KIP-47? Ramp up marketing

It looks like Vitalik was hinting at the market cap issue here

I completely disagree with the idea the protocol requires back end integrations to be successful. I also don’t agree that “having speculators and no case volume” is a bad thing. People waited for Cardano smart contracts. People are waiting on Eth to scale. People are waiting on Chainlink to have staking for non-kyc corporations.

V1 exists and is functional. There doesn’t need to be case volume to justify anything. If people get burned by not getting cases (already happening anyway) it won’t matter in the end when there IS case volume.

A higher MC will do nothing but help secure the protocol and give the cooperative more resources. The concern about jurors being “burned” and not returning is irrelevant, they will come back if there is case volume.

I hope a substantial change happens soon. I support Mizu’s proposal to increase the marketing position salary if that’s what it takes. Kleros is a top 10 project and it’s shameful how many scams are above it with it being ranked 685.

Very great discussion so far on this potential proposal. What do you think @Guangmian?

Hey @Laurence thanks for bringing my attention to the latest updates to this discussion.

About the salary and budget for the marketing positions, I think the problem is often not the advertised salary but rather the discovery of suitable candidates. Very often the best candidates would come from a company’s extended network, and are often motivated by interests and motives that are not just monetary. I think as long as the salaries we are putting out there are not laughably low (which I think at this moment it’s not, though definitely not SF-style salaries yet!), it should not be a huge problem.
An economic incentive that can and often does work for the candidate discovery problem (at least in the Web2 world) is putting out a ‘referral bonus’ out there (aka a bounty), basically paying the referrer who successfully refers a candidate (who makes it past probation) a certain amount of money. Common amounts are in the range of €2000-5000 in Europe, though higher amounts can apply for more difficult hires. I think this is something we can look at, and either open it up to a trusted pool of community members, or to anyone, but use some kind of mechanism to prevent abuse (e.g. using PoH to prevent applicants from referring themselves).

On how and why to market, I think we were wise to focus initial efforts on ‘spear-fishing’ when resources were scarce. This has led to a lot of awareness, respect and interest within the circles that are ‘in the know’. This method is great for capturing product-driven DAOs and protocols, who view security and decentralisation as a number 1 priority (e.g. Reality.eth, Uniswap, Gnosis).
There are however many - if not more - projects out there that are primarily demand/community-driven; meaning if their users are not demanding improvements to decentralisation, censorship-resistance or the game-theory behind their governance model, then there is no push for those projects to adopt something like Kleros. Simply put, many crypto laypeople (and often among DAO founders as well) still need to become more ‘woke’ to the benefits of proper decentralised justice solutions like Kleros, and as customers of our customers, can in turn indirectly spur the demand for integrations with us.

I think it will be very interesting to do a proper market analysis and segmentation of our fan base (if not already done recently), and in marketing terms this would mean identifying the distinct subsets of the community, based on their homogeneity in certain attributes such as (but not limited to) age range, language, ethnicity, geographical location, gender, education level, interests, affiliation with other token projects and real-world profession.

Once the key market segments have been identified, let’s do the basic 4 P’s of marketing for each segment:

  • What Products of Kleros to pitch to them (e.g. is it just buying PNK? or getting them to push their DAOs to use Gnosis Zodiac Reality +Kleros?)
  • What Price to set (in our case this is a tricky question depending on what we are ‘selling’)
  • What is the right Place to pitch our ‘wares’ to them (e.g. a specific subreddit? a certain country? a certain language)
  • How to Promote it in a way that resonates with them

And we can have different answers to these questions for each segment, and that’s fine! The key is to be specific and targeted in our marketing.
Once we have made pilots to test the responsiveness of each segment to our marketing strategy, only then is it appropriate to pump big money and efforts into them.

About integrations, increasing the TVS (Total Value Secured) through backend integrations is important, but we should not forgot that there are many dimensions to the value of our platform, and TVS is just one them. There are also many low-hanging fruits like ‘read-only’ integrations (Curate, PoH) which are currently under-prospected and can greatly increase our reach without any additional dev work. Also to be honest, while we get a healthy number of prospects, most of them are too early stage to use us, or do not represent significant TVS to really move the figurative needle for Kleros.

Waiting for v2 is also not ideal, as it may be delayed by many factors out of our control, and may not happen in one big bang. Also, V1 already works well and the V2 migration is mostly transparent to any Arbitrable integrated in the V1 setup.

Also, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think having a huge following of PNK holders who hold the token for no rational reason other than the fact that they like us, is not a bad thing at all! It increases the extrinsic social value of our platform and as Vitalik also pointed out, PNK adoption and MC increase is essential to the security of our platform. In conversations with partners, several earlier stage projects asking us to secure their platform are surprised that our MC is lower than theirs.

Some say that crypto is mostly a faith-based asset; you are either believer, or you aren’t. And I’d belief in an asset often precedes the understanding of it. Once a person starts holding PNK, he/she then becomes part of a new market segment which we could ‘upsell’ other products/use cases to (e.g. stake to be a juror, secure the platform). The key is to get them to believe and buy in first. Long story short, I feel it’s time for us to loosen our iron grip on only ‘rational and complete’ integrations, and leave a few fingers for the ‘irrational’ side of crypto :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll pause here for now and summarise my main suggestions:

  • Get out bounties/referral bonuses for candidate referrals
  • Do a proper market segmentation analysis to guide our marketing efforts (if not already done recently)
  • Embrace easy integration-free and/or standalone use cases of Kleros
  • Embrace shilling PNK for the sake of it (reasoning above)
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Very fair point.

