KIP-47? Ramp up marketing

[mizuzu]

First of all, let me say I’m only writing this because Laurence encouraged me to do so on Telegram so please don’t lynch me, thanks. This is just my opinion and if you find it dumb or annoying please blame Laurence, not me

Anyway, a perceived lack of marketing has been a cause for concern amongst Kleros investors and supporters for quite some time already. I know Federico (along with others I’m sure) has been doing a great job of getting Kleros known outside the blockchain world, in particular in the arbitration community, but it seems like Kleros has yet to fully capture the mind of the blockchain world and that our efforts have been lackluster up until now.

Worse still, some of our inferior competitors do not hesitate to market themselves despite having no cases, no long-term plans and vision, and/or no amazing research team pushing the boundaries of social choice theory. And while it is true that we’ve secured a partnership with at least one very important (dare I say, blue chip) player, namely, Maker, I feel like newer projects don’t necessarily know about us, or if they do, they might think that we are just one amongst several dispute resolution options.

Here’s a quick recap of Kleros competitors or potential competitors (let me know if I missed one):

1. Aragon: Aragon is a platform for building and governing DAOs. It comes with a court system (Aragon court) which if what I’ve heard is true is a fork of Kleros. At any rate, their court seems to follow the same design, judging by their documentation. The idea is to use this court to resolve disputes pertaining to DAO governance, and in particular, to assess whether governance contract calls are in line with a DAO’s constitution. I see basically no difference between this and the Kleros governor and I see no reason why any project would use Aragon court for governance instead of the Kleros governor since there simply seems to be no comparative advantage to it. Quite the opposite, this would be putting one’s DAO in the hands of a court with apparently no real cases [2] and a lower market cap, making it considerably less secure.
   It is possible that Aragon would try to rebrand its court as a general purpose court but I see nothing to suggest it for now. All in all, I would not consider it to be a serious competitor but it might gain some traction through marketing to less savvy projects. Which brings me to UMA, which seems to have managed just that…

2. UMA: UMA is a project that brands itself as the optimistic oracle system. In short, they provide an oracle where, instead of price feeds being continuously updated on chain, market participants self-report the price of assets relevant to their transaction (e.g. for a liquidation event). These transactions are however subject to a challenge period (generally of a few hours?) where the provided prices can be disputed, resulting in a case being open in their Data Verification Mechanism (DVM) which is UMA’s version of a Schelling point based court albeit apparently a lot simpler than Kleros court since I see no mention of appeals in its documentation.
   UMA also offers a layer of financial instruments such as options and synthetics which use the optimistic oracle as their main building block.
   Given how targeted UMA is and the extreme simplicity of the DVM, you might ask why I am even mentioning them a s a potential competitor. Well, I found an article [1] from October which explains how a new insurance protocol named Sherlock is integrating with UMA —specifically UMA’s DVM— to decide smart contract hacking claims. So it looks like the UMA team is already thinking of diversifying outside of price feeds and related applications. Although I have no idea how worthwhile of a project Sherlock is, I feel like this partnership should come as a shock to the Kleros community given how basic the UMA’s DVM is and how much more appropriate of a choice Kleros would have been here (with appeals and a specialized technical blockchain court among other things). Perhaps Sherlock’s decision simply has to do with internal project politics and conflicts of interests, but if not this suggests a failure in Kleros’ marketing strategy.

3. Jur: As far as I can tell, Jur is trying to bring traditional arbitration to the blockchain. I don’t see them as a real competitive risk since they are likely far too centralized to the taste of most blockchain projects, will prove to be less reliable and affordable than Kleros’ incentivized wisdom of the crowds, and will find it hard to scale. They might be a more appropriate choice for certain complex cases, at least until Kleros evolves the infrastructure to solve them. As such, they should not constitute a threat to us but we might constitute a threat to them in long term (assuming they ever garner any success).

