[DAO:1b176b5] Support DCL Reporters and Improve Content Quality

Governance
1

by 0xd2d950cea649feef4d6111c18adbd9a37b3a9f63 (Report)

Should the following Tier 5: up to $120,000 USD, 6 months vesting (1 month cliff) grant in the Content Creator category be approved?

Abstract

Since January 2021 The Decentraland Report has been a platform for community members to join as reporters and preserve the history of the metaverse. We have established our rewards system automation, and approved a 10% royalty return from The DCL Report to DCL DAO. Now, by increasing the content quality and introductory ecosystem value tutorial content, we bring about a greater sense of community understanding of everyone’s work across the entire Decentraland ecosystem.

Our surveys show high user satisfaction, retention, and an active creative economy. We offer valuable opportunities which allow members to receive both crypto and fiat rewards and hope to extend our support to reach a point of self sustainability.

Grant size

120,000 USD

Beneficiary address

0xe8C599568Fb76884C1100278A0430011067707Ec

Email address

kevinonearth999@gmail.com

Description

The Decentraland Report team has been preserving the history of the metaverse since January 2021, bringing Decentraland to the attention of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. As seen on Major News Networks such as CBS, NBC, Cointelegraph, and more, The DCL Report has grown by developing meaningful experiences around easily discovering and joining Decentraland. However, many creators/developers/designers have yet to discover ways to start exploring the Metaverse.

To prepare for a growing community, our team completed development of an automated rewards system which delivers our $REPORT tokens and NFTs via a smart contract. This initiative was accomplished with the help of community sponsors and the Decentraland DAO to solve problems in security, user retention and scalability.

For example, the increasing size of the community would be limited by the amount of prizes a person could manually send. By successfully automating this, we now are able to keep our $REPORT token distribution fair, transparent, and gives our DAO the potential to remain a platform for the community members to tell their story as they build and participate in the metaverse. Rather than request $240k at once to build this as well as optimize our quality systems, we broke this up into segmented efforts.

This is our 3rd revision of this particular grant proposal as in the first 2 versions we seeked to do “Quality” and “Reach” efforts at once. After hearing community feedback, we will break this down into 2 efforts, where currently quality is going to be the only focus. We will be led by none other than Pink Bambii (Imen Maaroufi, of Pink & Shades) who’s focus will be managing our team, meetings, personnel changes, documents for transparency, content planning, etc. Previously this was taken on by KevinOnEarth, but to offer diverse leadership and new ideas PinkBambii honorably takes on this role after nomination from the DCL Reporters.

Our decentralized news network is a reputable and cost effective method to generate content about Decentraland. In addition, it gives community members an open platform they can participate in at various levels. Whether as a reporter, or viewers using their $REPORT tokens to reserve coverage and amplify their voice in the metaverse.

Our goal is not to depend on DAO funding to sustain The Decentraland Report. We have budgeted this grant funding to elevate the overall content quality to help the ecosystem and reach a community size where we can maintain our monthly operational costs (i.e. developers, designers, video editors, community managers, social media/marketing director).

Specification

To address sustainability a SaaS business model has been established. Through a strategic partnership with Xpand.GG, The DCL Report retains 90% of revenue from donations and recurring subscriptions on our community page. Through our Xpand powered Community Page, we can automatically divide revenues across our team as well as our royalty payment to the DCL DAO. We will also pursue long term sponsor partnerships which can allow for more sustainable capital infusions to maintain operations.

With essential infrastructure to support our growth in place, we envision attracting like minded creators who will be positive contributing members of the Decentraland ecosystem.

The style of our content will aim to attract individuals within the following demographic:
Ages 20 - 40
Individuals Interested/Active in Web3 & Metaverse
University/Higher Education Student & Faculty
Backgrounds in Computer Science, Design, Music, and Art

We will focus on posting content within relevant contexts and social channels (i.e. Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, IRL events).

While content is hosted on each Reporters individual channels, content is also now hosted across DCL Report social and content channels. The budget allocation below is a framework for spending which will allow us to optimize content, ultimately reach our goals in content quality and community size which would enable us to acquire sponsors that could offer sustainable capital for operations.

