Summary

Creating a supplementary mechanism for access will help grow the community and allow for streamlined access & onboarding of new community members. This would be achieved through Access Passes, a novel and digestible way of hopping into Botto.

Background

Botto is an artist with gated access, where access may be gained by holding and staking Botto’s native ERC20 token, $BOTTO. As a preface to the idea of access passes, it’s important to break down the four layers of access the token currently provides.

Staking $BOTTO allows you to participate in:

Training: Spending voting points (VP) in a voting pool to train Botto
Curation: Spending voting points (VP) in a voting pool to curate a Botto artwork (for auction)
Governance: Participating in all aspects of Botto governance as a member of BottoDAO
Economy: Exposure to the success of Botto’s native protocol token, $BOTTO, and accessing direct economic incentives driven by Botto sales (and likely future BottoDAO initiatives)

The shortest method to gaining access to the artist and protocol requires the following:

Discovery of Botto and the token $BOTTO (either via website, discord, app dashboard)
Acquire $BOTTO on Uniswap (import contract address, approve spend, swap)
Stake $BOTTO in the governance contract on the Botto app (approve quantity, stake)

In short, the token acts as the primary onboarding mechanism to the protocol. Onboarding users can be understood across four dimensions, notably:

Streamlined access - The ability to take part and contribute to Botto’s journey should be straightforward, requiring minimal touchpoints to get started
Distributed access - Botto should be host to as many participants as possible
Scalable access - At a protocol level, we should strive for the ability to continuously grow the quantity of participants, where any employed growth mechanism also minimizes an individual’s propensity to reduce their own access in periods of market contraction
Consistent participation - Botto requires consistent participation with specific reference to VP expenditure - which is key to Botto’s growth as an artist.

By design, an ERC-20 token should play well along the first three dimensions. Streamlined access can be offered by simply acquiring the token and distributed access is theoretically infinitely scalable. In bull market conditions, an individual has a risk-on mentality and seeks exposure to productive assets that offer potential asymmetric upside. And at Botto’s inception, consistent participation was encouraged by the prospect of direct rewards (exposure to BB&B).

Initially the token aided the onboarding of users at an incredible pace. This was largely facilitated by market conditions coupled with the initial airdrop which bootstrapped access to Botto. Growth has since tailed off, with Botto experiencing user activity contraction across the board that mirrored the larger macro environment. This affliction to market conditions has and always was a predictable inevitability, but it has also exposed shortcomings with our current model of gated access via $BOTTO:

Access reduces in the event of market downturn, where

existing stakers are disincentivized to hold risk-on assets in bearish market conditions
new participants are influenced by broader market sentiment (macro environment) leading to reduction in participant growth (acquiring and staking $BOTTO)

Consistent participation is limited by market conditions; in the event of market downturn, participation wanes as users:

reduce their own access (unstake, sell) causing less VP expenditure and less time spent in the protocol.
feel afflicted by negative market conditions, disenfranchising existing participants due to economic loss and/or not feeling significantly rewarded, leading to reducing their own access and/or time spent in protocol.

Rationale

This proposal seeks to hybridize access to Botto by introducing Access Passes to BottoDAO and relevant, outside communities. Access Passes would fuel community growth, further distribute access to the artist, and subsequently encourage protocol evangelism.

Access Passes would:

Provide two layers of access, name to (1) Training and (2) Curating
Generate a fixed amount of Voting Points per day
Qualify along the four dimensions of onboarding (Streamlined access, distributed access, scalable access, participatory access)

This proposal also adds increased utility to Pipes, which would also generate voting points.

Access Passes would not replace $BOTTO:
Access Passes should be understood as a supplement to the token. Some of us might ask why not just keep the token model. TL;DR:

Financial incentives are not fully accessible to AP holders (Stakers currently receive $BOTTO when they're staked in the gov contract)
A fair amount of rewards would only be available (many for free) for stakers
Secondary fees of access passes can be redistributed to Stakers
Governance rights beyond training and curation are not there (you cannot vote on proposals)
No BB&B exposure
The $BOTTO token requires visibility to begin with. If some of us would like to see more adoption of the token, users need to understand that 1) it exists and 2) it provides a wealth of utility as mentioned above

This was addressed in a town hall alongside Shardifty, one of the DAO members.

