TLDR: We are running a novel governance style game with $300 Base USDC on the line, starting Jan 6, 2025. Each new active player who joins before the 6th grows the pot by $5. Join now! https://discord.gg/x5BQB6FPA4

Also try Realms, its free!

The Run up

At Realms, we have been experimenting with autonomous self governance in Discord through our series of Echelon Ascent Games. Realms provides the framework and tools, and we apply them to build interesting pro-social games with real money on the line.

Each game, we drop random people into a Discord channel and let them figure out how to exploit the Realms reputation system. Over the course of 5 days, they try to earn as much reputation as they can, in the form of “coins”. This is earned by chatting, and giving or receiving 👍 on messages. The directive is simple: earn more coins than your peers.

Leadership

In our final five games, we’ve added a leadership role: a single person from each game is elected as leader of the realm. We give players a choice to become a leader or remain a citizen, and then open up a unique style of voting on the potential leaders, called a combat vote. It’s a coin weighted vote, so that players with the most coins have the most influence, but coins can be lost if votes are not unanimous, for instance the vote is split between two or more leaders. Any coins that “disagree” are lost, and if any remain, that option is the winner of the vote. This introduces a bit of risk, but also an incentive to deliberate before committing to a vote.

We’ve held 5 games, each with leaders being elected. They now lead their own realm to in the Echelon Ascent Games Discord server. Each realm consists of an announcement channel, a voting channel, and a public chat channel. Leaders are able to create votes, manage aspects of the realm, and most importantly join the senate.

The Senate

Before the senate, we incentivized people to play our games through direct prize money to participants. While this worked great to get initial interest and activity, our goal at Realms is to build a tool to allow communities to achieve complex goals in a gamified way. The senate is a step towards this, rather than paying prize money directly to players, we are building up several independent realms with their own interests and leaders, and put them in the “senate” to fight for funding from the senate treasury. Leaders will need to agree on how to spend the money, and then hold votes to execute distribution, which then gets sent to their realm treasury for further distribution.

Governance

Up to this point, Realms has not had any formal governance process. We will be introducing one when the senate opens. This process should be familiar to those who understand how a DAO operates. People have voting power, they can then propose votes, votes will decide how funds are distributed.

In the diagram above, moving from left to right, we have our leaders, who deliberate in Discord. At any point any one of them can propose a vote to send senate treasury funds to a realm, this vote lasts 24 hours, and is executed if a majority of coins vote to pass it. The funds are sent to the leaders realm, where the same process occurs, but only for the citizens of that realm. Rinse and repeat until all the funds are distributed.

Game on

In typical Realms fashion, we have not introduced any top down directives, other than to work the system to your benefit, earning as much influence as you can to direct funds where you see fit. We have $300 Base USDC in the senate treasury ripe for the picking. What makes our governance system unique is the how voting power is earned (peer to peer) and used for votes (combat voting).

Leaders have a lot of work ahead of them, they will need to earn reputation once again in the senate, and battle over funding with combat votes in the new governance system.

Citizens are not left out either, as there is nearly 3 weeks to continue earning coins in each realm, which is ultimately where the decision is made to release funds to individual players. The more coins one holds in each realm, the higher the potential payout.

If you have no idea what's going on, or never played an EAG, that's ok! Join our Discord and start earning coins in the realms, we will add $5 USDC to the senate treasury for each new active player!

Senate opens Monday, January 6th 2025, with a prize pool of $300 Base USDC. Each new active player in any of the 5 realms will add an additional $5 to the senate treasury.

Join now! https://discord.gg/x5BQB6FPA4

Also try Realms, its free!

It’s been a while since we’ve done a proper Echelon Ascent Game and we finally have a new one coming. This is going to be quite a bit different than previous games, so let’s talk about it.

We built our game on top of Realms, if you aren’t familiar with either, we suggest you check out Introducing Realms and the first Echelon Ascent Game Announcement.

TLDR: We have some new and interesting gameplay planned for the next EAG starting November 4th. Fight for the treasury, earn USDC. Don’t know what the heck is going on? No problem! Join our server now! Also, install Realms, its free!

The Realms Mission

Our biggest prize pool to date was a 430$ USDC prize pool with 43 players. This was a wild game that generated more activity than all our previous games combined. Players were dropped in a Discord chatroom and told to maximize coin earnings through a peer to peer reputation building algorithm. At the end of the game we distributed the prize pool proportionally based on coin holdings.

