Takeaways from the Peeps x Polygon AMA on January 7th
Tl;dr: We had an AMA on Polygon and our community is growing fast (join our Discord here), the tech part of the project is developing, investors are on board and the prototype is to be live soon.
Friday 7th of January 2022: a milestone for Peeps, Polygon and everyone looking forward to Web3 and the metaverse. More than 300 people gathered to hear Aaron, our CEO, and Alexander, our IT lead, talk about the Peeps project on Polygon’s Twitter Space. If you missed the occasion, worry not! Here is everything that was revealed.
Q: What was the motivation behind the genesis of Peeps and its features?
The origin story of Peeps? At first, we noticed quite a few problems and inefficiencies in the current creator economy and existing social platforms:
- Users are not rewarded in any form
- Everything is centralized
- Creators don’t own their data
- There is ongoing censorship and arbitrary rules
That’s not fair. This can’t go on. It became our mission and that’s how we came up with our key features:
- Every user can earn
- Web3 architecture for decentralization
- Community-owned
- Permissionless, trustless structure
In our research, we divided “competition” into crypto and non-crypto. We observed and learned from every project, every platform. We were constantly looking for fuel for thoughts, to imagine an indisputable and lasting solution.
Q: What are your achievements and challenges so far?
Once the Peeps' idea was born, the founding team moved on it as fast as possible to set strong foundations on which to start building:
- Developing the idea into a realistic technical solution
- Creating a marketing team and a business development team
- Gathering funding and securing a pre-seed round
- Securing meaningful partnerships with Polygon, Distributed Labs, Byzantine Solutions, and others to be announced very soon!
Being fast on our feet allowed us to make a lot of advancements in just a few months.
Now we are proudly growing our community on Discord, preparing many events to reward early adopters and “OG Peeps”.
Q: Why are you building with Polygon?
In short: It’s a natural alliance. It just makes sense.
Peeps became a partner of Polygon, entering the prestigious list of Polygon Studios’ nurtured projects and received a grant from Polygon.
The Polygon blockchain and environment offers Peeps a very fertile ground for development:
- An extra scalable blockchain in the Ethereum system
- A fast-growing & vibrant Community of Creators and Innovators
- By the words of Peeps’ devs themselves: “the best combination between Speed, Transaction Costs, Convenient Infrastructure, all non-centralized like other EVM Based Chains”
And even more important: a complete alignment of Peeps with Polygon’s team vision and values. It was an immediate fit, a natural alliance.
Q: What is the road ahead, the future of Peeps?
Peeps is all about building the future, and 2022 is going to be particularly exciting. A decentralized Web3 Social Platform where everybody earns.
Here is what the community should look forward to:
- Live Prototype and MVP
- NFT Drops and events for our Discord Community
- TGE
- DAO, as we want Peeps to be community-owned
- Onboarding many influencers, big and small
We think about the metaverse and Web3 a lot, we want Peeps to be an integral part of it. In the immediate future, we are very focused on growing a quality community. Our tech & finance guys are incredibly passionate about designing a profitable business model for all users, so stay tuned for more info!
Open mic: rapid-fire questions
After answering the Polygon team’s questions, we got an open mic session. Here are the questions asked and their answers:
Q: How do you solve the problem of moderating content?
We are bringing a two-layered solution, following the decentralization architecture.
- Front-end layer filtering based on guidelines proposed by the Team but voted and finally decided by the community itself. Meaning: What is and what is not ‘OK’ on the Platform?
- On the smart contract (and data storage) layer, all content will remain, and anyone who builds an alternative frontend or looks directly at chain level could see it.
Meanwhile, the decentralized moderation teams (as described in the whitepaper) will be able to mark disputed content as shadow-banned, if this is the decision they reach.
Q: Is there a fixed APY that NameStakers get?
At the moment, all we can say without giving out too much fancy information is: Social will finally be fair. Meaning, a ‘simple’ user of the Peeps Platform can stake on a content channel and be rewarded fairly. The size of their input will be crosschecked with all other NameStakers and rewarded accordingly. Before a user decides “Should I stake on this content-creator or not?” an estimated APY will be shown.