4. PAID: Vaporware/scam. Enough said.

5. (0.) In-house arbitration layers specific to each project. It is very tempting for projects to roll their own arbitration system with voting power allocated based on their own token distribution. The advantages of doing so are: A. that this adds a new utility to the project’s token, thereby increasing its value; and B. that the project is not reliant on a third party which might be perceived as unreliable or a liability, especially if the project in question is bigger (i.e. has a higher market cap) than Kleros. The disadvantages are: a. increased complexity (reinventing the wheel), although this can be partially solved with libraries; b. bias towards the project, since the jurors are tokenholders and any financial loss against the project would reflect upon their own token share; c. lack of diversity in the jury pool and greater ease of vote buying, which could more easily lead to favoritism towards a specific party with influence (be it inside or outside the system) or offering bribes. An example of a platform that has its own arbitration system is the Nexus Mutual insurance protocol, with all of the aforementioned caveats, especially a risk of bias towards the project (b.). UMA is another example but they consider arbitration to be a primary function of their protocol so that’s a little different.

So it appears to me that strong marketing will be essential to fend off these competitors. If you’ll oblige, I’ll lay out my thoughts on what our marketing goals and non-goals should be until court v2 is released:

Goals

• Let people know that Kleros exists;

• that it already is a working and proven product (although not yet perfect);

• that it’s the only on-chain dispute resolution system with complex real world cases (UMA seems to only have simple price feed “disputes”).

• Brand marketing: When any of the terms dispute resolution, arbitration, court, investor protection, or any related concepts are brought up in the context of blockchain, the first thing that should come to people’s mind is Kleros.

• Emphasize that we are the only blockchain court to have proven our worth: For high-value, high-stakes use cases, the only valid dispute resolution system anyone should consider using is Kleros. The only area in which other dispute resolution systems will have any chance of competing with us is fees (because Kleros has and will surely maintain the best track-record of unbiased decision making in the space) and so the only context where another dispute resolution system might ever be considered competitive is low-value cases. And even then, it would be wise to allow appeals to go through Kleros.

Non-Goals

• Pumping the price of PNK.

• Getting Kleros onto an exchange. I actually agree that this probably isn’t useful other than to pump the price in the short term.

• Getting projects to integrate Kleros into their DAOs or smart contracts as soon as possible.

Regarding this last point, there is a general feeling among many Kleros investors or would-be investors that the cooperative is waiting for the release of Kleros v2 to start marketing. If true, I believe this could very well be a major strategic blunder. As I’ve already mentioned, our competitors will not hesitate to market themselves despite not having a proven product and not having anything that comes close to Kleros v2 in the works.

What if they manage to build momentum before us and then simply copy-paste the court v2 code when it’s released? There is currently no reason to choose a competitor over us except lack of awareness so this hypothetical situation is avoidable, and it will be easier and safer to take a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach. As a bonus, if it so happens that some projects see a use in integrating Kleros before the V2 release, we get some new customers early and avoid losing them to the competition.

So what can we do?

Well, I’m certainly not qualified to make recommendations since I have zero experience in business or marketing, but I’ll give it a try anyhow:

• If we could get into popular and especially higher quality podcasts like Bankless, that in itself could be a huge boost to our reputation. We’ve got some really interesting stories to tell too, like our case history and our forays into real-life justice, so surely it can’t be that difficult to convince some podcast hosts to do an episode with us.

• I see that the cooperative has two job offers for marketing positions on angel.co [3]. I don’t know how long they have been up for, but if the cooperative can’t find anyone, isn’t it likely that the offers are underpriced? The offers certainly look extremely low to me at 50k-80k for a communications manager and 24k-40k for an outstanding(!) crypto communicator. These are listed as full-time jobs too. I feel like we should be aiming for people with extensive connections within the space, and I can’t imagine that will be cheap. Surely a few hundred thousand dollars (or even half a million if necessary) for a year is a small price to pay to ensure we don’t get front-run by copycats and lose a huge chunk of our future market share. I also think the types of connections a potential candidate might have are important to consider. In particular, connections with younger projects (e.g. Abracadabra) and incubators are likely to be more beneficial since the old guard of DAOs probably already know about us, but I’m just thinking out loud here.