The games have been very successful in showing that the incentives of Realms work, and if properly motivated, people will align activity with coins, and coins work well in quantifying relative contribution and activity level during the game.

This has been a stepping stone. The mission at Realms is to create a community experience with an automated pipeline: new people come in on one end and organized teams (realms) come out the other. We aren’t quite there yet, but by addressing some of the major issues we have noticed, we will get one step closer to our vision.

Problems

We have seen several issues with the EAG:

1. People feel like there’s not enough direction which leads to meme spam.
2. Conversation is shallow, and deeper conversations are not incentivized.
3. Once the game is over, there’s no next stage, and people disengage.
4. You can only play the game so many times before it gets stale.

We are acutely aware of these issues and will be experimenting with solutions. This next game will introduce a treasury system which replaces the notion of a prize pool. This treasury will be accessible to players of the EAG.

Introducing the Treasury

1. We have a treasury and will add 50$ USDC to it for every game that runs. Players will be competing for a piece of this. The treasury will grow with each new game.
2. Every game, at least 10 players join our Discord and play a 5 day long game, with elements very similar to the existing EAG.
3. We introduce a new role called the “leader”. The final 2 days of the game is used to nominate a single leader from the ranks.
4. We introduce a new realm called the “Senate”, which leaders gain entry into. Their job there is to come to consensus on how the treasury is to be spent.
5. Once there are at least 5 realms (but not limited to 5) each with a leader, we will have a total treasury of 250$ USDC, at which point the funds unlock and spending can begin.
6. Leaders eventually take these funds back to their home realm, where the citizens will decide how to spend it.

Ok, that’s a lot to take in. Maybe a diagram will help.

Here we see money flowing in from the top into the Senate treasury. Leaders from multiple realms go into the Senate realm to compete through combat votes for shares of this treasury which gets awarded back to the realm treasury once successfully claimed.

Discussion

So how does this address the current issues we have with the EAG?

1. People feel like there’s not enough direction which leads to meme spam.

Previously there was no mission during the game other than to earn the most coins and receive the biggest proportion of the prize, which was a pretty short term goal. Now players gain coins to nominate a leader, who would be the best advocate for getting a share of the treasury. These coins will be used for voting on how to spend the funds in the treasury, giving players a farther reaching reason to earn coins and a more complex path to earning payouts.

2. Deeper, more meaningful conversations are not incentivized during the game.

In past games, coins are earned for contributing to discussion, but without something to discuss, it devolves to meme spam. Now coins are going to be used more for consensus on leadership and treasury distribution, this should theoretically lead to deeper and more cerebral conversation during the game, while still keeping open and strategic game play.

3. Once the game is over, there’s no next stage, and people disengage.

In the past, games end, prizes get paid out and players sit in the community waiting for the next game. Now the activity continues on in the Senate, where realm leaders must wage “war” through combat votes to get control of the Senate treasury. Each new realm increases the treasury by 50$ USDC. We hope that once we have at least 5 diverse realms, the Senate becomes another longer term strategic game.

4. You can only play the game so many times before it gets stale.

The EAG is a bit of a one trick pony, it’s interesting at first because it’s unique, but the novelty wears off quickly. We have been cycling people through different variations of this game, and now we want to use it more as an onboarding “bootcamp” for new players to understand how to use Realms (the app), form teams and nominate leaders. This way the game becomes less about the EAG, and more about the fight for funding from the senate, while giving players the opportunity to cycle back through the EAG if they feel they can lead a new realm.

Conclusion

There is a lot more we could go into detail on, but we’ve given the broad strokes for the next game. We hope that with these changes we will come one step closer to an automated pipeline to take raw people in and produce organized working groups which form the beginnings of treasury governance.

It’s a lot to take in, and probably difficult to really understand, so join our server to see how it all works. We will be running our first game with this new system starting November 4th. Join our server now and sign up!

Also, install Realms, its free!

https://makerealms.com

Its been about a week since we completed the third season of our experimental Echelon Ascent Game using Realms, which was even more exciting than the first and second!

We ran the game for 5 days, from Monday Sept 23rd through Saturday Sept 28th. The challenge had us put strangers into a Discord channel to earn the most overall coins. While it sounds simple, Realms creates incentives to both cooperate and compete simultaneously. We had a progressive prize pool where each new participant grew the pot $10, and after extending the entry 24 hours, we wound up with 43 players and $430 USDC on the line!