Weekly Reporter Generated Micro-Content for Social Channels for 6 months ($4k/reporter, 6 Total Reporters): $24,000

Lead Video Editor (7 Individual Report Videos, and 1 highlight Video/week): $24,000

Program Manager: $24,000

Reporter Equipment (Camera, Lighting, Microphone; $2,000/reporter): $12,000

Cross Channel Content Manager: $16,000

IRL Event Presence and Attendance Budget (4 events attended): $10,000

Chief Newsletter Editor: $6,000

6 Months of “MetaMoments Wearables” Giveaways: $4,000

TOTAL: $120,000

Funds managed via a Multi Signature Wallet via Gnosis-Safe.io; 3 wallet owners, 2 managed by KevinOnEarth and 1 by CEO of Xpand Alek. This is done to prevent hacking and transparent tracking of fund use and disbursement.

We are a Decentralized News Network that will always be owned by the decentralized community! By watching and joining our community they will earn rewards, learn how to navigate the metaverse effectively, and use the $REPORT tokens acquired to have their projects covered in the news when they decide to release work themselves.

In addition we will also reinitiate our MetaMoment Wearables monthly drops. The cost breakdown for this is $300-$500 to the wearable creator depending on quality or complexity, like, top. Then ~$200 for the publishing, and then the Reporter who captures the picture that is voted the MetaMoment of the month, that we create the wearable after, is given $250 as a prize. Another incentive for Reporters to capture good stuff during their stream to get that prize.

We will also execute a strategy around event attendance and an IRL presence through speaking engagements, which will bolster networking opportunities to connect with individuals inside the web3 space, but also individuals outside of Decentraland seeking to discover web3 possibilities in the “real-world”.

The events which we are targeting include: DCentralMiami, ETH San Francisco, Consensus, International Conference on Internet of Things Based on Blockchain (ICIOTBB), Blockchain Africa Conference.

Personnel

Operations
Founder - KevinOnEarth999 (www.ImagineOnEarth.com)
Program Manager - PinkBambii (https://pinkandshades.com/)
Graphic Designer/3D modeler - Sango of the East
CGI and Animations - Cinetica.Studios
Lead Video Editor - Nadim
Content Manager - Stefan
Chief Newsletter Editor - Lena

Reporters
KevinOnEarth NFTuesdays - Tuesdays from 11PM UTC to Wednesday 12AM UTC & Thursdays from 11PM UTC to Friday 12AM Twitch

MetaTrekkers - Wednesdays from 1AM UTC to 2AM UTC

FriskyBumbleBee - Wednesdays from 11PM UTC to Thursday Twitch

Moustafa - Thursdays from 4PM UTC to 5PM UTC

Fabinho - Fridays from 11PM UTC to Saturday 12AM UTC

Ina_DCL - Saturdays from 6PM UTC to 7PM UTC

Reporters get rewarded as of now in a few ways:

  • 1 of 100 wearable Report #13
  • 1 of 1 Wearable Report #26
  • Even revenue share of Xpand donations
  • $REPORT tokens weekly
  • Retain all of their own channel revenues, and sponsor fees.

Roadmap and milestones

To see our progress to date you can take a look at our Gitbook: The Decentraland Report - The Decentraland Report | A P2E News

We conducted various surveys and analysis across our platform. While the web3 community sentiment has certainly shifted with the current market conditions, our audience has continued to stay engaged.

Using Qualtrics to measure Net Promoter Score of 66, which is held as an Excellent Net Promoter Score. Here are some of the responses as to WHY people scored this way and why we believe it is time that we spread the word about The Decentraland Report:

“It is the soul of decentraland. It serves to start and be informed of everything that happens”

The following is a summarized deliverables for our key objectives over the coming 6 months:

Renew Visual Assets and Increase DCL Report Quality
Attend Conferences
Upgrade Reporter Equipment
Reports 7 days a week, covering 4 languages
1 DCL Report Public Town Hall Twitter Space a week

Key Metrics which we will track and report each month during the 6 month campaign to measure effectiveness and progress:

Productivity
Number of Videos Published
Number of Views

Traction
Monthly growth rate of followers across channels
Monthly growth rate of members on Community Page

Sustainability
Number of Sponsors Acquired (6-12 month partnerships)
Number of Subscribers on Community Page

Vote on this proposal on the Decentraland DAO

View this proposal on Snapshot

1 Like
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@KevinOnEarth I want to thank you for the level of detail this has. I also really appreciate the new mutli-sig wallet for transparency of the funds. This seems to be very thorough in how you took the time to put everything out there!

With this proposal by you and by @tangpoko’s current on-going grant proposal, I am starting to see a clear improvement to these grant proposals on how they are written for the DAO. With this being said. I don’t know if I have any questions at this time. And I appreciate you both being the new standard of how these DAO proposals should be written.