This is another point I haven’t mentioned but it has drove me nuts. The twitter bets involving crypto using @cobie for escrow. What an absolute joke to have a centralized escrow when Kleros escrow exists. But because there is no “influential” community member, the few people tweeting about it get overlooked. If you look at the socials involving Kleros, it’s all dead - how is this a good thing? Reddit is dead, if you search twitter for kleros there is minimal engagement (practically dead), Youtube has russians as the most active community but beyond them it’s dead.

Completely agree - in the end all this does is give the cooperative more resources which is only good. The cooperative may be used to operating lean, but they don’t need to anymore. They don’t have to justify anything. V1 existing is more than 90% of crypto projects, it’s enough to justify more resources. As I said in an earlier post people are more than willing to wait on things to come (scaling) based off other projects, it’s par for the course for crypto.

I support this and think for easy standalone use cases Pythia Bounties would be good
(also with higher PNK token bounties being paid in PNK give more incentive for people to complete bounties creating more activity)

I want to add the disclaimer that when I say ‘Embrace shilling PNK for the sake of it’, I only say so knowing that we are already putting our 100% into building the tech and math behind Kleros, so encouraging ‘irrational’ fandom towards Kleros would not be disingenuous! I don’t mean for us to become the next Shiba Inu! :rofl:

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I feel the same way but we shouldn’t have to qualify ourselves like this, it’s pretty clear the community genuinely believes in Kleros, but the low market cap and lack of community engagement goes hand in hand with the lack of use on the low hanging fruits (pythia for example)

Some may not like the comparisons, but a lot of people who invested in Chainlink in the early days did so because they saw the potential of running a node. The diehard linkies are STILL holding out for the opportunity to run a node, and look how much it allowed the Chainlink team to grow. It’s not all about marketcap, more people will in theory bring more uses to the showcase apps.

IMO a higher marketcap allows the team to hire the best employees by offering high salaries. It also makes it harder for a whale to come in and scoop up a huge amount of PNK. I understand advertising and marketing needs to be strategic with v2 release, right now I think a larger number of hodlers and jurors is even more important.

I support the suggestions made by Guangmian, and agree with the general idea that MC is, if not a priority, still important for security and integrations.

I also support the suggestion made in OP about trying to land quality podcasts/interviews that aren’t necessarily targeted to devs/integration prospects but also community.

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I think a dedicated Marketing Team should be a sub-DAO with a mandate to operate fast, without running every single decision through a vote.

Something like a “Galaxy” here (an unrelated blockchain project)

Or a “Guild”:

Source: https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1520766619814965248


I think that MORE ADOPTION is super important. It makes incentives and game theory more robust. It increases confidence. It is a flywheel, the more adoption, the more adoption.

I think that Kleros has the potential to cross the bridge to the mainstream. Not just geeky geeks but real-life use cases when the end user doesn’t even know there is blockchain on the backend.

I think that Ethereum is a civilizational building block and Kleros has a first-mover advantage to become de-facto a standard (“just use Kleros”) for subjective disputes. It is a pretty big deal!


Two ideas from top of my head

(they were presented here or there, I don’t claim ownership for them)

Escrow for global trade :money_mouth_face:

Russian gas in Rubles. China payment rails (AliPay, WeChat). INSTEX:

Its mission is to facilitate non-USD and non-SWIFT transactions with Iran to avoid breaking U.S. sanctions
Five EU nations declared in a joint statement on 29 November 2019 that they will join the INSTEX mechanism for trade with Iran.

Now we have Ethereum + Kleros + invoices as NFT + fractionalisation + real time data + (because climate change is real) tracking CO2 across the entire supply chain

This is a multi-trillion dollar idea.

Fake news / controversy / moderation on Twitter

Check this out, just posted a few thoughts in a separate thread:

That could create millions of cases every single day.

People marking as fake / controversial / out of context / other people voting / tokenomics / disputes / better sensemaking of what is real.

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It is a good time to consider this proposal during bear market time. People are looking for projects with real value like Kleros. We have the advantage to move more steps ahead of others.

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I wanna start by saying that I actually appreciate the direction Kleros has been taking to focus on integrations marketing. With v2 on the way and a suite of high-quality products, Kleros certainly has a good foundation to start more aggressive marketing strategies.

Chainlink has made a killing off of riding their “trust minimised agreements” narrative, and I strongly believe that Kleros can do something similar. My suggestion would be to have Escrow as the spearhead product for narrative building, similar to how Pricefeeds are most people’s first exposure to Chainlink.

Key Narrative Points

  • Payments Infrastructure Narrative - Even hobbyist developers and new learners would appreciate the value of being able to create products and services that can resolve payment disputes entirely on-chain. The “payments infrastructure” narrative may also help boost confidence in web2 developers transitioning to web3, as there will be a clear-cut way to implement buyer/seller protection.
  • "Start using Kleros Today"/“Ease of use” Narrative - Once small businesses, freelancers, and everyday users realise how easy it is to settle payments through Escrow UI, the dApp will become like a gateway drug into the Kleros ecosystem/community. On the developer side, the Kleros team has put together a great repo containing a bunch of Escrow contracts to fit different usecases.

But those are just my 2 cents after giving this proposal a read.

TL;DR Follow up the success of Kleros’ B2B efforts with a strong narrative push.

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A service DAO

Additional reasoning - the best people in the space can always find employment - move jobs. Cannot rely on individual person to do the job forever. Better to assume they will move at some point and run the entire thing as a DAO - without bottlenecks and single points of failure.

Let’s keep this idea alive and hopefully make it happen after V2 is released.

Monthly or quarterly AMA, community call could be proved effective.

Wednesday 18:00 UTC on the main Telegram channel: https://t.me/kleros

There is also DEV call 14:00 UTC on Jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/KlerosNewWeeklyTeamDevCall1

(sometimes I join and I’m surprised there are so many people)

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Bump: https://t.me/kleros/165169

I support increased activities in partnerships / communication / marketing / outreach / education.