In this season, we had many returning players, including the reigning champ, PVM, along with many new faces. Our rules were very similar to last time, though notable inclusions this round are the larger coin-weighted USDC prize pool, and a few tweaks to the currency inflation system. A quick recap of how to play the game:

1. The goal is to earn the most coins by the game end, this game ran for 5 days.
2. Players can react to content in the channel by reacting with a 👍(mints 1 coin), 😂(mints 2 coins) or 🤣 (mints 3 coins). This earns both giver and receiver half of the coins minted. Previous games only used 👍.
3. Players can generate content that others can like.
4. Players can claim a free coin and 12 likes to give every 24 hours.
5. Players should understand the coin inflation system in order to maximize earnings.

Final Scores
By the end of the competition players generated 3981 new coins, compared to 1311 from the previous season! The final distribution for the top 20 players:

If you have been following previous games, PVM had been on a winning streak and we never thought he would lose.

This game we see a new challenger appear, taking the top spot with a staggering 629.5 coins earned — Infinity! We also had strong showings from Legend, and Chris, two veterans of the games. There were many new faces on the leaderboard, including Ksmertz, caspermoeller, Omka, LiviuC, Ryan, Deraaa and many more.

Keeping it Simple

So how did Infinity dethrone PVM? The strategy was quite simple but brilliant. There are important times in the game:

1. Every 24 hours the faucet is reset, where new “likes to give” can be claimed by players.
2. Inflation was running on an hourly cadence, which means everyone earns a “like to give” every hour.

Infinity realized this and timed his activity to the schedule, being active at times when people had the most likes to give away, that's some serious dedication!

So Much Activity

With almost 50 active players in this season, we saw more messages generated in the first day of this game (probably in the first hour) than all the messages for all games combined. Unfortunately we did not have stats running on the first day (23rd), but you can see activity in the server throughout the game, peaking at nearly 1600 messages and staying quite high until the end of the game on the 28th.

Of course having such a high prize pool probably helped motivate players, but there was no top down direction and players were left to their own devices to rise up the leaderboard.

How's the Spam?

Having so much activity in the server means that people were just spamming stuff, right? Well yes and no. The system incentivizes community contributions which can lead to spam in the form of funny gifs and memes. On the flip side, there’s also community evaluation, which means not all messages earn coins, which can affect ones enthusiasm to spam. While there was a good bit of high quality contributions, the level of memery, ultimately felt too high.

Liking gives positive feedback, but without the ability to “dislike” things, there's no way to moderate content which is getting tiresome. We will be working on a solution to this in the next game!

Feedback Loop

EAG is a beta test, and we shamelessly used our players to give us feedback on the game and on Realms in general. We did this through coin weighed votes, facilitated by Realms, and a Google survey. We have been getting really great feedback, which led to changes in the game and new features in Realms:

• We experimented with multiple emojis and denominations for likes, which we ultimately ended up not liking.
• We began working on a “dislike” feature, to burn coins instead of mint them, as an answer to spam.
• We added several new features to inflation, including “auto-reacting”, where the bot seeds new messages with the proper “like” reactions, so the users don’t have to.
• We prevented minting coins for reacting (or removing reactions) to posts older than 24 hours.
• We have started thinking about how to add more direction to the game
• Above all it seems we need to get more people to try Realms!

Conclusion

This was our biggest game yet, and we ended up paying 43 players a total of 430$ USDC on Coinbase’s Base network. Since then we have been running activities, games and learning sessions for the community while we prepare the next game.

Join the EAG community and be ready to play the next game!

Also, install Realms, its free!

https://makerealms.com

Today we are announcing the third game in the Echelon Ascent Games series: Beta Season 2!

Previously we had an Alpha 1 and Beta 1 season, which both had some interesting and surprising results. We highly recommend reading the previous wrap-ups (first game, second game) which cover the types of strategies that players discovered, as well as how to play optimally.

If you aren’t familiar with EAG, its played in Discord to see who can earn the most coins using Realms, a community reputation tool. See here for a deeper dive into the game mechanics.

In the previous game, we gave away 130 ACX, worth about 40$ at the time. This game we will increasing this to $500 USDC on Base. Seats are limited to 50 people so make sure to join our server and register as soon as possible!

