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Bethany Crystal
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This is the first of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.
Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized
It started with a single Tweet. On April 16, 2021, Denis Nazarov mused aloud on Twitter about a product for collective bidding on NFT auctions. He named it PartyBid. This seed of an idea inspired a builder, Anish Agnihotri, who announced just four days later (also on Twitter) that he’d built an MVP over the weekend. Less than two weeks from that initial Tweet, even more good news rolled in: PartyBid deployed (and won) their first auction.
Spurred by this upstart momentum – Denis chimed back in again, this time with a proposal on his own platform, Mirror, about how a continuation of the project could play out in the form of a DAO. In that initial post, Denis laid out some early thoughts on how the economics of the $PARTY crowdfund could play out, and some of the opportunities in the long term. That was it. The rest was left up to the people, the token holders, and the DAO to decide.
Just over three months later, on August 4, 2021, PartyBid v1 was live. And things moved quickly. As the team noted in this blog post from August 2021, “in its first 48 hours live, PartyBid processed over 1200 ETH in volume and earned over 60 ETH.” By the end of August, over 2600 ETH had been contributed to Parties. With Ether valued at around $3,100 at the time, that meant that the equivalent of over $8 Million flowed through the platform in less than one month.
While PartyDAO is a fully decentralized organization by many definitions (read: there’s no CEO or central authority, the DAO votes on treasury decisions and product changes, and there is no central legal entity), it’s not a complete anarchy, either.
Despite a Discord of 2,600+ people, Danny Aranda, one of the core contributors, estimated that about 150 people are actively engaged in their ecosystem today (which includes builders, founders, and engineers). Those contributors can still earn $PARTY for doing work and include a lot of part-time contributors for specific projects. If you want to join and contribute today, the process is really quite simple: Join the Discord, start doing tasks, get paid to do part-time work, and ultimately, potentially join their small core team of full-time workers.
In addition to the initial attention spike that brought a lot of talented contributors their way, PartyDAO has maintained a group of high-quality contributors through its public Notion page of how to get involved, not to mention its open Github repos. For many of the PartyDAO contributors and advocates I spoke with, it all comes down to the strength of the team and the people working on the project. As Danny said, "Good software is built by dedicated people working on it in a tightly coordinated way.”
At its inception, PartyBid had two major things going for it: An innovative idea and amplification from a trusted, crypto-native expert. In that sense, it was special from the start. Let’s not kid ourselves: Not everyone can Tweet out an idea on a Friday that leads to someone else building it by Monday. But this infectious energy of people wanting to roll up their sleeves and play in the sandbox with strangers was the precise seed needed to germinate an engaged, highly active community.
When Danny spoke with me about the early days, he shared how even his own involvement started pretty casually.
"I was a DAO member like anyone else. I started working on the project pretty organically and unpaid. Eventually there was a governance proposal that we should start paying Danny. Then there was more work, and I started getting paid full time."
I suspect a similar version of this story is true for many of the core team members named in that blog post: Get to work, then figure out how to (maybe) get paid for that work.
full-time core team: hiring decisions, high-level strategy
DAO vote (via Snapshot): treasury decisions, sprints, fundraises, product fees, token supply & economics
Viral early traction (largely driven through team)
Enticing work (that attracts builders)
Accessibility (to developers, through open documentation & public repos)
"I would encourage people to be really honest about what they are doing with their product and just stay true to that. Think very honestly about what your product needs. It should be very focused. Have your growth & community efforts be focused on that."
Danny Aranda, Core Contributor