If there is support for it, I can write a KIP officially asking the Kleros cooperative to ramp up marketing and put it to a vote on snapshot to measure stakeholder sentiment and get some form of official community approval. To make things a little more concrete, I could propose that the cooperative is encouraged to use up to 500k USD for its marketing budget for a year starting immediately.

Thanks for reading.

[1] Sherlock x UMA is Live — A Fairer Claims Process | by SHERLOCK | Oct, 2021 | Medium
[2] Aragon Court Dashboard
[3] https://angel.co/company/kleros/jobs

EDIT: s/Lex/Jur; haven’t looked into LexDAO yet.

[Rip]

I completely agree there needs to be a marketing campaign. You can have an amazing product (kleros) and if no one knows about it, it’s useless. I’ve suspected they were waiting for v2 to ramp up marketing but I agree with the sentiment that it’s a strategic mistake.
Even though v2 isn’t out yet, there should be a narrative to excite people for it’s launch. If it does correct gas fees and people know about it then things will fall into place.

NFT’s are nothing but branding and they have massive appeal. Curation could become a killer dapp if the branding is strong enough. Pythia could really take off and Kleros could become a trusted fact checker with minimal bias thanks to decentralization.

However, if no one knows about it then it won’t take off. We need to get Kleros to the point of the virtuous cycle of more disputes drawing more jurors. Then overtime with adoption the courts will secure themselves and become stronger with more users.

[Laurence]

Fair and objective suggestions! I support you. We should consider some more marketing movement. For example, promoting Linguo & Pythia on xDAI when gas fees are high on mainnet; adding some marketing-task-oriented bounties in all kinds of Bounty platforms and Hackathon events…and so on. Storytelling is still running but it seems kinda forgotten by community. One more competitor is Celeste (a fork from Aragon Court).

[YAR]

Totally agree, there’s definitely a need to grow the Kleros community. currently, most of the discussion is being made by the existed community and feels like “Kleros community” itself hasn’t really grown that much for the past year (e.g. Telegram/Discord user counts etc.). Projects like PoH does seem to have some significant growth and brining in some new community members recently (congrats!!) , but it always looks like there is a gap between PoH/Kleros, and most of the newly gained members either don’t know the existence of Kleros at all or only treat Kleros like a side-project for PoH.

A competent marketing/education team is clearly needed to bring more awareness to Kleros.

[clesaege]

Hi Mizuzu,

Thanks for participating in governance.

First on the technicality or the proposal, the cooperative is not controlled by the DAO (it’s controlled by its members and you can be one if you are a juror see https://kleros.io/coop/ ). It’s a grant recipient from the DAO, so the DAO cannot explicitly mandate the cooperative to act or spend in a specific way, it can give grants or condition grants depending of some work being done (the difference is subtle but important from a legal perspective). So the proposal would need to be rewritten in this perspective. Note that it’s also possible for the DAO to give grants to other entities (could be a marketing DAO).

Now, on the marketing side, I understand that from the outside it may seem that there hasn’t been much marketing. This is due to the fact that due to limited human resources, marketing has been channeled where it the most needed: Toward projects to integrate.
This kind of marketing is not that visible as it’s generally “spear fishing” (targeted toward specific projects/individuals) rather than “net fishing” (just getting Kleros to be known by a large audience hoping for a few members of that audience to be relevent). This includes giving talks to conferences, talking to projects which could integrate, writing integration proposals, participating in crypto closed circle groups, etc.
This is because Kleros is a 2 sided market place (jurors and dapps having cases) and that the juror side which benefits the most from general marketing (net fishing) has been shown to be the “easy” side (i.e. the bottleneck is getting dapps to integrate, not getting jurors to solve cases as there are already plenty of them).
I think we’ve been quite efficient in this area, this is evidenced by the fact that we got tons of integrations while other projects have their courts mainly used by themselves.

