COMMIT CLUB IS LIVE ON ETHEREUM MAINNET

The Commit Club Whitepaper

Last updated July 17, 2022

Version 1.1
From the Commit Club team.
This Whitepaper will evolve over time.

Table of Contents

Introduction

A COMMITMENT DEVICE is a way to lock oneself into following a plan of action that one might not want to do, but which one knows is good for oneself. In other words, a commitment device is a way to give oneself a reward or punishment to make an empty promise stronger and believable.
Wikipedia

Short term, Commit Club is starting out as a straightforward commitment device. Commit to a challenge with ETH. Get your ETH back as you complete your challenge. Fail and forfeit your ETH to everybody successful.

Long term, the Commit Club OPOS (Open Proof of Success) protocol and the Commit Club DAO are intended to become the Web3 era Guinness World Records.

Commit Club

In its most basic form, Commit Club is a vault that can only be unlocked by successfully completing a challenge.

Derived from that, various challenge models and forms of gamification will be supported. From daily challenges to single goal-based ones; from individual challenges to group challenges.

The Commit Club smart contracts will become the most trusted authority on established records. Commit Club and its users will issue NFT achievement badges for both everyday challenges and once-in-a-lifetime records.

To attest correctly whether challenges have been achieved, Commit Club will integrate with external witness authorities. These can be real institutions, apps, juries, settled events from prediction platforms like Augur, and people.

By abstracting witnesses as smart contracts, Commit Club provides an open model for witness participation.

Accountability models that don’t rely on commitment devices

Current accountability models have several flaws:

  • Just saying you will do something is not enough for most people.
  • Accountability partners need to be kept accountable themselves.
  • Accountability partners don’t allow for challenges private to the user.
  • Memberships (i.e. a gym) are in annual or monthly payments; the feeling of loss aversion towards not using the membership quickly fades.

By relying on 1. loss aversion, 2. bounties, 3. gamification, and 4. social possibilities, Commit Club provides incentive and motivation to stick with and accomplish anything.

How the Commit Club MVP works

To quickly prototype and iterate basic functionality, Commit Club has been developed as a centralized platform with intent to fully decentralize and ultimately transform into a DAO for the public good.

At the time of writing, gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain are impractical for Commit Club if it was running on smart contracts.

However, numerous Layer2 / zkRollup / sidechain solutions have recently gone live on Ethereum Mainnet, already demonstrating high transaction throughput at lower fees. Commit Club is closely following and evaluating updates to these solutions.

The present implementation is based on an immutable proof of authority transaction system, optimized for rapid evolution and prototyping towards the desired decentralized solution.

Both the backend and frontend integrate with the Ethereum Mainnet via Web3.

Proof of check in

This most basic form of proof creates a public record that is fully authored and validated by the entity creating it.

It doesn’t prove anything beyond an entity “checked in.” It contains a text field that cannot be changed after “checking in”.

The Commit Club MVP uses the honor system. Oracles and accountability partner integrations are quickly planned for nearing iterations.

Staking

It is required to put up an ETH stake in order to create a challenge.

A user receives an equal portion of the challenge stake back upon each check in. If a challenge is failed, the user loses the remainder of the stake that has not been earned back.

Staking also allows for the Commit Club Loser Pool.

“Losers pay users” - The Loser Pool

The LOSER POOL aims to incentivize users to have active, long-running challenges on Commit Club.

Failed challenges’ remaining stakes are collected and redistributed among those who have ongoing challenges.

For the MVP, self-witness challenges profit from the following Loser Pool redistribution model:

Loser Pool reward % = (Total ETH committed in active challenges) / (Total ETH in all Commit Club active challenges within the daily check in period)

The amount received from the Loser Pool is proportional to the amount committed in active challenges compared to how much exists in all active challenges within the daily check in period.

In the Roadmap, it is planned to incentivize different challenge models with different Loser Pool participation models.

Development roadmap

Starting with Phase A (the current MVP), Commit Club will be developed over four phases.

Phase A

  • Proof of authority based platform, privately centralized. Public challenge tracking with loser pool rewards.
  • Staking challenges and loser pool rewards with real ETH cryptocurrency.
  • Continuous development and addition of functionality:
    • Issuance of NFT achievement badges.

Phase B

  • Transition to an EVM-based blockchain that integrates with the Ethereum main chain and ecosystem.
  • Proof of Trusted Witness / oracles.
  • Continuous development and addition of functionality:
    • Sponsoring.
    • New challenge types.
    • More.

Phase C

  • Establishment of a DAO and decentralized governance.

Phase D

  • Full decentralization.

In depth: future iterations

In this section there is a closer look at planned iterations.

OPOS (Open Proof Of Success) Protocol

Commit Club smart contracts are being developed for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Commit Club will transform most of its backend architecture to a fast EVM-based blockchain platform.

The Commit Club contracts will contain the Loser Pool, challenge type registry, and challenge interface. These contracts allow for:

  • Creating an active challenge.
  • Checking into a challenge.
  • Locking funds of a challenge.
  • Claiming rewards.
  • Collecting Loser Pool for a Loser Pool time period.
  • Claiming Loser Pool rewards.
  • Challenge type interface and registry.
  • Witness interface and registry.

