Sounds like a great idea! The program is well-structured, and I like how it encourages meaningful contributions. You’ve got my vote—looking forward to seeing it in action!
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Heyooooo, I’m glad that this proposal (which, btw, you did a great job with the research to back it up) has moved forward to the point where a vote is being taken to decide whether to move forward to the next step.
Making use of social media is of great importance to any project, and I think the best way to encourage that is to have a small army (aka Rangers and Vanguards) that contributes in the different ways you explained in the main proposal.
Sometimes I’m a little short on time due to IRL issues but if you need a hand, I’m here.
looking forward to seeing this in action.
I have been thinking about this for days, and trying to think how I would do it. This is not meant as an alternative to any of the above. Just trying to streamline and knock down some barriers.
I can totally see how much work the Community Educations Rewards was, especially the program running once a month. That was work, a lot of work.
I think on-chain voting puts some friction on the whole thing, and then needing to announce the voting, get people voting… Did a vote add much value? (aka was it more of a popularity vote, rather than scored against certain metrics that pushed the community on?)
I think I’d go like this, in a way that decentralizes the process out to the community, and has a little bit of autocratic shaping. I think much of this fits in with your thinking.
You get three Vanguards: A, B, and C, you give them a combined pot of…: Let’s stick with those numbers: $4,000 a month ($48,000 a year).
That’s $1,000 a month “each” + $1,000 combined.
Their purpose is to keep $500 a month for themselves for their content (not “We’re paying you for content”, more “We recognize your work in the community as Vanguard, thank you”) + and for managing contributors and future Vanguards.
And the next $500 they distribute individually, leaving $1,000 to distribute as a group.
That equals $2,500 available to the wider community each month, but disbursed at discretion, in ways such as:
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Someone writes a killer thread, here’s $200 as a tip/reward.
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We notice someone reply-guying a lot, $200, thank you for doing that this month.
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Helpful person is repeatedly in Discord, same again.
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Someone starts demonstrating they really know their stuff around, eg: DeFi pools and writes a fantastic Medium on it as it relates to Reserve, here’s $500, great piece.
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Similar to the one above, but it’s more like a commission - “For $500, can you bring your writing/video/podcasts/Spaces skills to…”
If this sounds unstructured… Wait for it…(naturally, the top line has to be that your trusted Vanguards understand the flavor of content that the ecosystem wants to see).
You go with three Vanguards of different skills. I’ll use myself as an example: I’m not deep in DeFi, it’s pointless asking me to be a point-man on that. That’s okay, not my strength. There’s another Vanguard who is much more focused on that, and who is hunting down or recognizing or encouraging people for that content.
(Encouraging people both from an “inside out” and from “outside in”, with money on the table as the invite/incentive.)
There was a $2,500 “pot” per month available at the start of the process.
3 or 4 months in, there’s potential that another 2 Vanguards have emerged.
Now they are also getting $500 a month to steer people in, reducing the money on the table to $1,500 each month for the community.
And you’ve decentralized the process, you now have 5 Vanguards, each unique, each with capacity to find their next follower.
You may see an exponential recipe for disaster there, but I’d suggest if it was extremely successful, and you now have 7 excellent Vanguards, and only $500 on the table per month, the setup would have justified itself for an extra +$12,000 a year ($60,000 a year), bringing the communal pot up to $1,500 a month again. And I can’t imagine a world where more than 7 Vanguards are really needed.
At that point we’d definitely want to helicopter the situation again: “Confusion can justify $60,000 a year, hypothetically that’s a hard limit”. But I repeat you probably don’t want or need more than 7 Vanguards.
Perhaps the world months down the line looks like “We have 5 Vanguards, and through the extra contributors we have found, we actually want to pay this writer $2,000 a month for two long-form articles a month about X, Y, Z” or “we want to pay these two people $1,000 each to continue their community outreach or amplification” etc etc.
AKA we stop and work out what Chapter 2 is.
The things I’m getting at are:
Remove Hurdles: Not on-chain voting, not monthly voting, just a small committee of three Vanguards, overseen or occasionally justifying their direction to a Reserve core member.
Transparency with rules: The Vanguards would (monthly?) say publicly who they were giving rewards to - if a Vanguard was being ineffective or biased it would be pretty clear from a “this content was awarded $X” viewpoint. CC + community could voice concerns loudly or privately if a Vanguard was not working / working out.
