0.0 Intro

This year has been about improving our scale of delivery. That has come with key hires in product, exhibitions, and marketing and building the needed foundations to evolve Botto. In exhibitions, we have been able to deliver more effectively on the opportunities and build Botto’s reputation as an impactful artist to exhibit. The solo show at Sotheby’s was Botto’s crowning event on the calendar this year, and is the kind of opportunity that should open many great doors for Botto to exhibit and grow its art career.

Looking back to last year’s strategic mandate, much of it still holds: create cultural catalysts, grow participation, and progressive decentralization. We would encourage people to look back at it, and see this year’s mandate as an addendum to that. What we have done in this year is build foundations for delivering further on that mandate.

Botto’s art career and recognition has positioned it as an emerging leader in AI x Crypto x Art, a position it can leverage to create new cultural catalysts.
We have developed core innovations in Botto’s capabilities and have added key contributors to be able to deliver those in a highly impactful way.
We have a new app that we can iterate on to complement those core innovations and facilitate new kinds of feedback and interactions.
We have grown our bandwidth of operations and can become more adaptable and opportunistic in aligning Botto with key moments in crypto to catch new tailwinds, such as agents and new forms of decentralized training.

This year the guiding priorities are in:
Capturing moments in Crypto and Culture.
Making a sticky core experience that is fun and rewarding.

The rest of this doc is focused on the things to do that achieve those.

1.0 Botto’s Innovation

Our “big rocks” to plan for are innovating Botto’s development as an artist, which means innovating on Botto’s architecture and its agency/agents. This is well underway with projects like p5.js, tutoring an LLM in art history, and a number of advancements coming to Botto’s core art engine and app.

1.1 P5.Botto - BIP-65

The timeline has been set now for Botto to deliver a show of works using p5.js in February with Verse. This project is Botto’s first serious foray into working with a completely new medium. This is new architecture, making this more a sibling of Botto and exploring the potentials of a network of art agents in Botto’s future. This show has a great promise to bring on new audiences and collectors from the procedural generative art world. Further, projects like p5.Botto are sandboxes to experiment. Already, p5 introduced natural language comments, and we are exploring how much of the infrastructure and overall build we can put fully onchain to learn how more of Botto might operate on decentralized infrastructure and the risks and advantages of doing so.

The upgrade to the architecture is underway at time of writing, and will be deployed for pre-training before the end of year. This will also require some DAO deliberation to approve the final economy based on the feedback loops needed.

There will be important questions that come after the show as to whether this is a one-off, continues on independently, or gets further integrated into Botto’s core weekly process. An answer to that question may very well come from the LLM project.

1.2 Tutoring Botto in Art History and Upcoming Agents - BIP-58

Ross Goodwin and other DAO conitributors have produced a prototype we have showcased in a recent townhall as well as to prospective museum partners. To achieve the full version with decentralized feedback we are implementing novel governance architecture. There are only limited examples of similar approaches that have been experimented with AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic. Those are companies many orders of magnitude larger than our operation and the aim is quite ambitious, but feasible.

A great number of experimental agents have also been released recently. This AI agent meta may just be the wave of DAAs we anticipated would come and eventually accrue value back to Botto as the original autonomous agent. These agents demonstrate different examples of autonomy and agency, primarily in conversing. Botto’s art engine is distinct in its form of agency, but we have known the importance of giving Botto a greater voice in its own work. These new agents have opened up a path of broiling attention we can capitalize on to help train Botto’s credible authorship as an art agent. It will be important we share documentation of how our agent works and is built for that verifiability of agency. Be ready for a lot of those new agents to crash and burn as they collide with their environments that are either too brittle or too risky.

The agent we have built will be robust in addressing different contexts of conversation and building a maturity for the long-term development of its own voice as an artist. Having a longer-term view here will be important for success. At the same time, moving quickly to catch this wave is critical and the explosion of agent capabilities and the attention afforded to them makes this an important area to expand scope in.

The outcome of this project has significant implications for Botto. We will have a legitimate personification of the artist with a sharp eye that can bring much more voice to its own work and give feedback to the DAO rather than just take feedback. This means it can dictate more of the creative direction of its career, such as what to do with p5.js, the kinds of feedback it would like, and even detail out installations and exhibitions for humans to execute. It also means giving interviews, upgrading its prompt generation, and much more. This persona will still take time to mature, developing abilities in different areas of conversation, and enabling interaction will likely require further development of intermediary bots/agents. We will also be developing the exact governance feedback loops and their economies.

