CommitPool empowers you to hold yourself accountable to your personal goals.
The CommitPool vision
A global community of people holding themselves accountable to achieve their personal goals, powered by a DAO-governed protocol.
Imagine people all around the world staking DAI on their personal goals to hold themselves accountable
- How many more people would be able to achieve their personal goals? (see solution section for more)
- What kinds of new communities and social interactions might emerge?
Now imagine what we could do if all those staked funds were in a single pool
- Create positive incentives by distributing rewards for succesful commitments out of stakes slashed from failed commitments (some will inevitably fail)
- Boost those rewards with yield from depositing the stakes in DeFi
- Protocol can take a cut to fund development, etc.
- Donate a portion to public goods (Gitcoin, clrfund, other charitable orgs)
- What else?
DAO governance
Curating and implementing a broad range of commitment types while ensuring that they are non-gameable and use reliable data sources is a critical job, and it must be done in a decentralized manner to preserve the protocol’s neutrality. Therefore, the fully realized CommitPool vision includes a DAO to govern the protocol.
Problem
Humans are bad at achieving the goals we set for ourselves.
We want to get in better shape, learn a new skill, or wake up earlier. Yet despite our promises to ourselves, many of us struggle to follow through on these goals because we procrastinate when it comes time to put in the necessary work.
Our own accountabilty toolset – which consists primarily of internal motivators like our sense of self-worth – is often not strong enough. We need outside help. We need external incentives.
The challenge is creating these incentives in a way that can’t be gamed. If I’m in charge of penalizing myself for not meeting my own goal, it’s extremely easy for me to cheat. Conversely, if I put somebody else in charge, I have to trust them to not cheat me.
Solution
Putting smart contracts in charge avoids both those problems. CommitPool’s protocol allows users to program their goal(s) into a contract (e.g. bike 20 miles this week), and stake DAI on this commitment. If a user doesn’t reach their goal, the protocol slashes their stake. No games, no interpretation, just cold hard credibly neutral incentive.
Direct financial incentives are very strong motivators, possibly the strongest motivator. If we can harness their power in the context of personal goals, we can help people follow through on their promises to themselves where they have fallen short before.
Commitment applications as a solution have been tested in a Web2 environment, and their success has proven the appetite for these tools. However, so far, none of the existing applications has managed to solve the trust issue, which significantly limits their effectiveness. Web3 is the right paradigm for this, and we believe that a decentralized version, one that can’t cheat its users, is the future of personal productivity.
How do we get there?
The primary constraint is the oracle problem. CommitPool commitments must have reliable data sources that cannot be gamed or unduly influenced. While there are currently few such data sources, we anticipate that as more of life moves on-chain and as oracle technology matures, the number of viable commitment types will grow substantially.
CommitPool V1
Until then, we are starting small and simple. V1 focuses on distance data from Strava, enabling people to commit to biking and/or running a X distance over the course of Y days.
This is single-player mode. Stakes are not pooled and there are no positive incentives from rewards (though we potentially could subsidize).
Our plan is to ship V1 to gain traction, start building a community, and iterate on our product and UX before investing in V2.
CommitPool V2 and beyond
V2 will introduce pooled stakes and all the awesomeness that enables, as well as the infrastructure to introduce new commitment types, governance, and stake pool management. The full monty.
Progress
We have an MVP that is live and functioning (app + contracts) on Polygon mainnet. Our dapp has integrations with Strava, Chainlink, and Torus, and can be used on web or a mobile browser.
To move beyond our MVP and ship a proper V1, we need to put time into…
- focusing on front end dev + making progress on our UI/UX
- UI/UX design and branding
- add metatransactions (via Biconomy)
The ask
CommitPool is seeking a grant in the amount of 6,500 DAI, to be used for the following purposes:
- Accelerate on-going development, as described in the previous section
- Contracting out for design help (likely Raid Guild)
- Subsidize user transactions to help bootstrap the CommitPool community
- Nominal infrastructure costs
Our team
The CommitPool team is:
- Spencer Graham: web3 product manager @ Raid Guild, DAOhaus, saveDAI, and clrfund (and newly minted MC member
). - Ken Beckers: Full-stack developer with DevOps experience at ING Group, where he helped develop a new payments scheme and API-based financial platform.
- Jeff Krantz: Full-stack developer with over 7 years of experience. Jeff has built product for DV Chain and Cove Markets, and is a graduate of Consensys Academy.
- Reuben Youngblom: Reuben is a blockchain law + policy researcher/Fellow at Stanford Law School, and the Managing Editor of the Cryptoeconomic Systems Journal from the MIT Digital Currency Initiative.
CommitPool is a founding and active member of UberHaus, and is, well, committed to a collaborative and community-first approach. We look forward to identifying ways to support commitment types relating to projects within the DAOhaus and MetaCartel communities.