Relevant Timestamps - Townhall
51:54 - Comment and questions
54:00-58:00 - Response

Proposal Specification

A “Botto Access Pass” would be sold directly by the DAO for a nominal fee, with external communities receiving an access pass that may be freely minted based on access relevant to their community (i.e. holding a token native to their own DAO). We would start with CyborgDAO and SuperRare DAO as eligible communities for Access Passes.

Access Passes will be minted into an ERC1155 Contract, collection titled ‘Botto Access Passes’
Access Passes would start as a ‘blank canvas’, allowing the community of access pass holders to curate the cover of their Access Pass over a four week period.
The most voted on fragment will appear on their Access Pass.
An Access Pass will share the same properties as Pipes from the ‘Ceci n’est pas un Botto’ Collection
Access Passes are not stackable. The AP yielding the highest amount of Voting Points is used to calculate daily VP regeneration. Clarification:

You will not be able to stack a Botto AP, SuperRare AP, and so on and so forth. They all stem from the same contract, so the AP generating the most VP will be used to calculate your daily VP regeneration. Pipes can generate VP alongside access passes, but aren't stackable between pipes. I.E. I cannot have 10 pipes and generate thousands of VP daily, but I can have 1 pipe (225VP) and 1 Access Pass (100-175VP depending on the Access Pass) alongside my staked $BOTTO.

Access Passes would be implemented in three phases:

Phase 1: Standardizing Implementation

This phase has an 8 week execution time, where we:

Update Botto’s frontend to accommodate minting
Setup Access Pass contract
Setup permissioned minting (free vs fee)
Roll out Access Passes for the Botto community

Specifications Botto Access Pass:

Free to mint for $BOTTO stakers
Paid mint for non-stakers/new project entrants (nominal fee, .03 ETH ~$50USD at ETH price to date)
Minted directly via Botto website
Generates Voting Points (100 VP per day)
Cannot be stacked
Provides eligibility to training and curation layers of Botto
Provides eligibility to drops and rewards

Phase 2: Distribute CyborgDAO Access Pass

A straightforward, 1 week campaign where we would distribute access passes to CyborgDAO as a headnod to their conviction in Botto.

Specifications CyborgDAO Access Pass:

Hold a Turing Key to mint
Max 100 Passes (100 Turing Keys)
Minted directly via Botto website
Generates Voting Points (100 VP per day)
Provides eligibility to training and curation layers of Botto
Provide eligibility to drops and rewards

Phase 3: Distribute: SuperRare Access Pass

A multi-week campaign where we would distribute access passes to SuperRare token holders, improving interplay between SuperRare DAO and BottoDAO and empowering the $BOTTO tokens held by their treasury, acquired via token swap (See BIP-08 for details)

Specifications SuperRare Access Pass:

Hold some $RARE (+-100 $RARE) to be eligible to mint
Max 10k passes
Minted directly via Botto website
Generates Voting Points (175 VP per day)
Provides eligibility to training and curation layers of Botto
Provide eligibility to drops and rewards

SuperRare Access Passes are a way to distribute access from the tokens they hold in their treasury, where 1,000,000 $BOTTO at 10,000 minted passes = 175VP daily.

Budget (If applicable)

The proposal requires no additional budget and has minimal drawback to developer schedules.

Criteria of success

Measurable impact across the following KPIs:

Quantity active voters per round
Quantity VP spent per round
Amount of mint passes in circulation

An Indirect KPI to measure is the quantity of $BOTTO staked in governance contract and/or active LPers.

Disadvantages

Conflation between Access Passes and the Token (i.e. why do I need the token?)
Additional lead time to existing roadmap tasks