3 Likes
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“Rewards Features Development (6 Months, 3 Developers + Security Audit): $65,000”
“DCL Report News Station “From Scratch” Renovation: $18,500”
“Wearables for Monthly MetaMoment and Giveaway Prizes: $6,500”
“I don’t like to get into specific pricings because often, the people I’m doing deals with are giving me a much lower rate than they would usually charge”

There have been some unanswered questions from the previous DCL Report grant that were not answered last week.
The above quotes are from Kevin’s replies in the previous DCL grant forum discussion, he claims that $65,000 was spent was spent on a smart contract that airdrops NFTs, out of curiosity we got a quote from an Ethereum developer to see how much this would cost and was quoted way less than $10k for these features to be custom built. What were the rest of the $55k spent on? Why did the DCL Report over pay by such a big amount for this feature, especially when Kevin claimed that the people he is doing deals with are giving him a much lower rate…?

On top of this, $18,500 was spent on a 3D blender build for the DCL Reports headquarters in DCL… a build that could be done for a fraction of the cost also. $6,500 was quoted on being spent on monthly wearable giveaways by the DCL Report, which has produced a very small amount of engagement on most of their videos. Over $120k of DCL DAO grant money has been spent by the DCL Report, which is a significant amount of funds and does not justify the very low engagement numbers that they get on their content after months of building.

Some more interesting info that the blockchain data reveals is Kevin On Earth’s NFT purchases in his other wallets, some of the bigger purchases were made after the previous $120k grant. Since multiple of the funds that were claimed to be used for the DCL Report don’t add up, it’s worth looking into where the funds came from to purchase a CloneX for 6.1 eth, a Jetpack for 2 eth, and a FLUF for 2.3 eth. Adding up to over 10 Eth in NFT purchases in July-August-September 2022. Blockchain data in the following links:

all held in a DCL Report admin wallet as seen in the following link:
https://snapshot.org/#/thedclreport.eth/about

I do not think the DCL DAO / community should continue funding a project that has shown to mishandle previous DCL grants. We present the above information that $120k worth of DCL grants used by the DCL Report have either been spent by overpaying on various projects or might have been used for other questionable transactions. Regardless of where/how these funds were used, after months of building and +$120k worth of grants spent, the DCL report does not show any significant engagement/views on majority of their content. DCL does need news reporting teams, but I think that funds would be better used by other teams that can show results.

1 Like
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Thank you for your comment here,

Glad to clarify anything that you may have felt was unanswered, but if you had someone quote you for way less than $10k, than I’m sorry, you are not working with very good developers, your contract would not be security audited, the UI would be scary and your user experience would be horrendous. With that said, everyone seems very happy, and we spent exactly as much as anticipated so we were happy with the outcome.

For our DCL Report HQ, we had a great team behind it for a number of months, and the cost to build test and iterate over 6 months everything we have done, is no small cost. With that said, you said we have low engagement for the funds we received, but note, the funds we used were specifically to build our rewards contract, in which we have been very successful.

I’ve been collecting Crypto and NFTs since 2017, and have never cashed out anything until just as I saw the market crashing, in this last 2 years I worked with a number of sponsors such as MetaKey who worked with me for nearly a year, and I saved every single penny putting it all back into project I love and believe in.

Feel free to look into how I’ve found a lot of success working creatively as a CEO of a Tech company, as well as a content creator that has been sponsored by multiple brands, and had some success dropping my own NFT, the OnEarth Badge.

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If the community found those rewards valuable, then it would show in the engagement/views it brings in. Instead the community is being forwarded to another platform outside of DCL (xpand), a platform with very low users, which reflects why there has not been any significant growth in the past year.

I wish the DCL Report success in growing their metaverse/DCL news platform, but I do not think it deserves another big grant. They have been funded multiple times in the past, at some point it is up to the projects to continue growing and monetizing themselves.

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Granted the size of our community is not massive yet, but the quality is amazing.

Xpand is not a social media network, its a high powered tool for managing community rewards and content. It’s like a super discord for content creators. So are you saying DCL communities/projects shouldn’t have discord?

If you look at the facts, The DCL Report is focused on a very niche part of the market, and given the bear market I don’t think it’s valid to gauge DCL Report’s impact and value to the community based on the metrics you are providing. With that said, we are all entitled to our own opinion.

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Thank you!! It honestly is important for us all to hear what the DAO community says and look beyond the frustrations we might feel when thoughts don’t align.