Not Monthly: I said monthly above ^, but it’s not really: it’s a constant small process: “Hey Ranger, great thread, $20”, “Thanks for reply-guying so much, dropping $100 to you as a thank-you”. There’d just be a collation/report monthly.
The TLDR is: 3 x Vanguards, each getting $500 a month, and using $500 a month to inspire others into their tribe. And $1,000 a month collectively / for bigger rewards to certain standout content. Evolve from there under clear structure and direction.
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The community poll is complete—thank you all for your valuable input.
After 53 days of thoughtful discussions and proposed experiments on experiments, there’s a clear consensus: the Reserve community craves stronger cohesion, louder–more everywhere present education, and an inclusive coordination system to compound ecosystem value and thrive together.
Crypto winter possibly comes again in 2026/27 but we’re at a pivotal moment right now with the wind behind our backs!
I have invited ABC Labs and Confusion Capital to comment or suggest next steps on the proposal.
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At Confusion Capital, we believe this type of ambassador program would be most effective if Vanguard applicants come from outside the current, close-knit RSR community.
From my experience with the Community Education Rewards Program, much of the content was created by the Reserve community’s inner circle and primarily consumed within that same group, making it less effective than if it had reached people outside the existing Reserve ecosystem.
If we can find ways to recruit these (semi-)outside contributors, we would be happy to fund the proposed $36,000/year for this program.
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I disagree with this stance. My understanding that the Vanguard programme aims to mobilise the current community and grow the pie from within. Rewarding active contribution to the protocol from people who already have skin in the game and are aligned with Reserve’s mission.
I haven’t been involved discussions aimed at mobilising fringe contributors or KoLs but I imagine it would be a much harder sell and considerably more expensive to employ their services than that of the original target cohort set out by @0xJMG. It’s also worth noting that these (semi-) outside contributors will likely face a steeper leaning curve to get up to speed with things like backing buffers, running auctions and the melting of rewards than a tight-knit community member which will elongate the on-boarding process.
From my experience CER had a mixed bag of submissions from tight-knit community members all the way through to DeFi reseachooors and KoLs. It’s my opinion that they came for the incentives and have since left, a quick search reveals Mughal and Dynamo haven’t tweeted about Reserve since May and July respectively, although I didn’t check for specific RToken mentions. That being said it’s very difficult to know if those who read their posts we on-boarded to the ecosystem and have remained as active community participants.
I also recently discovered that we only have 21 active governors on our top 3 RTokens, eUSD / USD3 and ETH+ meaning that even our close-knit RSR community aren’t even at the bottom of the funnel and actively governing. Surely we build this army from within rather than recruiting outside contributors first? Slowly, slowly then all at once.
I’d also appreciate if you could expand on the definitions of a close-knit RSR community member and a (semi-)outside contributor. If we proceed aiming to only on-board the latter we will quickly enter a grey area and be paralysed by choice, who is too tight-knit and who is sufficiently on the fringe which will ultimately result in the collapse of the whole programme.
Vanguards is designed to develop nascent talent/grit from inside the Reserve community. It seeks to identify missionaries, and give them support and resources. The value of missionaries cannot be overstated enough. If developed properly, they will still be standing through the darkest crypto winters. These talents might aslo make good recruiting pool for the dev and ecosystem teams in the reserve ecosystem. I cover this quite a bit in Humans All the Way Down with perspectives shared by 6 other protocols.
Outsiders will operate moreso in a mercenary way. They are indeed important, given their much higher subject matter competency, and their much higher distribution/followers. To succeed in this category (which is NOT the proposed Vanguards program), there are two additional paths I suggest:
- Identify high quality external candidates, and make them a 1 year (or more) ambassador. This drives a stickier, longer term, and collaborative learning relationship with an “expert” in the space. Best example of this I can recall is The Calculator Guy DeFi Dojo with Gearbox, Contango and others.
- Retain a high quality agency with provable mission aligned talent like @StableScarab 's ProofofContent.
I would actually recommend doing all three: (1) Vanguards for insiders, (2) external long term ambassadors and (3) agency backup with a bench of talent that can turn on like a fire-hose depending on the priority of the day.
The pyramid on getting started is relevant to remind ourselves of.
p.s. CER was a blend of all of the above in different and imperfect ways. We got our learnings, which informed the above. If only Vanguards happens at its very low cost, this is a win. If more happens, then we are better for it.