Now, there is still a value to “net fishing” kind of marketing and for that we’d need more communication workers. The offer also includes some PNK so adding those, the manager one is more 75k-120k. But I agree that it doesn’t show on the offer so we’ll update it to make it look more attractive.
If you have more ideas on how to get talents working for the coop we could also discuss those.

[mizuzu]

Hi Clément,

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I am well aware that the cooperative is not controlled by PNK votes. That’s why I used the language “encourage” in my original post. The idea here is not to impose an action on the part of the cooperative (since that’s not even possible) but to let it know that the community is supportive of increasing the marketing budget and would not consider it a waste of its precious treasury —assuming people vote in favor that is.

To get back to marketing, it’s nice to know that the cooperative is making the necessary efforts to find partners to integrate with, but to expand on your analogy, with spearfishing you can only capture fish which are within your field of view, but the Ether sea is vast, and some of the fish are yet too small or hidden too deep to be seen from above the surface. Yet the younger, smaller fish are perhaps those who could benefit the most from Kleros integration.

You mention yourself that you have limited human resources to dedicate to marketing, and that is not surprising considering that the blockchain space is so large and rapidly expanding that we would need an ever-growing crew of spearfishers and fishscouts to have any chance of capturing all potential customers. So I’m going to say it again, spearfishing is a good tactic and I’m happy the cooperative is using it, but only focusing on that aspect still feels to me like a strategic mistake. The world at large needs to know about us, not just the few projects the cooperative manages to pick out.

And I totally agree with your remark that recruiting jurors is not the hard part and not what we should be focusing on. This does not mean however that we should not be getting our name out there (brand recognition!) to capture the minds and hearts of the blockchain world.

I’d also be curious to know what happened with Sherlock and their decision to integrate with UMA. If I had to guess, I would not be surprised if you’ve never heard of them before, and maybe this is a case of UMA spearfishing Sherlock themselves. In any case, this is why brand recognition is important: when UMA came to the Sherlock devs with their proposal, the first thing the Sherlock devs should have thought is: but wait, isn’t that what Kleros does? By focusing only on the spearfishing aspect, I feel like we are making ourselves very vulnerable to competitors. Of course, if you have an alternative explanation for the Sherlock story, I’d be happy to hear it.

I’m glad to hear you are updating the job offers, but I wonder if they’re not still priced too low. Looking at this page [1], it appears that many projects are offering salaries up to and over 150k$ for business development positions, with one offering 200k-250k$. I’m sure you did a great job of finding competent software developers around the world at low prices compared to Silicon Valley prices, but I’m unconvinced that the same can be done for marketing. Based on the report from April [2], Kleros should still have over 20M USD’s worth of assets in its treasury, so would slapping an extra 100k onto the marketing position really be noticeable in the long run? I understand that Kleros is a developer-first project (which is one of the reasons I love it) and you’ve got that aspect clearly well figured out, but marketing (or lack thereof) could be what makes or breaks us in terms of our success. It doesn’t even have to be sustained for long; it’s an expense which could be limited to one or two years until we gain traction. You asked me for ideas to get talents working for the cooperative and yes I do: higher pay.

[1] Blockchain Business Development Salaries
[2] Kleros Community Update - April 2021

EDIT: oops, forgot [links]

[Rip]

I don’t agree that getting integrations are necessarily the bottleneck for kleros adoption. Curation could sustain itself if the branding for Kleros was strong enough.
If it wasn’t so convoluted to access Pythia on xDai, I believe it would really take off if the branding was strong enough.

If the reputation is good enough people would be willing to use a browser add on just to see what kleros jurors thought of tweets. Yes further integrations and improvements could be done for curation, but as of now it won’t go anywhere if nobody knows about it. In a perfect world there would be zero friction to use curate, and it would be directly integrated in stuff.

I actually love the idea of using a marketing DAO to do this, and we could even use escrow to determine whether they get paid. Imagine if they don’t deliver any results and it turned into a dispute. That would get people talking, and then people may become more interested in using things like the escrow dapp.