Appreciate your feedback in the last proposal @tudamoon, it helped alot in getting this 3rd revision right <3

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They can have discord, but they shouldn’t be using DCL DAO funds to build out discord… also, discord has over 100 million users already on the platform, while xpand only has a few 1000 accounts. Easier to communicate with people on a platform that is already being used by millions vs spending DCL DAO funds to build out and onboard people to a new platform (xpand) that is barely getting traction.

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Hey - If you need a platform I still own Into The Meta News and we are publishing there. Happy to give you a section/area on that site. We have a dev team running the back end of things already. We are in Google News, etc. I used to run the newsroom at many orgs, and I was an editor at USA Today, other places, and I have owned several media companies. Maybe we can help or we can collab on some things where you lack seed funding. I remember seeing a website in another version of this. We also have a super server (can handle lots of traffic) and a team for managing that. Happy to help if I can! Media orgs are super pricey to run correctly and grow, totally understand. Are you getting press passes? We are contacted for event coverage pretty frequently. Not sure if this would make sense but feel free to DM me.

2 Likes
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This means so much to me thank you!!

I know the DCL Report team and I would all be so grateful for your help and guidance! Our official website right now is https://www.TheDecentralandReport.com and we have our community page The DCL Report | Xpand Gaming but with this we will also be starting our news letter so it would be awesome to include that content on The Meta News!!! <3

We have gotten approved for a few Press Passes which is good, so ultimately just covering costs for our reporters to travel and lodge.

I’ll DM you and thank you again!

1 Like
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Hello Kevin Hope you are well ^.^

Nicely written proposal I must say. Thank you for taking the time.

In my opinion DCL report should wait about 3-4 months before submitting another grant proposal due to the fact that there was a 120k grant approved back in March, I feel like its too soon and have not had the time to gather any metrics on how the development of report token on Xpand has helped the Decentraland platform as a whole.

In the time in between DCL Report can:
*Refine the team. ( assign duties that will best fit each individual on the Report team)
*Detach from Xpand Having any part in this grant.
*Gather metrics that would be important for a unanimous vote
*reconnect with the community

When I look at the DCL Report, I see a whole team in the reporters alone. So many smart, talented and capable individuals. At the current state of the project you can easily run with a team of 7 ( 6 reporters and Kevin) There is no need for the extra positions. I am wondering how the Duties of a Program Manager Differ From a Cross Channel Content Managers duties? Just feels like to many cooks in the kitchen. I think you can easily delegate the extra positions duties to your team of Reporters.

Here is a Budget that i would be willing to vote yes on in 3-4 months:

Reporters: (1k a month to each reporter) 6k x 12 months = 72k
Kevin (project lead / Manger) : 30k
Equipment: 12k
Giveaways / Miscellaneous: 6k
Total: 120k (to fund DCL Report for one year)

I know some would disagree with me on this budget , but I personally think DCL Report is important for the growth of Decentraland.

4 Likes
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Hey there, and thank you!

We went through all the feedback from the previous grant and found at the core the following:

Feedback Resolve
Grant Size too Large 50% Budget Reduction
A $240k grant would put DCL Report at $360k in funding in 1 year Reduced to $240k
Investing in Advertising is a Money Pit which has unsubstantiated ROI Removed Advertising Strategy + Budget
DAO Grants are for creating, we should invest all funds on building 100% focus on content creation and enhancing quality of deliverables
Funds for Reporter Equipment too high 50% Budget Reduction
Reporters need to get larger share Maintained Budget (increases the percentage allocation) for reporters

I appreciate your notes but now it seems like after covering what was mentioned in the previous grant the goal post is being moved further back.

“I feel like its too soon and have not had the time to gather any metrics on how the development of report token on Xpand has helped the Decentraland platform as a whole.”

Partnered across 12 different DCL communities where their NFT holders earn bonus tokens for holding one of their NFTS (more incentive to invest in DCL based creators)
We have successfully distributed Hundreds if not over a thousand NFTs efficiently.
Idk how people handle it on your channel, but for us, people don’t drop ETH address in chats or twitter posts anymore and are less exposed to hacks as a result.
DCL Community members can vote for who they want reporting content in their own Decentralized News Network.

Those are only a few ways, hope this helps clarify but having to clarify these things only emphasizes that you need to take time to better understand what we have built. I get that as a content creator you are busy of course, but one of these days you can jump into a stream as see for yourself.

