Join the Bytexplorers 🔍

Learn onchain analytics while building onchain reputation - with friends!

Today is the start of the Bytexplorers. I’m creating this onchain community of crypto data people to accomplish three goals:

• Explore and understand the world of crypto data (all chains).

• Build tighter relationships between all data analysts, engineers, and scientists.

• Teach everyone how to navigate crypto data.

To join, you’ll mint a Bytexplorer Passport NFT (called a “bytepass”) that will hold all community tokens you earn through “quests”. Your tokens will be represented on the bytepass as a curated sets of “traits”.

In this post, I’ll explain why you should join this onchain community, how the bytepass system works, and how you can participate in quests and earn tokens.

🔍 Mint your Bytepass and then join the telegram group!

📊 Bytexplorer and Quest stats

🔊 Listen to our weekly Twitter space recordings

📆 Keep track of crypto data related events (bounties, competitions, hangouts)

I work at Dune, but neither Dune nor any other companies fund or own this community at all. I’m building everything with my own time and money.

Why should you join this onchain community?

I’ve been fascinated by digital identity and crypto native communities for a while, and have long believed that in crypto, the community is the main platform. Unlike traditional web2 communities that “live on reddit” or “live on youtube”, web3 communities build up a strong token and people base before enhancing it through other platforms.

A graphic from an older article of mine on token membership, reimagining how existing platforms would be used if they were built in web3 instead of web2.

Long term, we can turn any web3 platform into a community quest. We could have guild tokens for completing data bounties using bountycaster, or for participating in external competitions on metricsDAO.

By participating in this community, you’ll eventually unlock opportunities across the entire crypto data space for work, collaboration, social, discovery, and more. No more “cold starts” from zero on every single platform you visit.

“Why would I want to build up this bytepass? Can’t I just go tackle bounties or earn one-off tokens?”

Most public bounty opportunities and competitions are tough to get started with. Even if you do get some success with the above, most platforms do not have the incentive to flexibly represent your achievements or make connections. This makes repeated success hard to build up.

On top of that, web3 platforms are still constantly changing. You might have earned some tokens or won a competition on a platform like layer3, dework, or 101.xyz before, but startups constantly pivot or disappear. Your work is then lost into the blockchain ether.

Having this NFT bytepass makes it easier for all of us to represent a combination of actions as a collection of tokens, and then curate the attributes and values that we think best represent the data community. These can all be the typical NFT “traits” platforms are familiar with, creating easy APIs to pull from. Building up your passport will mean that all of your work gets connected together, and that any platform you go to find or do work on has that context.

How does the Bytepass work?

Below is a bytepass. Anyone can mint one for 0.01 ETH on Optimism, and there is no limit in supply or time to mint.

🔍 Mint your Bytexplorer bytepass and then join the telegram group!

Your Bytexplorer passport NFT will look like this

When you mint, you will get the bytepass NFT. I’ll explain the bytepass structure and base tokens:

• Bytepass: This NFT will own another address that will hold all your community NFTs (ERC6551). This is where people will find your bytepass graphic like above, which will hold and display all your tokens in aggregate.

• Bytexplorer Tiers: There will be four tiers as of now - trainee, scout, trailblazer, and captain. As you participate more in the community, you will earn higher tiers. Your tier is represented by the icon in the middle of the bytepass.

• Guild Token: Participating in quests grants you different amounts of the guild token. In the future there will be many guilds, but today we start with the “multichain maxi” guild token. The number of guild tokens you own is in the bottom left corner.

• ByteInsight Token: You’ll get this for answering people’s questions on Farcaster or completing bounties (soon). The number of insight tokens you own is in the top left corner.

All these tokens will be nontransferable. This community is not your way of making a quick buck. I’m looking for those are willing to put in the work to learn and develop the right ethos in crypto data.

Your name on the bytepass will be Farcaster username that your minting wallet was most recently tied to (either as a custody or verified address). If you haven’t joined Farcaster yet, you can join here. A lot of our initiatives will live on Farcaster.

I’ve put a list of technical details at the bottom of this article, for those who are curious.

How can I participate in quests and earn tokens?

ONLY THOSE WITH A BYTEPASS CAN PARTICIPATE IN QUESTS.

Bytexplorers will be able to earn tokens by completing “quests”. We’ll be starting out with simple quests. The first one will be a weekly question:

🔍 This quest will open every Thursday at noon EST. You can keep up with these weekly quests on JokeRace under the cryptodatabytes profile. More details on the grading system, guidelines, and rewards can be found here:

Bytexplorers Weekly Quest #1

There is no limit to the number of “winning” discoveries, this is not a competition!

We’ll also be partnering with organizations to run missions, which are longer term initiatives that will be funded with larger rewards. Our first two can be found below:

Bytexplorers Mission #1: Optimism Airdrop Research

Bytexplorers Mission #2: Creating Reputation Graphs with OpenRank

Leveling up through tiers

These are the tier requirements:

• After minting your pass, you’ll get the “trainee” tier

• At 5 guild tokens you’ll earn the “scout” tier

• At 50 guild tokens you’ll earn the “trailblazer” tier.

• At 100 guild tokens and 100 insight tokens, you’ll earn the “captain” tier. You’ll also need to maintain a monthly streak of at least one submission, five votes, and three questions answered.

Tier requirements will change as the community grows and more tokens such as ByteInsight are added.

I will be adding more quests on different platforms throughout the season, some of which will have monetary rewards attached. I’m open to exploring partnerships with platforms/protocols, so do reach out if you have any ideas.

See you around, bytexplorer. 🔍

Thanks to artghost for their amazing design work, and the teams at 0xStation and JokeRace for being fantastic launch partners.

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About Me:

I’ve been an analyst, engineer, and educator in the crypto space full-time since 2020. I first freelanced at a couple defi startups like Spectral.fi exploring onchain identity and scores, spent a few months over at Consensys in early 2021, led a social graph airdrop and built multiple data indexers for Mirror.xyz in late 2021, and have been at Dune since late 2022 to focus purely on data education and tooling.

I’ve built up strong analyst communities on multiple chains like Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana - all in a fully web2 way (twitter, discord, and on Dune itself). This is my first attempt at building a fully onchain community, and I will be learning with you all as I go.

I’m always open to feedback, suggestions, and contributions from the community. You can find me @andrewhong5297 on Twitter and Telegram.

Technical Notes On The Project:

• While the community will initially live onchain on Optimism, the activities and opportunities will cover all chains (Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos, etc). In the future, I’ll deploy the community on multiple chains and keep token balances and states in sync.

• The bytepass structure is a “token bound account”, that means your bytepass NFT owns another address that all of your other community tokens will be minted to.

  • The bytepass NFT is an ERC721 with an ERC6551 account tied to it

  • The tiers and guilds NFTs are ERC1155 tokens

• You’ll notice the bytepass example I showed had two more numbers on the top left and top right. These will be different tokens with new mechanics to be released in season 2, and will be null for everyone this season.

• Part of my reason for keeping tokens generally non-transferrable is to deal with sybil and value issues. We will look to make it toggle-able in the future for those who lose their wallets or get hacked.

• I reserve the right to burn tokens for anyone that presented someone else’s work as their own on purpose in a quest (or impersonated them in general in the community).

• After much deliberation, I decided that groupos by Station was the best platform for building the token base and initial mint with - their API/interface is great and 0xrails is a great protocol. And JokeRace is the best platform for testing the first community token distribution lever with - it’s simple and easy to iterate with.

• I will adjust guild token rewards/requirements, voting power, and tier requirements based on the size and distribution of the community.