One integration id really like to see is kleros as a data provider for chainlink for subjective oracles. Chainlink can be used to aggregate any subjective oracles and kleros will be one of the best data providers imo. I only bring this up as they were interested in subjective oracles in the hackathon and Kleros has the best subjective oracles.

[FedericoAst]

Thanks for this well researched and thoughtful post.

There’s a lot to unpack here. I was going to write a more comprehensive post but it was taking too long. I prefer to write something shorter and answer follow up questions.

To add to what Clément already wrote, let me clarify a bit more the framework we use to define our strategy.

As Kleros is a B2B platform (its “customers” are other protocols) our marketing is oriented at other protocols. Kleros is an “arbitration marketplace” which connects a demand side and a supply side for arbitration services.

Demand side: users that have cases to solve (typically Web3 platforms that want to “delegate” resolution).

Supply side: users who have the skills to resolve the cases.

As Clément mentioned, the hard side of this market place is the demand side. It’s harder to find partner platforms that want to delegate cases to Kleros than jurors to resolve those cases (jurors will come if there’s money to be earned in adjudication).

The main problem, as you already know, are gas fees which price out most low value disputes (the kind of cases that can give Kleros a sustained high volume use and create a community of engaged jurors)

In the post, it’s suggested that, because of lack of marketing, many platforms don’t know Kleros, which causes lack of integrations and thus lack of cases.

But this doesn’t accurately describe our integrations funnel. On the contrary: we get many contacts with integration requests.

The problem is that, as we move forward in the conversations, we find that the cost of Kleros is typically too high. So the conversation ends with a situation like this: “Let’s speak again when V2 is launched”.

An aggressive marketing campaign on the supply side of the marketplace (i.e., targeted at jurors) while we don’t have enough cases, is likely to lead to a dynamic like the following:

• User buys PNK.

• User stakes PNK to get drawn as juror.

• User gets frustrated for not being drawn.

• User sells token and complains:“Kleros has no users”.

This is why at the current stage, it makes more sense to target the demand side i.e. Web3 platforms. We actually do lots of B2B marketing targeted at these users:

• We participate in every Web3 conference giving talks, etc.

• We organized a Kleros conference in English and Spanish.

• We give other generic talks, podcasts, etc.

• Write articles which were published both on our blog and many other prestigious outlets.

• We host the Kleros Fellowship.

• In the past few months we put together a comprehensive knowledge base.

Other activities from last year connected to marketing/business development/ecosystem development include the launch of Proof of Humanity, the launch of the incubator and developing more use cases.

It’s also worth noting that having too many requests for integrations before Kleros 2.0 also leads to conversations that end in “let’s speak again when V2 is launched”.

Some areas where I believe there’s room for improvement:

• Have more community involvement for pushing integrations. I believe this could be done with some community bounty program for “protocol politicians”. This means having Kleros “ambassadors” representing our interests in different potential partner protocols.

• Have more coverage of Kleros in other languages, especially in the Asian region.

• Stronger product development in some showcase Dapps (Tokens and Linguo although this also is affected by gas costs). We’re actively looking for product managers here.

There’s more that could be said, but I’ll stop here now for not delaying this answer.

I think that some of the recurrent “lack of marketing” comment is probably the result of us as a team (and me as president of the Cooperative) not having communicated our strategy clearly enough to the community. I’ll prepare a presentation about this for a future community call.

I also encourage you guys to apply to our many open positions and help us grow Kleros!

[Rip]

I think this is where I myself may have had a completely different understanding of the plans. I’m not sure about the rest of the community, but I wanted marketing for the “showcase apps”. I don’t think these products have to run in the backend of integrations to see adoption. Yes it is extremely cumbersome to load up xDai and the Pythia list and start a dispute. A direct twitter integration with curate in the backend would be far superior, no doubt.

I’m pretty confused by this because it sounds like the Kleros products on the website are nothing more than proof of concepts to show customers. My thoughts were the point of marketing would be to get people to use the showcase apps and get excited for V2 where gas fees will be fixed etc.

