Hello, CommitPool family!
Happy New Year to all, and we hope that everyone’s December was healthy, relaxing, and enjoyable. 2020 was a rough year for most, ranging from mildly annoying to absolutely devastating, depending on one’s individual circumstances. We wish nothing but good things for each of you and for the world as a whole as we move forward into another year.
Outreach Update
Our January will be primarily outreach, as we continue our work with some really amazing folks in the space. Last month, our own Spencer gave a brief update on CommitPool for the Gitcoin Kernel community, and shared a little taste of what’s to come in the near future. Perhaps the highlight of the presentation was the incredible Andreas Antonopoulos not only attending, but distilling his take on what CommitPool offers down into a pithy sentence: “A DAO swear jar.” Four words that somehow capture the spirit of what we’re trying to accomplish! As an additional reminder, please don’t forget to follow us on our various social media: We have a Twitter account (@commitpool), as well as a Discord server if you’d like to chat. We are also in the process of experimenting a bit with setting up a CommitPool DAO, which may or may not ultimately go anywhere… but stay tuned to find out!
Development Update
Our beta version has been working better than we had hoped! There are still a few bugs to be uncovered (as is to be expected with any new technology), but we’re hammering away to produce the safest, cleanest code possible. Our front end is the target for January, and a big goal for us is making the UI/UX highly intuitive for both crypto-native users, and absolute newcomers. In a lot of ways, this has been a complete return to first principles: what is usability, and what do non-crypto-native users expect out of a product and a user experience? How can we best bridge the gap between those who are already part of the distributed web, and those who aren’t? Once our front end is good to go, we’ll be inviting a small group to participate in a more public pilot, and we couldn’t be more excited to finally get our vision out into the world.
Funding Update
CommitPool participated in the Matic hackathon on Gitcoin last month! While we didn’t win, we were incredibly happy with what we managed to pump out over such a short sprint, essentially adding in full Matic functionality over the course of the hackathon. This entailed putting data provided by Chainlink on the Matic network (we used their Mumbai testnet for our purposes), and getting our dapp fully integrated on their platform. This was a huge step, as a Layer-2 scaling solution opens a number of doors for future features. We’d also like to say congratulations to the winners—as always, we were blown away by the creativity and innovation happening in blockchain, and we’d encourage everyone to check out the winning projects. Beyond this, we are actively seeking seed funding, so please reach out if this is something you may want to discuss with the team!
Thought of the Moment
A counterpart of the idea of what constitutes a commitment (see our last newsletter): what, exactly, is failure? Say that someone commits (either credibly or not) to running 10 miles in a week. We tend to converge on a consensus around failure at the extremes—if this person runs 0 miles, everyone would agree that they failed, but if they run at least 10 miles, everyone would agree that they succeeded. But what about running 1, or 5, or 9 miles?
What’s extremely interesting about failure is the grouping that we’d expect to see when a commitment is partially met. Unlike most things that are on a spectrum, where we’d expect a gradual, fluid change in opinion as we move along the spectrum, failure is binary. It’s not the case that most people out there see 0 miles as failure, and then 5 miles as “partial failure” (what even is that?) and 9 miles as “almost total success.” Instead, individuals tend to have sharp internal cutoffs: some think that anything less than 10 miles, no matter how close to 10, is failure. Some would say that any running is a success. Some might think that getting over 5 miles (thus completing a majority of the commitment) is success, and anything less is failure. But very, very few people hold the idea that one can “partially” fail.
What do you think? Please let us know. Just as we think it’s important to have a strong grasp on how we think about a commitment, it’s equally critical for us to have a strong, reasonable definition of failure.
Thank you all—stay committed, my friends!
The CommitPool Team
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