Details
- Sign up through our Discord server.
- Up to 500$ USDC prize pot given away on BASE: we will add $10 USDC to build the pot for every player that joins!
- 50 player limit.
- Free to play!
- Game starts Monday Sept 23rd 1 PM UTC ( 9 AM EST )
- Game ends Saturday Sept 28th 1 PM UTC (9 AM EST), 5 full days.
- All players receive a share of the pot based on their final coin holdings.
- Goal is to accumulate as many coins as you can!

Referrals
We will be running a referral program which will earn you voting power in our community realm. For every new player that you refer, you both earn 10 CROWNE toward EAG community governance. This community realm also enables members to take influence on the game development at EAG. Just let us know who you invited, or who invited you when you join. CROWNEs will not give any advantages in the upcoming Echelon Ascent Games.

Join now!

We have just concluded the second season of our experimental Echelon Ascent Game using Realms, which was even more exciting than the first.

We ran the game for 7 days with 13 players. The challenge had us put strangers into a Discord channel to earn the most overall coins. While it sounds simple, Realms creates incentives to both cooperate and compete simultaneously. This time we put 130 ACX (~39 USD) in a prize pool for the top three players, in order to increase the stakes.

In this season, we had many returning players, including the reigning champ, PVM, and a few new faces. Our rules were very similar to last time, though notable inclusions this round are an ACX prize pool, and a few tweaks to the inflation system to make “likes” a bit more scarce. A quick recap of how to play the game:

1. The goal is to earn the most coins by the game end, this game ran for 7 days.
2. Players can react to content in the channel by issuing a 👍 reaction on messages. This earns both giver and receiver half a coin.
3. Players can generate content that others can like.
4. Players can claim a free coin and 12 likes to give every 24 hours.
5. Players should understand the coin inflation system in order to maximize earnings.

Final Scores
By the end of the competition players generated 1311 new coins, with a final distribution:

As we can see here, PVM smashed the competition once again, and the top 3 players earned rewards which includes senselessceo and Chris.

The final days were a nail biter between senselessceo and Chris, with senselessceo taking the lead by one coin in the final hours of the game.

PVM was never in danger of losing first, but the rest of the positions seemed up for grabs. Its hard to see from the chart, but the second place finisher senselessceo missed nearly two full days to start, and was able to just beat out Chris for second in the final days of the game.

Optimal Play
What was the winning strategy in the end? It’s difficult to say, but we know that at the very least players needed to contribute to the chat. The most natural way to do this is to post funny memes and reactions. All players in the end used this strategy, but with some to better affect than others.

Optimal play required a few things:

1. Claim the free coins from the faucet every day.
2. Participate in votes where admins minted coins to voters.
3. Most importantly, always give your likes away to make room to earn more likes, and therefore more coins.

Its clear that PVM understood how to play both competitively and optimally, and was well liked amongst many players:

Senselessceo had a dramatic rise into second over Chris. Chris, who like PVM, is a well liked and high scoring veteran of the first game, seemed to be secure in second place. Senseless on the other hand started 2 days late, and had no friends in the game. How is it possible senselessceo could go from dead last to second in just a few days?

Rich vs Poor
Our previous EAG had some interesting strategies emerge, including preloading 👍 on posts and “shatnering”, a style of breaking up single line messages into multi-line message to make more real estate for emoji reactions, among other strategies. It was not until this game that we see adversarial behavior between the leaders and the laggers. We predicted that it is more optimal to “like” the laggers, rather than the leaders, in order to even the field and improve ones chances of winning. We thought perhaps players individually might grasp this, but we didn’t think players would organize explicitly to reach this outcome.

On day 3 the top coin holders, you can see the top three players beginning to separate from the pack:

Then this message was sent, to bemused reactions:

Clearly the intention here was to reduce the rate of coin earnings for the top players and distribute them to the bottom through a team dynamic. While it didn’t necessarily end up working out that way, it was a solid strategy, which put senselessceo into the spotlight to give them a boost in coin earnings and generated a lot of controversy in the game channel!

Backroom Deals
We had confirmation once the game ended, that senselessceo communicated outside of the public game channel, in private, to create alliances to earn more coins and prevent the top players from solidifying their lead. Between this and the public takeover, it gave the boost needed to rocket them into third, earning as much as 50 coins in a single day, which was second only to PVM’s best day of 54.5 coins!

Some might consider these dirty tactics, but this is exactly the type of activity we hoped would emerge in a competitive game, and it ultimately worked for senselessceo, with some players willing to cooperate and collude.

