Hey CommitPool family, the team is excited to share our 2nd weekly update with you!
Before we get into the meat of the update, we were remiss last week to not provide an overview of CommitPool itself! So, a little belatedly…
What is CommitPool?
CommitPool helps people meet their personal goals by holding themselves accountable. CommitPool users stake money to credibly commit to meeting their goals, and lose their stake when they don’t.
While our MVP focuses on a single goal type for individuals (cycling distance per week), we envision the protocol supporting a number of personal goal types and enabling positive goal-completion incentives via a pooled commitment model.
A common question asks why this needs a blockchain or web3. The honest answer is that it’s not strictly necessary; in fact, a few web2 companies do exist (see Beeminder, Stickk, and Pact). However, those products leave a lot to be desired. First, to maintain their users’ trust, the companies are forced to allow extremely lax commitment enforcement policies, which undermines their effectiveness at delivering their core value prop of helping users meet their goals! Personally, I use Beeminder for exercising, and, frankly, I cheat and get away with it a lot.
Second, since trust constraints force them to make it so easy for users to cheat, these companies are not able to support a pooled commitment model where penalties are routed to succeeders as positive incentives. Furthermore, even if they did, the revenues they’d eek out from their cut of those penalties may not cover their operational expenses. This is exactly what happened to Pact, who shut down a few years ago, owing their users $1 million in rewards.
By contrast, a well-implemented web3 approach would avoid the user trust issue, actually be able to enforce user commitments, support a pooled model with rewards, and operate more cheaply, not to mention access to a universe of incentive mechanisms and business models made uniquely possible by smart contracts.
This Past Week
First off, we added a new team member—we’re excited to welcome Alysia Huggins on-board!
Our primary focus was on exploring the design space for integration between our activity data source—Strava—and our oracle service—Chainlink. We came away with three options each optimizing for different combinations of frictionless UX, protecting user data, and decentralization.
We also received and analyzed results from our initial user survey, which was designed to help us select the goal type to support in our MVP. While a couple goal types would likely be viable, biking appears to be the best choice.
Lastly, we made initial strides towards our smart contract architectural design and our mobile app.
Next Week (Week 3)
In the upcoming week, our focus will be on:
Deciding on an initial (MVP) architecture for Strava and Chainlink integration
Completing 4-6 user interviews, including testing our Figma prototype
Having a working version of our prototype in a mobile app
Completing an initial draft of the CommitPool contract (slight dependency on #1)
Asks
Continued input on our initial architectural decisions and how we’re navigating the UX // privacy // decentralization trade-off space.
Consultation on potential sustainability and economic viability. While our primary focus now is on building something that works and that people want to use, we are striving to make decisions in the short run in the context of a longer term perspective. We have some thoughts, but any guidance here will be immensely valuable.
Thank you!
Spencer and the CommitPool team