A project has been slowly gathering steam to fix blockchain governance called Jokerace — and it’s no laughing matter. On Wednesday the project announced it has raised $3 million in fresh capital, in a round led by Maven 11 and approximately 30 angel investors (adding to the 100 backers that funded their seed round).
The three-person team has built an easy-to-use, no-code app that allows developers to launch onchain contests and hackathons as well as issue grants and other incentives to community members. The idea is to incentivize participation in whatever particular project a user thinks is meaningful by offering crypto rewards.
Jokerace launched last year and is live on over 90 chains. It has built a solution to launch on any EVM-compatible platform “in a matter of minutes” and is being used by big-ticket brands like Polygon, Farcaster and Bankless.
Now that the project has found traction, the team is looking to use its funding to expand — particularly in marketing and business development.
“The past year has been very qualitative, we've been focused on achieving product market fit, making a core product people really enjoy using, building a community and adjusting to feedback from the established users,” Jokerace co-founder David Phelps said in an interview with The Block. “At this point, we've partnered with basically every single major business or chain in the ecosystem — it’s super validating.”
The project started as a competition created by Phelps among friends over who could post the funniest joke on Twitter and grew from there, which served as a proof-of-concept that co-founder Sean McCaffery wanted to expand on. A favorite joke among the interviewees was a repeatedly posted photo of Phelps at a conference, which continued to degrade in resolution as more and more people posted it.
"The goal with all of this was — if this starts taking off, then go out and create the full platform for this that will let anyone create these kinds of contests for submission," McCaffery said.
“A lot of what we’re really trying to think about is incentive alignment. We really want to make sure that as much as possible, in the spirit of crypto, our users are the ones who are getting the upside from what we're building,” he added.
Disclosure: A podcast at The Block uses Jokerace to crowdsource guest appearances.
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