Unliking
EAG is really known for being somewhat frenetic about reacting to posts with a 👍 in the game channel. This is called “liking”, and nearly every time someone reacts with this, a coin is minted. Senselessceo discovered a little known feature in Realms: you can remove likes from people, on the condition that you gave one first. Removing a like has the effect of burning a half coin from both parties, undoing the original coin mint when you gave the like.

While it seems innocuous, this discovery allowed senselessceo to remove likes from high ranked players and add them to lower ranked players in response to the evolving leaderboard. This strategy would not fetch any more coins than before, but only slightly adjust relative player coin balances, and with such a close game fighting for second and third, this may have tipped the balances in senslessceo’s favor.

Conclusion
We were really thrilled with the results of the second game, because ultimately it shows that the incentives of Realms can get a community to organize in a way that is both competitive and cooperative and lead to creativity and fun, without explicit top down direction. Nearly every player was active every day up until the end, and we’ve shown the system leads to dynamic shifts in reputation that correspond closely to levels of engagement and contribution.

Congratulations to PVM, senselessceo and Chris on your placements! The final payouts were:

1. PVM — 54 ACX
2. senseless — 38 ACX
3. Chris — 38 ACX

Thank you to all the players who played and stay tuned for future seasons, as well as new and improved versions of the EAG.

If you haven’t joined our server yet: https://discord.gg/hUEgKd2A8w

Want to try Realms out in your own server? (its free!) https://makerealms.com

If you haven't already heard, we are running a series of experimental games we are calling “Echelon Ascent Games” designed to work with Realms and Discord. We already concluded our first alpha test run that went beyond expectations. Learn about all the interesting things that happened here.

We are excited to announce the second round of the game, we are calling “Beta Season 1", where we will take feedback and learnings from “Alpha Season 1” to improve on the formula even further. Best of all it will be free to play and we are adding 10 ACX to a prize pool for every player joining. We will be limiting the maximum prize to 300 ACX (roughly 100$ USD). The total pool will be split among the top 3 coin earners.

Just to quickly recap on how the game works: players join our Discord, accept the terms and join the game channel where we have a realm waiting. In this channel they need to earn as many coins as they can doing the following:

1. Liking content in the channel by issuing a 👍 reaction on any messages. This earns both giver and receiver half a coin.

2. Generate content that others can like.

3. Use the faucet every 24 hours to claim a free coin and 12 likes to give.

4. Understand how the inflation system works and to be active on the game server for optimal coin earnings.

For more detailed explanation of how the game works, see the original article introducing the first game.

The upcoming game is designed as follows:

• No entry fees!
• Each player increases prize pool by 10 ACX, for a maximum of 300 ACX!
• The top 3 players split the prize based on their relative coin holdings to each other, paid out as ACX with the Discord tip-bot on the Optimism chain.
• Game starts Tuesday September 3rd at 12 PM noon UTC.
• Game ends Tuesday September 10th at 12 PM noon UTC ( 7 full days ).
• Inflation is set to generate 24 “likes to give” per person per day, with a maximum holdings of 12 “likes to give”, so use them wisely.
• Each like is worth 1 coin, and that is split between giver and receiver 50/50.
• Free coins will be available to claim on game start, and every 24 hours at 12 PM noon UTC, until game ends. Claiming coins will net you 1 coin and 12 “likes to give”, which if given out earn the giver and receiver each 6 coins.
• Late joiners are accepted, but the prize pool will be fixed once the game starts.

We have made a few improvements to the Realms software since the last game based on feedback, making it a bit easier to check your dashboard, as well as better notifications and some UX improvements.

Please spread the word, the more players the better, and join the Echelon Ascent Discord server!

We successfully concluded the first “Echelon Ascent Game”, built on Realms, which puts players in a Discord channel to try and earn the most overall coins among peers before time runs out. It’s a simple premise, but the coin distribution mechanism creates incentives for players to both work together and compete against each other.

To understand the game and rules in more detail, we recommend reading this article:
https://medium.com/@makerealms/players-wanted-97e836d459af

We dropped about a dozen players into a Discord channel for 5 days with little direction other than to figure out the Realms system and earn as many coins as they could. We guessed based on the economic incentives that we would see some pro-social behavior emerge:

1. Earning coins requires others to like your content, which means you need to contribute in the chat room.
2. You can also earn coins by liking content from others, which means its in your best interest to express your likes rather than hoard them.
3. There’s a compounding effect due to inflation, which allows you to earn more coins the more coins you already hold, creating incentive to earn coins now rather than later.

