, which ensures that the protocol’s frxETH reserve is instantly available for redemption. The sticker protocol itself receives and redistributes the aggregate yield in the following ways:
- 20% to finders, those that facilitate the printing of stickers (minting platforms, social apps)
- 10% to Adhesive, LLC, the core dev entity responsible for building the protocol
- 70% to Stick Together, an on-chain collective
Stick Together is an on-chain collective tasked with facilitating the stickers ecosystem. As the primary recipient of sticker yield, it has a vested interest in the flywheel effect (pun intended) of printing more stickers and increasing the velocity of an individual sticker. Stick Together is also the administrator of the very few parts of the protocol that are governance-integrated, namely how yield is distributed.
Stick Together will use much of its earnings to subsidize or eliminate gas costs for onboarding and transfers, based on a variety of heuristics, proof-of-personhoods, etc. The goal is to remove gas costs for the long tail of users. It could also use its revenue to retroactively incentivize platform integrations, fund grants, and more. Initially it will be a simple multisig, foundation-style, but could be expanded to include a governance token.
Individual sticker minting (‘printing’) logic is controlled by Printer implementation contracts provided by artists. The sticker protocol makes it trivial to deploy and index these contracts for a unified experience over the set of all stickers in the ecosystem while allowing artist-controlled collections.
The User-Facing PWA
A mobile-first PWA for printing, collecting, and trading stickers. Gas for onboarding, inviting, and trading is sponsored by Stick Together. Session keys and account abstraction means users sign in with anything and never need to manually approve a transaction. Fund your sticker wallet directly, by (liquidity) bridge, or with Moonpay.
The app is invite-only, and all invites include a set of pre-printed stickers, ensuring that everyone on the network has stickers to swap. Invites can be generated by Stick Together or individual users can invite a friend by printing stickers on their behalf.
The app will support inventory management, activity feeds, and a polished send/receive flow to support an IRL launch at a conference in the future.
Scope and Timeline
The scope of work consists of:
- User research and brand design
- Landing Page Design & Development
- Smart Contract Development
- Consumer PWA Development
- Quality Assurance & Testing
We estimate that an MVP will take 3-4 months to complete. Upon completion, we will showcase the product on Flywheel DeFi in a video feature explaining and demoing it to the wider community.
$30k will be paid out in FXS. $15k will be sent after the proposal passes, $10k will be sent upon release of MVP feature on Flywheel, and $5k will be sent before ETHDenver. Of the grant money, $25k will be used to fund development and $5k will be used for promotional activities at ETHDenver.
We intend to launch The Sticker Protocol on Fraxchain so if for whatever reason Fraxchain is not live by ETHDenver, we will wait for the next relevant conference to have an event promoting it.
Proposed MVP Launch Plan
In a perfect world we’d like to launch The Sticker Protocol at a conference with the following experience: attendees onboard using our mobile-optimized PWA and receive many duplicate editions of a single sticker from the genesis sticker pack. they’re then incentivized to trade between other attendees to collect the full set:
Users scan each others QR codes to open a trading interface between each other where they can swap stickers in real-time (imagine dragging and dropping a sticker at the top of your device where a wormhole catches it and teleports it to the other person — they receive it moments later and the new sticker places itself gently into their collection).
Assembling a full set of the genesis pack also grants them an event-exclusive set of stickers that will surely be a massive flex in the future. all gas will be sponsored and account-abstracted away for the world’s smoothest experience.
one of the many matts—the guy with the NFT-dispensing chip embedded into his hand—and Defi Dave (and perhaps others!) will also have some custom stickers to give away to those who meet them IRL. Furthermore, we can collaborate with relevant influencers and brands to create and distribute their stickers as well.
Team
- DeFi Dave is the Co-founder of Flywheel DeFi and Core Advocate for the Frax community. He organized the FraxBUILD hackathon and has been shepherding a number of community led-initiatives
- one of many matts is a conceptual artist, NFT OG, and applied crypto technologist. He’s maintained OpenZeppelin and helped draft and audit its ERC721. He has most recently worked as the lead engineer of PleasrDAO.
- DECO (Floguo & Sean Grindal) are a designer and developer duo with extensive experience in Web3. They most recently assisted Flywheel in our new website and brand redesign.
Proposal
- For: Grant $30k of FXS to fund Sticker Protocol MVP
- Against: Do Nothing