Request for Discussion: Moving CRP Nominations On-Chain

[skullzarmy]

I want to propose a change to how CRP nominations are collected, and I want to be upfront that it only works if Tezos Commons is willing to adopt it. So this is two things at once: a request to TC to buy in, and a request to the community to help design it.

First the ask to TC directly. Will you engage with this, and if the community builds something solid, will you use it? If the answer is no, tell me now. Everything below assumes you’re at least open to it.

Here’s the problem. Right now people nominate by posting a list of handles under #tezoscrp, or by filling out the TypeForm. The public posting is what people like. They tag everyone they want to recognize, across every category, in one shot. But X bans accounts for mass-tagging, the posts get spread across X, Reddit, Discord, and Telegram, and someone at TC (Cryptonio) has to gather them all by hand each month. The form works for people who prefer it, and I’m not proposing we remove it.

My proposal: build a web UI where you fill out one nomination covering as many categories and as many people as you want, submit once, and mint it as an NFT. The nomination data lives in the token metadata, with a shareable “CRP mm/yy” image. Because it’s on-chain, the month’s nominations aggregate directly from chain data. No cross-platform collection, no lost entries, no bans.

This is additive. Keep the form, keep the hashtag. On-chain just becomes the primary method, and if it’s better, people move to it over time on their own.

The reason to do it this way is simple. We’re a chain. Running our own recognition program on our own tech, with native minting and native sharing, is us using what we build. Once nominations are on-chain, badges, contributor history, access, and eventual on-chain voting all become straightforward to add later.

I don’t have a finished spec, on purpose. I want to settle the standard with the community first. Open questions:

Dedicated nomination token, or agreed conventions in FA2 metadata keys?

How to model one nomination that spans multiple categories, each with multiple nominees?

Required fields. My starting list: category, nominee, nominator, cycle, optional note. What’s missing?

Identity: people nominate by social handle today. Addresses, .tez or hack.tez names, DID, or a bridge between them?

Who indexes and aggregates, and where does the tally surface for TC’s monthly review?

Sybil resistance, weighting, eligibility: how much does any of it matter here?

The nine categories are settled and I don’t want to touch them. The work is the metadata format, since that’s the durable part every future front-end reads.

Devs, designers, anyone with opinions on how this should work, jump in. And TC, the one thing I need to know is whether you’ll use it. The rest we can figure out together.

[v32]

sibyl resistance isn’t critical if non-binding. you can have reputation scoring like versum had or the Teia DAO claim where verifications acted as a multiplier (upto 3x iirc)

the MoMI community curation partnership had a voting NFT given out and something like that would probably make for a good incentive

[Cryptonio]

Hey Skllz, first of all, thanks for trying to come up with ideas to improve the CRP program.

Speaking from my perspective as someone who’s heavily involved in running the program, I don’t think this is a direction I’d personally be in favor of.

One thing I’d like to clarify is that the current aggregation process isn’t really a pain point for us. While it is manual, it doesn’t take a significant amount of time each month, so moving nominations on-chain wouldn’t solve a problem we’re actively struggling with.

I also think there’s a misconception around how the hashtag was intended to be used. The goal wasn’t for people to wait until the end of the month and tag 15 names in a single post with zero context. The mass-tagging issue is something that evolved organically within the community rather than something we’ve ever encouraged. The idea was always to use #tezoscrp throughout the month whenever you see someone make a meaningful contribution, right under the their action, or tag someone with a short explanation of what they did if their contribution wasn’t public. That helps us see the contributions as they happen and provides useful context during the review process.

More generally, I don’t think moving nominations on-chain would improve the quality of nominations. If anything, I’d be concerned that it could make the process easier to game or gradually shift toward a popularity contest, where the number of nominations becomes more important than the substance behind them. CRP isn’t designed to be an on-chain vote, nominations are simply one of several signals that help us identify contributors worth reviewing.

I also think this would introduce more friction for nominators. Today, someone can make a quick post or fill out a Typeform in under a minute. If nominating multiple people is what’s missing, we could simply add that capability to the Typeform instead. Asking people to use a separate application, connect a wallet, and mint an on-chain nomination feels like a higher barrier, and I’m not convinced that would lead to greater participation.

I appreciate the idea, but from my perspective I don’t think the benefits outweigh the additional complexity or the trade-offs it introduces.

[skullzarmy]

Thanks for your reply and your candor!

Let me speak to a few of the points to made.

Firstly, about the misconception. I totally hear you, and that is how I usually use it myself. BUT, you have to leave room for the users to tell you how they want to use it. They have spoken. Most of the time it is one huge list, because it is a monthly chore not an in-the-moment reaction. Now, that’s perhaps a larger discussion to be had about how the CRP is presented to us, but I digress. How it was intended is only half of the scope. How it is actually used in the wild must be considered.

For your pain in aggregation, I spoke to that as a possible positive, but that was not a driving reason for the suggestion. In fact, the driving need is that X is banning us when we make these big long threads, but we love doing it and keep getting banned. We want to make big lists of love and shout it out to the world. This is what users want. So if we can provide a mechanism to do this without a ban hammer, win-win.

In concern with gaming and quality of submissions, that is a point worth exploring, however I would argue that the barrier to entry is placing a hashtag on a social post so you can’t get easier to game than that.

More friction: I am specifically suggesting an additional method, not a replacement for existing methods. No new friction.

That said, perhaps the typeform can be updated to address these issues. I also saw it as an opportunity for our community to eat our own pudding. It kinda says something that Tezos is not using Tezos in this community program. Just from my perspective we ought to be using our chain whenever and wherever possible.