We purposefully left the game very open ended to see what would happen, and we saw players come up with clever strategies to maximize their coins:

1. Memes: The most dominant strategy was to post memes and reactions gifs, which nearly every player did.

2. Preloading emojis: this made it easier for others to click the emoji directly on a message which immediately gives the like versus clicking around the Discord UI to find the right emoji:

3. Shatnering: Breaking apart every word in a sentence into a new line. Each line gives users another opportunity to add an emoji which maximized real estate for giving likes:

4. Bribery: asking people to like your post to earn cryptocurrency:

5. Creating value: Players attempted to provide value to the group through posting current news events, tips on the game and asking general questions to engage conversation:

Overall we saw daily engagement until the end of the game which was an awesome result and showed that system can work:

The final scores had PVM winning the game:

We saw some big swings in the player rankings over the days the game ran. For the first several days the highest ranked player was Boxer. He was not the most liked, or even second or third most liked, yet he was leading the pack in coins earned. This is because Realms weighs both giving likes and receiving likes equally, and Boxer had figured out that he could earn the most coins by liking others as much as possible. The game was not just about being liked, but expressing your likes as well. It wasn’t until other players caught on by day 3 that the leaderboard began to shift with PVM taking the lead, and MANI even passing Boxer for 2nd.

We allowed latecomers into the game, even though missing a day or two would put you at a severe disadvantage competitively. Somehow though Christina moved up to 5th after missing a full day, and Amer to 7th after missing two full days! This shows that the ranking system is highly dynamic and that its possible through activity level and contributions to make up for a handicap.

Ultimately no player played optimally. One of the biggest issues in the game was that players were earning too many “likes to give” and hitting their holding limit (30 “likes to gives” was the maximum allowed), which means there were coins that could have been minted but were left unearned. Either there wasn’t enough activity in the channel to like, or it required too much attention to keep liking things. We will be adjusting this setting going forward.

Congratulations to PVM on his win, it was well earned, and thank you to all the players who helped us test the system. We plan to run a new game soon and we still need more players, so join our Discord and participate in the next season!

Join the Echelon Ascent Games Discord Server!

We are proud to introduce an all new type of social engineering game called “Echelon Ascent Games” (EAG) powered by Realms, a Discord community reputation tool.

The core of Realms is a reputational point system called “coins”, built to work with Discord. What separates Realms from other reputation systems is the unique incentive mechanisms which focus on peer to peer subjective evaluation and self organization. EAG utilizes these Realms mechanisms to create a dynamic pro-social, competitive game with no fixed optimal strategy.

The goal of EAG is simple: earn the most coins amongst your peers by the end of the game. Games run for 5 days, Monday through Friday in Discord, giving players plenty of time to learn the system, optimize strategy and form alliances with other players.

EAG creates some basic rules, using Realms features, which are designed to foster regular engagement with other players and produce a kind of open ended emergent social gameplay:

1. A daily faucet which allows you to claim a small amount of points.

2. A “liking” system, which uses emojis to give limited coins to others as well as earn them yourself.

3. An “inflation” system which probabilistically gives players the ability to mint coins based on their relative coin holdings.

4. A prize to motivate competition and give a sense of risk and excitement.

The faucet allows players to claim their first coins when the game begins, and then on a daily schedule which motivates continued involvement with the game server in order to maximize score.

Giving “likes” are as simple as reacting to someone’s message with an emoji. The act of liking mints coins for both the player being liked, as well as the player doing the liking, in equal proportion. This incentivizes social activity, encourages players to interact, as well as creates strategy around who a player should like and how they should earn likes from others.

The inflation system is what limits the players the ability to issue coins through “likes”. It is a proportional but probabilistic mechanism which gives players the ability to like others at a rate dependent on their relative coin holdings. Inflation incentivizes players to regularly monitor how many likes they can give, as well as who they can earn likes from in order to maximize earned coins.

Finally we add a prize pool which gives players additional motivation to participate and compete strategically. We facilitate this through entry fees going to a prize pool using the Discord crypto “tipbot”, which allows easy transfer of crypto currency to and from a Discord account.

A leaderboard is available and updated in real time to see who is currently leading, and the top coin holder at the end of the game wins the prize.