Q: How do you work around bots and Spam?
We are taking this subject very seriously. It has a major part of our thoughts in the development of the platform. In simple terms, it will not make commercial sense to do that. There is a mechanism our devs implement that will make spammers, bots and similar loose small amounts of deposits needed to become verified — which in turn will make them leave.
Let’s note that spam transactions are blockchain transactions, so they are not free for the spammer, which in itself may be a deterrent. If it turns out to be a real problem, in later versions we may introduce additional on-chain mechanisms, such as token commitments for new commenters and/or curve-bound temporary deposits for leaving many comments. However, at this time we rely on the previously described approach, which is the opportunity for front-end filtering and therefore more traditional and less invasive methods.
Q: Who will be the creators?
Everyone! Everyone who is willing to create content can do it on Peeps. But if you are asking about what bigger Influencers are already with us on board, then you should join our discord channel and stay tuned. We have lots of announcements to make.
Q: What influencers did you onboard already?
The very first ones will be announced this and next month (January-February 2022)!
Q: Who will be the viewers on the platform, what didn’t they see on other platforms (like YouTube)?
Everyone can be a viewer on the platform, public content will be easily available. And we plan on having a lot of exclusive content that other platforms don’t have. It’s not about what someone has or has not seen, but it’s more about that now everyone can start also earning while doing it.
Imagine the following situation: You find an awesome account with great content, and it has almost no followers. You think: “This is impossible, how cool would it be if I can bet on this persons’ success? The content is just fantastic!”. Well, 3 months later, this person has 300k followers, and you just sit there and think: “Damn it, I knew it… I wish I could have profited from that...”.
With Peeps, you can benefit from other people’s success. You can stake $PME on a channel and receive through this a share of the revenue right into your wallet.
Q: What other Projects similar to yours do you know, and what makes you better?
We know and closely follow Web3 social projects. We work hard to make a unique platform, offering the best earning model for all our users, with NameStaking.
It is great to see that there are many projects that try to copy-cat the big social platforms, but none of which has something that makes the Influencer and their Community work hand-in-hand.
For the Influencer it is great when the community starts to stake more and more $PME on the channel, since in the internal Platform ranking it will go up, receive more visibility, publicity and simply be easier to find.
For each user who staked, this is also great, because more and more people will jump in and earnings will grow through the success of the Influencer. A Win-Win Situation!
Q: Is there going to be a DAO?
We have a bold vision for Peeps. We want it to be innovative in every aspect. This includes the governance part of it. We believe that a social media platform lives thanks to its community, and therefore the community should own the platform. So we want to create a DAO, yes. Everyone who is joining us now will become a voice in Peeps’ governance, decide on its future, and receive every benefit associated with it.
Are you going to have NFTs?
We won’t say no if the community asks for this! We will also have an NFT marketplace inside the Platform where you will be able to sell, not only the NFTs you created, but also sell a channel you built!
Q: What if I add X amount of the Token into NameStaking, the token price will fall. Will the person coming after me earn the same amount as I do?
We are looking at different options. Let's dive a bit deeper:
First of all, huge volatility in token price is worked against from our end via the slow distribution and future staking competitions, hodling community and other community incentives within the tokenomics to be announced and laid out bit after bit.
Secondly: we are looking at implementing a bonding-curve mechanism, which should be working towards whoever comes first and NameStakes earlier, will receive the biggest chunk.
Q: What collabs do you guys have?
Outside our technical partnerships with Polygon, Distributed Labs and Byzantine Solutions, we are currently talking with influencers and brands. We will soon start having announcements on the topic. The most prominent for everyone to know is Polygon itself. We are featured as one of the projects built on Polygon on their showcase website: https://awesomepolygon.com/nft-gaming-peeps-platform/
It’s been a fantastic moment for us to finally share our brainchild and beloved project!
Big thanks to Polygon for having us and to all the listeners, as well as everyone who joined our Discord channel and asked questions! We collected many excellent questions there, and will soon publish answers. Stay tuned!
Official website | Whitepaper | Discord | Twitter | Telegram