I had always thought the demand would be from using curate, escrow, etc through the kleros front end. People are willing to use opensea for NFT front ends, why wouldn’t they be willing to use the Kleros front end? If the cumbersome version can be adopted of course people would use the frictionless version.

This goes back to my original point of branding. NFT’s are nothing but branding. Building a reputation and brand with the masses may cause them to say things like “did kleros verify this?” and so on. Of course its not a sure thing. I don’t think marketing to the masses is targeting bringing in more jurors, to me you’re trying to bring in people to create disputes on something like Pythia.

Appreciate the response Federico, definitely gives the community more insight.

[mizuzu]

Thanks for your reply, Federico. It’s certainly good to hear that there are many lower value use cases and potential customers waiting for v2. But I’ll echo @Rip’s reply and state for the record that I still think “building a reputation and brand” is very important. There’s certainly a risk that a strong marketing campaign could create a bubble as you describe (even if it is not targeted at potential jurors) but this is a phenomenon all crypto projects face and is no reason not to advertise: we are not responsible for irresponsible investors’ bad decisions, and if that can make you feel better, we could even explicitly warn against joining as jurors too early as part of our marketing content.

[Drunkbot]

Regarding your point on creating community involvement via a bounty for protocol politicians, this is exactly something that I had thought about myself in order to foster more engagement, and allow for outreach to protocols that may have gone under the Team’s radar. This is in line with the Team’s B2B marketing initiative.

I personally had in mind an expansion to the Kleros Guild of Justice…

There are Heralds and Envoys which are hand picked by the Team, however I was thinking of expanding the Guild of Justice to include a third rank called Justiciar (Justiciar - Wikipedia) as part of an integration bounty campaign. The title of Justiciar would be handed out by the Team to a member of the Kleros community whose Kleros pitch results in the successful integration with another project.

In order to foster interest, there needs to be an exclusive reward. The rewards would be $1000 in DAI (the community would have to agree on this) as well as an exclusive NFT minted by the Coopérative. Since an icosahedron has 20 faces, only 20 Justiciar NFTs will ever be minted. The NFT itself should be something that is easily distinguishable, and that can be used as a profile picture. I was personally thinking about a pixelized Great helm (Great helm - Wikipedia) since it would be very easy for a commissioned artist to come up with 20 variants, though once again this is something that the community can discuss. If (when) Kleros really takes off as a protocol, these NFTs will be worth a lot of money should a Justiciar decide to put it up for sale. As community lead integrations are put in place (and Justiciar NFTs are awarded), the pressure towards pitching integrations in order to be awarded a Justiciar NFT will increase.

Additional thoughts and suggestions are welcome, just brainstorming here.

[SR87]

@mizuzu I just wanted to come out and say I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis. The team’s replies are sensible but in my opinion they are overthinking the risks and underestimating the benefits of getting people talking about Kleros.

I want you to know you’ve got my full support and if I can put the weight of my (non-negligible) Kleros holdings behind a forthcoming proposal, I will!

EDIT: post aimed at mizuzu

[mizuzu]

So I sent a DM to Sherlock’s protocol designer earlier asking why he chose UMA over Kleros and got a response. Turns out his main concern with Kleros was… the market cap. UMA has ten times our market cap so is in a sense ten times as secure. And there’s not much I can say to argue that point honestly. I explained that buying up half the supply would require spending a lot more than half the market cap due to our low liquidity, and that an attacker would have to sell their PNK at an almost 100% loss since no one would want to buy PNK after such an attack. Still, on a 300 million dollar insurance case, and especially if jurors could be made to panic sell, this could still be very profitable at our current market cap. I see two ways to remedy this (which are not mutually exclusive):

1. increase the market cap: this can be done through general marketing and hype and might even be sustainable if done well.
2. have waiting periods when staking and unstaking: one thing that could help address the concerns from our twitter conversation is if tokens staked after or not long before a case is created were not eligible to vote in that case. There could be a 1 week wait for instance. So if I staked 100M PNK on January 1st and case 69420 starts on January 6th I would never be selected as juror in that case, even for an appeal starting in March. I must admit I haven’t thought about how this could work data structure wise and it would certainly increase gas usage. But might be realistic on a rollup.
   EDIT: having a waiting period for unstaking could limit an attacker’s ability to induce panic selling, especially if that period were a function of some moving average of tokens unstaked.