Currently the game is in alpha and we are tweaking rules and configurations with each new round. We plan to run this weekly and are looking for competitive people willing to try this experimental game and give us feedback!

If you are interested in playing or spectating, join our Discord server and be notified for the next round: https://discord.gg/VArkZ33g

To learn more about what we are building at Realms visit https://makerealms.com

We are excited to unveil Realms, infrastructure to gamify community organization in Discord. Realms breathes life into community interactions through a vibrant and interactive approach, providing tools crafted to facilitate the recognition, motivation, and rewarding of community members effectively. With Realms, you can track member contributions through crowdsourced curation and conduct Discord-based voting for quick and easy decision-making.

This initiative is not just about enhancing community engagement; it’s about redefining it.

Today we launched the Realms Beta with our integration partner, Epoch Island, to empower DAOs to self-organize and run more autonomously. This integration is designed to amplify their collective ability for self-organization and to achieve shared objectives towards building the first digital nation state.

The Challenge of Online Communities

Managing online communities presents a unique set of challenges, particularly when it comes to fostering productive engagement and recognizing individual contributions. Traditional methods often fall short in adequately compensating and acknowledging the hard work of community members, which can hinder the realization of a community’s full potential.

Gamified Community Empowerment

Realms is a Discord bot that transforms community management into a fun and equitable experience. It allows for the creation of exclusive, self-governed spaces called “Realms,” each dedicated to achieving specific missions within a Discord server.

Realms provides two key functionalities to enhance community collaboration:

1. Community-Driven Peer Recognition

2. Reputation-weighted Governance

Community-Driven Peer Recognition

Community-Driven Peer Recognition allows for the tracking of individual contributions within a community, thanks to a community-curated peer recognition mechanism.

How it Works

Realm admins start things off by setting clear goals and distributing coins to members. But here’s the twist — members themselves play a pivotal role in this economy by using reactions to like a fellow member’s contribution.

By adding a specific reaction to a message to show your appreciation you’ve sent a coin to a fellow member. This democratizes the recognition process and deepens the sense of community. It encourages everyone to actively participate and keep an eye out for contributions that truly make a difference. Examples of contributions can range from content creation, active participation in discussions, providing support or assistance to other members, and engaging in community-driven projects or initiatives. This peer-to-peer appreciation mechanism fosters a vibrant culture of recognition and gratitude, making every interaction within the community more meaningful and rewarding.

Reputation-weighted Governance

Realms optimizes community governance with a flexible and engaging voting mechanisms, ensuring that every member’s voice is heard and valued. The foundation of this system is the Reputation-Weighted Voting feature, where the recognition system plays a crucial role not only as a reward but also as a tool for democratic decision-making. This feature allows members to use the coins they’ve accumulated through their contributions to cast votes on community matters, ensuring that the weight of each vote is directly proportional to the member’s level of engagement and contribution. This aligns community decisions with the preferences and efforts of its most upvoted members.

An exciting addition to the voting process is Combat Voting, which gamifies the voting experience by incorporating elements of strategy, competition, and collaboration. This approach transforms standard decision-making into a more dynamic and engaging process, where members can strategically use their earned coins to support or oppose proposals with the risk of losing coins during voting. This adds a layer of tactical depth to community governance and stimulates active participation, ensuring that a diverse range of viewpoints is considered and making the process more inclusive and democratic.

The customizable nature of Realms’ voting system sets it apart, allowing communities to tailor the voting process to their specific needs. It provides a governance framework, empowering members to actively shape their community’s future. By valuing contributions and encouraging strategic engagement, Realms’ governance mechanisms are not just flexible but deeply reflective of the community’s collective will and dedication.

Self-organization through gamified collaboration

Realms offers a solution for communities seeking to engage members meaningfully, reward contributions, and streamline decision-making processes. By gamifying community management, Realms not only enhances participation and collaboration but also ensures that governance is influenced by the most committed members, fostering a vibrant and productive community environment. We are beyond excited to pilot Realms with Epoch Island, marking a pioneering step towards redefining community engagement and collaborative governance in the digital age.

Dive into the future of community collaboration with Realms and Epoch Island by joining Epoch Island and participating in the Realms Onboarding Channel via the below:

https://discord.com/invite/EpochIsland.

For additional details on Realms visit here. If you are interested in joining our Beta program, please join the Realms Discord and reach out to a member of our team. Additionally, B Labs Research is the Realms development partner.