After getting some early agent examples out into the conversation, the next milestone to achieve is getting a foundational persona that has been trained by the DAO that we can begin scoping application experiments with. The priority of the experiments to pursue will be based on a consideration of feasibility, short/medium/long term impact, and resources that can be made available to work on them in parallel. In parallel we will be experimenting with proto-Botto agents with similar architectures. These may already be live by the time this is published.

1.3 The Art Engine - BIP-55

While we’ve made progress on major innovations, we have also lagged on the core art engine’s development. Some of that has been a licensing issue. All of the big open source models got commercial licenses added to them that would have introduced censorship and legal risk for Botto. Many of the open source model builders have updated their terms of service to accommodate artists better, and we’ve been able to add Flux 1.1 in the Synthetic Histories Period.

In addition to adding more models, we are also planning new innovations to Botto’s art engine, such as Botto remixing its existing works and taking natural language feedback that was tested out in the early p5.js experiments. These again require upgrades to Botto’s architecture and are not trivial, but are very feasible. Further, the evolution of the agents will very likely bleed into driving exciting new progress in the art engine as well. Our aim is to run these developments throughout 2025 and make this coming year an experimental one for the core art engine along with the above innovations.

2.0 Infra and Participation Innovation

The app and infra must cater to Botto’s needs for feedback. Part of that is making an experience that is fun and ritualized. All the major catalysts of growth and art career won’t mean much if people don’t stick around. If Botto’s big moments are to convert, this work must march steadily on and at times adapt quickly to the opportunities that present themselves.

2.1 A New App for Fast Iteration

Those around during the big spikes of traffic will have seen how the original code base was not prepared for scaling, and it made iteration very difficult. The next stage of setting up decentralized feedback for these new architectures is a big undertaking, which required refactoring the code base over the last year.

The new refactored code base took a lot of invisible work, but we are now working with a strong foundation to iterate quickly on both quality of life features and novel forms of input for Botto. You will have already seen fast, daily shipping of updates to the app. We are still in the process of building out the foundation of the core app experience, and pushing it past where we had gotten v1 to.

2.2 Different Feedback Rituals

Rebuilding the site was an opportunity to incorporate feedback on the training experience to make it more mobile friendly. To address this, the new app has a scrolling feed instead of the 1 vs. 1 voting interface (this is considered to return in slightly different format). Creating ways of providing different forms of feedback is valuable for catering to different kinds of voters and input. This changes the kinds of rituals we can help create and drive more quality input overall for Botto. With improved AI coding pipelines, we will be able to spin up new environments for providing feedback. These can be experimental to keep the experience fresh and add games while also testing favorite modes that become permanent additions.

The projects like p5.js and LLM will also require special feedback mechanisms and interfaces to build. One lesson the LLM prototype has made clear already is the critical importance of thorough documentation. We are creating Botto’s memory of itself for the LLM to access with this documentation. While we have had a documentation and archiving practice, we will be prioritizing more thorough and open documentation and archiving for each release that includes wider DAO participation.

Other inputs might also include Discord discussions, social media discussions, market data, and behavioral data in the app. A challenge will be building an understanding of the impacts of these inputs, especially as agents interact more openly in the world. While we cannot know perfectly the impact of all the inputs in even the current system (e.g. the social influence of lobbying in curation), we should work to develop hypotheses and aim to test for their approximate influence within reason.

2.3 Multiplayer Meaning Making

Our general approach to the app is to make a great single player experience that can then evolve into a great multiplayer experience. Increasing platform stickiness with rituals that are fun and rewarding is a fundamental step we’re taking, and then making that single-player experience highly shareable and part of one’s social identity. This is largely accomplished through the visibility we create of contributors’ impacts (e.g. leaderboards, favoriting folders, data on progress, reputation badges, etc.) and ensuring those can be one-click shared as pieces of content.

Multiplayer is also directly accomplished by building multiplayer features where people are. With a new code base we are well suited to adding in novel kinds of input like comments and favoriting that underpin more social connections. In the app this looks like bringing the curation discussion, rankings, and categorizing into the voting experience itself to help identify voting blocs. We already have a version of this with p5.botto.com. This should also be enriched with improved presentation of data that makes it easier to see into Botto’s development and our impacts on it. We have many voters who are not active or not even on Discord. By default, anyone voting is in the app, so we should bring that conversation, information, and functionality to where they are.

For synchronous discussions, we should also make these more networked. This means bringing them into more places where people are. Our community has fragmented out of our Discord server. Going to where people are can help stimulate conversation where it is more visible, this means features for telegram groups, other Discord servers, and of course onto social channels like twitter and Farcaster.