He also basically asked me what sets Kleros apart from UMA. So I gave a quick rundown of appeals and specialized courts and how that would be beneficial in the context of smart contract insurance. But the fact that I had to explain this myself is perhaps a sign that we could improve our communication efforts. For instance, I see no mention of appeals or specialized courts on the kleros.io website. And sure there are links to the white paper, the yellow paper, and so on, but… I’m talking about marketing here. How about some more details on the “integrations” page for instance? It just has a “get in touch for integrations support” button basically, but it doesn’t sell me on why I would want to get in touch in the first place. EDIT: Okay, it does actually, to some extent, but if we’re going to have UMA as a competitor, I think we need to shill appeals and specialized courts. <ranting>What I’m trying to say is please just pay the price for a head of marketing (hint: probably more than 100k). I know I’m being a nuisance, but I really have Kleros’ best interests at heart.</ranting>

Also, I wanted to go ahead and see if I could create the proposal on snapshot but I noticed that creating a proposal on the Kleros snapshot requires being an approved author. Not great for decentralization. Can we think about changing that? And in the meantime, can someone with the rights do it for me?

[Rip]

This may come as a surprise to you and I should’ve mentioned it earlier, I don’t necessarily support giving the marketing position a higher salary. I don’t think throwing money at a marketing person would solve this dilemma.

I would like to see a more grassroots approach where something like Pythia has significant bounties to dispute false tweets successfully. There will be controversial cases that will get people talking which will cause excitement etc.

Hiring someone with connections would be a benefit for sure but I’m not sure if throwing more money at the position will do much. It’s all up in the air really. In the end though, I’d like to see the showcase dapps getting more attention to create disputes. I’m 100% on board with the fact that running these dapps in the backend will be better for adoption. So whatever gets that side more attention I’m for.

[FedericoAst]

Hi guys, thanks for all this extremely valuable input and sorry for my very slow response time. I’m 100% on the idea that we want more of a grassroots approach to marketing. Even more, I believe the internal marketing and communications team primary goal should be to coordinate that grassroots approach.

So this doesn’t stay in a theoretical discussion, let me ask what you think are, say, 5 concrete and actionable proposals that you would like to see implemented by the team.

And also, if this is your interest, how you see yourselves getting involved in helping with the implementation of such proposals.

I’d prefer people who are already involved and passionate about Kleros to participate in this execution. Feel free to write here or also contact me in private.

[rtLookerMax]

Ethereum gas fees are high. The project should consider moving to Avalanche. (the safest staking consensus that I know of). That would solve the high gas fee issue that keeps web3 protocols from integrating Kleros.

[Rip]

1. hire a marketing dao using kleros escrow
2. bounties for pythia.
3. buy an abandoned prison and remodel it for all the new inmates that will be found guilty in the court
4. cex listings to help with the market cap problem mizu mentioned
5. funding for a kleros court tv show that reenacts controversial cases with high production values (the point of this is to build brand awareness)

[Laurence]

Bounties for pythia are really needed.

[mizuzu]

This is a great marketing opportunity (assuming the bot works :D) and even as little as a 5$ reward per accepted submission might be enough to encourage people to participate! Can we get something like this going? @FedericoAst ?

[mizuzu]

Why was Pythia restricted to cryptocurrency influencers by the way? I guess one reason I can think of is that if a controversial case arises regarding some highly politicized subject, with the relatively small amount of PNK staked on Gnosis Chain, things could get kinda goofy and that might end up not being a good look for Kleros.