Sinful each one of these people on this team deserve to be here and it’s sad to see another DCL creator really impose themselves this way. PinkBambii as our Program Manager is the role I had which is very tedious, managing weekly teem meetings, story strategies, and sponsor collabs. Our Channel Content Manager is Stefan to gets the content handed off from our video editor.

Sinful, I graduated with a degree in Jazz Composition and Film Scoring arranging for 18 piece orchestras, I currently run a Tech Company for Digital Health. I understand how to mobilize a community towards a common vision and achieve a meaningful goal.

I appreciate your feedback, however I strongly disagree with your approach which is why it’s a good thing there is more than one group trying to solve these problems around content, history, and community in Decentraland.

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What do you mean? There is 0 risk in dropping a public eth address, there is no way for a hacker to use that to access a wallet…
However, there is a risk of connecting an eth address to a new smart contract

1 Like
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Not true, by dropping your eth address in twitter for rewards you are getting your address scraped by bots who send out malicious NFTs then get someone to accept a large txn which makes them have to accept token approval allowing hacker to drain their wallet.

Everytime you to drop you eth address in twitter for instance you are exposing yourself.

Honestly with all do respect, maybe I can ask you, how many years have you been in crypto really?
Not knowing about this and thinking that there is 0 risk in dropping a public eth address just shows you probably have not run, built, or managed a web3 project or community.

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I have been in crypto since the bitcoin days, before Ethereum was a thing, with some knowledge on solidity eth dev also… I don’t see how that is relevant to this though?

True, there are a lot of malicious NFTs that get airdropped, but sharing your public Ethereum address on twitter or other places does not increase your risk of those types of NFTs being sent to your wallet. They can gather a list of Ethereum addresses simply from looking at the holders list of an NFT project and use that to airdrop malicious NFTs to… and even if they are airdropped to someone’s wallet, that still does not expose them to a hack, those show up in peoples hidden folder on Opensea and a person would need to approve permissions for that malicious NFT also.

Having a public Ethereum address is common practice and it is false that it increases the risk of someone getting hacked. However, connecting your wallet or singing to approve permissions to a new contract does increase someone’s risk to getting hacked. Who did you say your Xpand smart contracts were audited by?

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You clearly don’t understand how these predators target people, or do you? An anonymous dev is not that convincing to me…

Who audited our contract? None other than: https://twitter.com/nachomazzara?s=21&t=IyHrP6x64EZNYmpjfu2A1w

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Have there been security updates made to the NFT airdrop smart contract that DCL Report uses? The security audit reported multiple high and critical problems found in the contract that was submitted. Can’t seem to find an updated security audit that addressed the problems that were reported in your smart contract.

Make a new eth wallet if you want to test it, dont share the new eth address on any public posts (twitter, etc) and buy a popular NFT on it. They will pull your eth address from the holders list and airdrop you malicious NFTs. Sharing a public ETH address does not increase/decrease your risk of getting those types of NFTs airdropped to you.

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With my delegated vp I’m voting no for the same reasons I’ve voted no all along, $240,000 is still too much money for one group to receive within this short time span. With my own vp I’m voting no because your demeanor when interacting with those who oppose your point of view could be more professional.

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Canessa if $240k was too much for one group, why would there be a $240k grant option?

We broke down our goals as a team into stages once for technology infrastructure and now for us to focus on content quality.

By you choosing to vote no, you are voting no against the DCL community having the right to accessing coverage through their own decentralized news network.

It’s clear after 3 proposals, and adjusting each time to satisfy your feedback that ultimately some people just do not want to see DCL have a decentralized news network. On top of that clearly you dev a personal issue with me.

The reality is that you have a conflict of interest here even voting, as well as @SinfulMeatStick , so I can understand why “centralized” streamers would feel threatened by a decentralized solution.

At this point, I come to terms that SOME PEOPLE JUST WANT TO SEE US FAIL, but I remember that I have given you both plenty of chances to see and understand the value of what we are doing here. At this point, I realize it’s a wasted effort because. :pray:

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Can you explain to me what makes you a “decentralized” Streamer and Sinful a “centralized” Streamer?

I’m not a streamer but personally I just don’t see the added value. DCL Report is your creation. So all reporters work for the name of your brand, don’t they?

With your brand, it should also be possible for you to attract investors and sponsors outside of DCL and to hold events on your land.

IMO voting NO for this Grant doesn’t mean to vote NO against the DCL Community having the right to accessing coverage through their own “decentralized” news network.

Thank you what you have done in the past and i wish you all the best for the future.

3 Likes