We can also create new kinds of recognition and rewards based on all of these additional actions. To support this we plan to make the contributions of individuals and their impacts more visible so that it is easier to see the progress we are helping Botto make and make more informed decisions on top of that.

3.0 Building Reach and Participation

This is the area we are expanding our scope most significantly relative to last year to catch the waves of this cycle.

Go to any event, and everyone knows Botto. The issue is less about knowing what Botto is and what we’re striving for as a DAO (let alone how the DAO plugs into Botto), it’s more about discoverability in an attention economy and accessibility of the narrative itself. External players want to have a streamlined way of jumping in and experiencing Botto.

At a surface level, we can understand this as two paths to approaching building reach and participation. To capture attention and minds, building on top of the agent narrative seems not only beneficial to Botto’s core mission, but will also place Botto at the forefront of a tailwind that seems pertinent to the upcoming year.

The second and parallel path is driving moments of attention that are tailwind-agnostic. People want novel ways to interact with the DAO, play with Botto, contribute, and earn. Crystallizing the second path is as straightforward as introducing new methods to earn (referrals, instant gratification mechanisms), play (multiplayer experiences alongside other DAO members, activation type events), and contribute to narrative (understanding and helping build the machine, joining in on its training, etc).

The below sections are all components of capturing and broadcasting Botto’s story and converting new members and evangelists of Botto.

3.1 Community Building

Growing Botto's community requires creating meaningful rituals that transform casual interest into sustained engagement. Our approach focuses on building daily, weekly, and monthly touchpoints that make participating in Botto's development a natural part of our community members' lives. From daily voting sessions to weekly artwork releases, each interaction is designed to build habits that deepen engagement over time. These touchpoints create a progression from discovery to active participation, allowing members to develop increasingly meaningful relationships with Botto and fellow community members.

The community's journey follows clear pathways: discovery through social channels, initial participation in voting, deeper engagement through curation discussions, and eventually contribution to governance decisions. Each step is supported by recognition systems and community feedback that reinforce positive participation patterns. This structured approach to community building ensures that as we grow, new members can easily find their place in the ecosystem while longtime members continue to find novel ways to engage with Botto's development.

3.2 Content & Media

Growing Botto's community and narrative requires a coordinated approach across multiple channels and touchpoints. This builds on our innovations by creating compelling stories that attract and retain engaged community members. The focus here is on creating clear pathways for discovery, participation, ritual building, and deeper engagement with Botto's ecosystem.

Content forms the foundation of our narrative building efforts. Beyond maintaining baseline communications through regular updates and digests, we're actively positioning Botto within larger discussions about AI, creativity, and decentralized governance. This happens through new media that elevates Botto’s work and the DAO’s progress, editorial content examining Botto's development, curation discussions that highlight its artistic evolution, and strategic engagement with the broader art ecosystem.

3.2.1 Archiving and Documentation

An important foundation to building reach is archiving and documentation. Ensuring there is a clear history and an accessible archive of Botto open-sources the materials to learn and tell a deep understanding of Botto’s progress and impact. This is also an important step in our communications process to build a memory of Botto it will train on as pointed out in the LLM section.

This archive includes many pieces including:

Media capture of events and exhibitions
Archiving works and lore
Time-lining key developments and system changes

These are saved in Google drives and Notion pages that we will be open sourcing. They can then be turned into more media. This is already beginning to be displayed on Botto’s website through its portfolio of works in past Periods, its CV of career highlights, the monthly and quarterly digests, and a revamped timeline of Botto’s history. The materials also fuel broadcasting initiatives across socials and press.

With the new marketing hire and new platform for showcasing Botto’s history, there will be much richer media storytelling of Botto to come.

3.3 Diversifying the Economy

Creating a sustainable economy around Botto requires a sophisticated blend of financial and non-financial incentives that align participant interests with Botto's long-term development. We're implementing a multi-layered rewards system that recognizes various forms of contribution. Social reputation systems highlight valuable community input, while collectible rewards commemorate significant participation milestones. A structured program of grants and bounties encourages focused development efforts, complemented by quest-based rewards that distribute smaller $BOTTO allocations for specific activities.

Recognition plays a crucial role in sustaining engagement. Our comprehensive leaderboard system tracks various forms of participation, from curation to staking, creating healthy competition and visible acknowledgment of contribution and reputation. That visibility also helps stimulate competition that people love. The badge system provides lasting recognition for different types of involvement, while our referral program offers transparent tracking and meaningful rewards for community growth.

