Decentralizing the design of our newest district

For the past few weeks now, we’ve been teasing the upcoming Meme Factory district, a decentralized marketplace for the creation, issuance, and trade of provably rare memes. As part of our ongoing effort as a team to distribute decision making on the district0x network to token holders, we’ve devised a several part ad-hoc process to include our community in the preparation of our newest district.

• Phase 1 - Meme Factory Design Contest
• Phase 2 - Meme Factory Community Polls
• Phase 3 - Meme Factory Launch
  As detailed in our introduction of district staking, we plan to issue DANK tokens to DNT stakers participating in a series of polls that determine the exact final design of Meme Factory — this is Phase 2.

Several of these design elements, however, we’d like to outsource directly to the community at large. This is Phase 1, the design contest, and we’re officially opening it today. Within Phase 1, we are accepting designs for three different contest categories. Without further ado, let’s jump in to the finer details!

Design Categories

Each category in the contest will have a different set of requirements and prompts for inspiration, provided below. Valid submissions in each category will be collected and then populated into an Aragon voting dApp interface for DNT holders to then choose from in Phase 2.

DANK Token Logo

Up first is the logo for the DANK token. DANK is an ERC20 token that powers the Dank Registry. Holders of the DANK token can use it to decide which Memes are allowed for issuance and sale. Although the Meme Factory logo will be used primarily throughout the dApp, we do need a logo to provide for various ERC20 token trackers and wallets. Below we shared some preliminary designs we tossed around— these are only for inspiration, so use your imagination!

Requirements:

• Designs must be submitted in .svg in square resolution
• Think tokenized or “gamified” votes or ballots — DANK lets anyone maintain the quality of the production lines at the Meme Factory, and benefit in the process.
• Make these designs FUN! Capture all the silliness and color that memes bring to our world.

Back-of-meme Designs

Every meme issued on Meme Factory will by cryptographically unique from the next. Much like physical playing cards, in order to unify the cards as a single set of collectibles, they all need an identical and identifiable back. As players browse through Meme Factory, they’ll be able to click on various Memes to turn them over. Below we attached an early iteration of what the back of the Meme might look like — in many contexts there will be buttons, biographies, and stats overlaying the back/front of a card.

The back of theoretical meme #96 and an example of the meme stats overlay

Requirements:

• Designs must be submitted in .svg format.
• Winning designs will tie all cards together, making them as “meme factory minted”, “provably rare”, “certified DANK”, etc. * Draw inspiration from traditional physical collectible cards if possible.
• The exact size and shape of memes is subject to the first round of Phase 2 voting — as such we can’t give exact resolution requirements just yet. However, designs amenable to a typical mobile-friendly image formats as shown above will cover most card shapes. We’ll announce the final resolution for Memes as soon as the first vote concludes.

First Memes Minted

The Dank Registry mints new memes one by one in a sequence. Using other crypto-collectible games as a reference, we’d expect the first few memes minted on Meme Factory to carry quite a bit of value just for the novelty being “first”. In order to prevent an unfair rat race at the launch of Meme Factory, we’ll be allowing community members to submit memes ahead of time. With some rough filtering, these will then be put to a ballot in a community poll.

Winners will be given the opportunity to add their memes to the registry in the order based on their ranking in this category’s poll. With their Memes already submitted to the registry, there will be submissions to watch, challenge, and vote on for all players from the very first moment Meme Factory goes live.

Requirements:

• Memes submitted must be in .png, .jpg, .gif, or .svg format.
• Max file size of 1.5MB
• Any duplicate memes submitted will automatically void both submissions — this encourages contestants to dig for (or create!) the dankest and most unique Memes rather than land-grabbing the most popular.
• This is an incredibly low bar to entry and a unique opportunity to profit for the winning individuals. We’re asking participants to limit themselves to 3 submissions total to contain the sheer volume voters have to sift through.

Submission Process

As of the publishing of this blog post, the Design Contest is open. To submit a design or meme, follow the simple form. If you’d like to enter multiple submissions in one or several categories, please re-submit a new form for each individual submission.

Each category will remain open for submissions through the beginning of their respective polls in the upcoming vote. Once submissions are closed, all qualifying ones will be populated into the polling dApp for the community to choose from.

Rewards:

• A portion of all DANK issued will be reserved for winners of the contest, as well as future airdrops to meme-centric communities. 95% of DANK will be issued to stakers/voters in the Meme Factory Community Polls. Another 2.5% will be withheld by the community multisig to airdrop in crypto-unaware meme communities. The remaining 2.5% of DANK will be distributed as awards as follows:

.5% of DANK to the winner of the Token Logo design contest
.5% of DANK to the winner of the Back-of-meme design contest
.5% of DANK to the contestant with the highest rated Meme
.2% of DANK to the 2nd through 4th place Memes submissions
.05% of DANK to the 5th through 12th place Meme submissions

Additionally, we will do a short feature of the work and channels from any designers, artists, Meme zealots or influencers who win any of the above prizes in the winner’s announcement.

DANK rewards will be distributed during the creation and issuance event at the conclusion of the final round of voting. Once distributed, DANK will be both transferrable and usable in all future Dank Registry votes.

Recap

To quickly summarize:

• The design contest is now OPEN.
• Submit designs for each category HERE.
• Each category’s contest will remain open until therespective voting round begins (TBD).
• The very first voting round will determine the meme shape/resolution.
• As always, stay tuned for more updates, and drop in to one of our community links below if ask a question!

Learn More

For more information about the district0xNetwork:
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