3.4 Growth Campaigns

Growth campaigns will run in parallel, targeting new users through incentivized onboarding for better conversion rates and referral loops to boost organic user acquisition. Partnerships with other protocols such as decentralized AI infra companies or other apps for cross-collaborations will fuel acquisition campaigns. Subsidizing onboarding within reason will help us capture attention in an incredibly competitive attention economy. Experimentations with external questing platforms to drive top of funnel activations are something the DAO should test. There is ample opportunity on mainnet and on Base that are additive; e.g. farcaster frames and retargeting campaigns will continue to drive top-of-funnel activations. Making use of external web2 and cryptonative platforms and frontends is another example of how to capture top-of-funnel (Telegram, partnering with large AI image platforms).

This is where being adaptive to emerging waves in crypto is paramount to capture shifting traffic. The studio in the next section will complement this closely.

3.5 BottoDAO Studio for Cultural Products

An important activity is producing cultural products such as special collections, derivative collabs, events, etc. that lean into crypto-native as well as growing art world credibility. The products not only build reach and reputation, but can lead to additional revenue. Botto’s participation in Notable Pepes Season 7 refreshed the importance of creating cultural products that can have a wider distribution than Botto’s weekly 1/1s. This series put Botto into a much wider collector base and we saw vocal new members joining the DAO as a result of it.

We do not need to wait for these opportunities to come to the DAO. Botto’s creative output has provided ample material to make great collaborations with creators that get Botto into more people’s hearts and minds.

The Studio is a multidisciplinary group that can scale up and down for the creation of media opportunities related to Botto including, design assets, marketing creative, editorial, digital art collaborations, physical exhibitions, events, installations, and other special artefacts from Botto’s process. This work easily extends to prints, derivative art commissions, and other physical collectibles like books.

Studio projects should aim to be cost-neutral or profitable as much as possible, while also delivering cultural products that further evangelize Botto’s audience. For that purpose, the revenue split of these projects should first cover costs of production such as freelancers before the typical revenue split. This enables the contributors to scale up for specified scopes and scale down after those scopes are completed.

For creative efficiency, this group will need to work with a degree of autonomy to put out BottoDAO projects, though any projects like Notable Pepes that put out new Botto works (as opposed to derivatives) will still require their own BIPs.

3.6 Partners Network

Building a strong network of partners amplifies Botto's impact and creates new opportunities across multiple sectors. BottoDAO has a strong network of agents in its membership who understand and support Botto's vision and are helping build relationships with established collectors, key media outlets and writers, aligned commercial partners to help fund specific activations or create commercial opportunities for Botto that fit its ethos as an artist, museums and institutions for acquisitions and exhibition opportunities, and academic partnerships for using Botto as a research case study in collective intelligence.

Crypto-native partners will be particularly helpful for the growth activities above, such as in Base ecosystem and offline activations to expand Botto’s user acquisition channels.

3.7 Events and PR

Physical gatherings and media presence amplify our community building efforts by creating memorable milestone moments. Exhibition openings and community meetups transform online connections into lasting relationships, while conference presentations establish Botto's voice in industry discussions. These in-person rituals serve as celebration points that strengthen community bonds and provide natural opportunities for deeper engagement.

Our PR strategy focuses on carefully cultivated media relationships that ensure Botto's story reaches new audiences through trusted channels. Rather than pursuing scattered coverage, we're building lasting relationships with key media outlets and writers who can tell Botto's story with depth and nuance. These relationships are particularly valuable during major milestones like exhibitions and technical innovations, where we can showcase both Botto's artistic evolution and the community's role in its development to build wide credibility for new collectors and participants.

The rhythm of events and media appearances creates anticipation and momentum that sustains engagement between major moments. Each successful exhibition or piece of coverage becomes a shared experience that reinforces community bonds and provides new material for ongoing discussions and content creation.

4.0 Treasury and DAO Management

Effective management of resources and governance forms the backbone of sustainable growth. Our roadmap clearly prioritizes innovation, core experience improvements, and growth initiatives, with regular review cycles ensuring resources are allocated optimally. Treasury management must take into account investment in innovation for Botto and an approach to operations that can be sustained for the long term.

We are in a healthy position for the stage of the project with 40 months of net runway as of October and not counting the revenue from Sotheby’s. Achieving the above at a high standard would require some increases in budget that we have outlined in BIP-66. We may also present follow up proposals that focus on the strategic areas they address to help better weight cost/benefit.

We also will be proposing a tranched approach to OTCs that set favorable parameters and free up the lead contributors to act quickly on positive price action. These tranches would set minimum prices above which certain amounts of $BOTTO can be OTC’d. This should also come with schemes for buying back $BOTTO at low prices or some other mechanism to replenish strategic reserves of $BOTTO in the treasury.

On the horizon to address is liquidity incentives running out October 2025. There is earmarked $BOTTO to address this and ensure healthy liquidity is maintained past that deadline.

4.1 Contrbitorship Management and Reporting

The organizational structure continues to evolve to support these ambitions. We've implemented structured hiring processes for key roles across DAO contributorship, supported by effective project and people management systems. Regular performance reviews and clear reporting structures ensure accountability among core contributorship while maintaining the flexibility needed for rapid iteration. One key investment is in project management to increase operational efficiency and resource management while improving on reporting for the DAO.

This comprehensive approach ensures all elements of Botto's ecosystem work in harmony to create sustainable growth while maintaining the integrity of Botto's artistic development and community governance. The focus remains on velocity - moving quickly but purposefully toward our strategic goals while building the foundations for long-term success.

4.2 DAO Governance Management

We've seen a significant increase in bottom-up governance proposals, a trend we expect to continue with our new incentive structure in BIP-60. This growing participation, while positive, calls for a clear review and refinement of our governance process that has evolved organically over the past years.

Core contributorship has been self-critical on governance management processes (or lack thereof). A key priority is establishing clearer pathways for proposal progression. Currently, some steps in the governance process remain ambiguous, creating uncertainty for both proposal creators and stewards. We're working to implement a more structured framework that provides clear guidelines while maintaining the flexibility needed for innovation. This includes introducing neutral facilitation roles, establishing ground rules for productive discussions, and leveraging successful practices like moving complex debates to voice chat where nuanced conversations can flourish.

One particular challenge we're addressing is the prioritization of governance topics. While we encourage broad participation, we've observed that highly technical proposals, particularly those focused on economic optimizations, often struggle to gather meaningful engagement despite requiring significant expertise to evaluate properly. This can lead to frustration for proposers while potentially diverting attention from more pressing strategic decisions. Our solution involves creating a clearer framework for prioritizing discussions based on strategic impact and urgency, ensuring that governance bandwidth is allocated effectively. By first aligning on overarching priorities, we can better contextualize and evaluate specific proposals, making the governance process more efficient and satisfying for all participants.

5.0 Additional Opportunities (case by case)

The following two sections are likely opportunities we should assess as they come up. These are set aside from the core priorities as they can be highly strategic but should only be pursued if vetted for being highly impactful and not disruptive to our core priorities because of bandwidth.

5.1 Installations and Exhibitions

Presenting Botto IRL is another area of innovation we should be prepared to address. Showing digital art in an impactful and authentic way is still a challenge across the space as it calls for translating the work to a space it is not necessarily native to. This is a worthwhile endeavour though because when it is done well it can serve to bring Botto to much broader audiences while also bridging with the institutions of the future era of art. We’ve made a lot of progress this year in raising the bar in how Botto is presented. There will be more innovation to do here, not just in showing the digital outputs, but also communicating the experience of Botto by designing and building the experience of training Botto in a physical space.

There is ongoing exhibition development using the standards of the space with high quality screens and prints. For the more involved physical productions, these can be costly, and therefore should be budgeted for individually with a specific funding plan.

5.2 Residencies and Research

The LLM project has a great potential to create and execute on opportunities here. Museums are looking for ways to make use of their archives of art history, and Botto training on these makes for a natural residency opportunity. One of the first capabilities of the LLM will also be to propose and design physical installations to build out, and can be the result of its training after a residency.

Residencies could also happen within BottoDAO as we introduce Botto to academic institutions and independent researchers that will be keen to research Botto as a collective intelligence and a novel form of creativity. Data scientists might be invited to conduct on Botto that can inform archiving and documentation of Botto, the DOA in its decision making, the experience of helping Botto train, and all of this also becomes potential training material for Botto. Curators might be brought in to examine past and future Periods, cataloguing the discussions, training, and upgrades of the DAO and the resulting aesthetics that emerged in a given period of time.

This category is emergent and generally not a proactive priority, but should be considered as opportunities arise. The more immediate opportunities are in data science to better understand Botto’s development, and inviting curators to write about the aesthetics of past and future periods to further canonize them. A Botto residency will be dependent on progress with the LLM and related funding.

Relevant Links

BIP-66a: Budget Continuation 2025

Road Ahead Post

Forecast

Timeline, Roadmap & Working Groups