To support the evolution of different types of challenges and challenge parameters, this smart contract will likely be reduced to the fundamental mechanisms.

NFT achievement badges

Like record trophies in the real world, NFT achievement badges could become collectors’ items with real tradable value. Most badges will be just for fun, but with the options below Commit Club NFTs could range from only personally valuable to works of art that carry value.

Commit Club NFTs also function as another way to incentivize action.

How do NFT badges work?

You receive badges by doing predefined actions and receive more than 1 badge per challenge. You can also choose to show off your badges on a Commit Club profile page.

Badges come in sets

As with sports cards, Commit Club can continually produce NFT badges.

Since some badges are different from others – badges will be organized into sets. Examples:

  • New Years, 2022 set.
  • Halloween 2023 set.
  • Sets by artist.
  • Generative variable badges have limited sets where the style changes from set to set.

Making badges rarer than others

Difficult challenges validated by an oracle are a way to increase the rarity of a badge. However, there exist many more ways to increase rarity:

  • Sets with a limited number of badges.
  • The number that the badge is in a given set. Being the first person to complete a viral challenge could be an example.
  • Badges made by well-known people and artists.
  • The user who completes a challenge that a badge is attached to can give rarity and value. A famous athlete could complete a running challenge, for example.
  • Branded badges from accountability partners / oracles. This has the added benefit of allowing non-blockchain companies to incorporate blockchain in a way that doesn’t use a currency, but instead, art.
  • Random generative variables combined together. Variables with different rarities such as color, shape, and icon could be combined.

Repeated badges have variables and single achievement badges do not.

Users can try to repeatedly accomplish challenges to get rarer badges. 

No variable examples:

  • First 100 & 1,000 people to start a challenge.
  • Completed 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 1,000 challenges.
  • Start on a holiday.
  • Limited badge made by an artist.

Variable examples:

  • Finish a challenge.
  • Start a challenge.
  • Commit more than 1 ETH.

Badges can be group-specific and user-designed.

As there will be group challenges (outlined below), group admins may create their own sets of badges, limit supply, and create conditions for achievement while setting goal posts at the same time.

Group badges can have multiple sets and group badge creators can even get royalties.

More on NFT badges

POAP.xyz provides an open-source protocol that could start as a great jumping off point for this functionality.

Both a completed challenge, as well as a check in of a challenge can be represented as a POAP.

With Commit Club, it will be possible that sets and metadata can be explored. You can see which badges have been created by an artist, earned by a user, or exist for a certain oracle, for example.

To see the current preview of NFT functionality, please visit https://app.commitclub.co/nft-preview.

Proof of Trusted Witness: accountability partners, oracles, and an API

API functionality will allow for other platforms to use the Commit Club feature set.

A simple example would be somebody committing to using a language learning app for a month straight. A more complicated example would be that the language learning app provides a branded NFT badge for completion of a challenge or streak.

The same goes for other e-learning products, wearables, fitness apps, health and wellness apps, and productivity apps.

Commit to walking a certain number of steps a day, measured by your phone.

Commit to quitting smoking, measured by a wearable band that detects nicotine in sweat.

Commit to using social media less as measured by an app tracker.

The number of applications Commit Club can fit itself into is seemingly endless. Some obvious examples: Peloton, Udemy, Mirror, Headspace, Memrise, DrinkControl, Nike Training Club, RescueTime.

Starting out with proof of trusted witness and the Commit Club contract

A smart contract associated with the challenge and authorized by the user “checks in” regularly to attest that the user did what the challenge requires.

As described above, the smart contract based implementation allows for an infinite scope of witness models. More examples:

  • A group of friends “voting” whether they observed the user doing something.
  • A group of jurors providing different scores. The smart contract calculates an average and checks in with Commit Club if a threshold is met.
  • A prediction market oracle, such as Augur.

Example integration sketch: Duolingo as a trusted witness

There could be a Duolingo challenge type in the challenge type registry.

A user creates a Duolingo challenge on Commit Club.

The user connects a Duolingo account ID with the Commit Club Duolingo witness contract, where the account ID is hashed to avoid its publication on a chain.

The user creates a challenge to gain a defined amount of experience per day over a month.

The Duolingo challenge smart contract is instantiated and emits an event.

Duolingo will check the challenge in for the user on chain, whenever the experience goal is met in the app.

Proof of trusted witness through individuals

In addition to applications serving as trusted witness, individuals, such as friends and family, could also function as accountability partners.

These individuals would provide a signature on chain using their Web3 wallets to verify that a check in was fulfilled.

An example would be friends verifying through signatures that another friend did the Ice Bucket Challenge.

The amount of individuals verifying a challenge could even work to weight loser pool rewards; more witnesses increases reward output.

Groups

Groups in Commit Club could range from:

  • Friends.
  • Businesses.
  • Localities.
  • Strangers aligned with a certain interest.

Users will be able to make challenges others can commit to and Loser Pools can be isolated to groups.

Businesses can use Commit Club for learning and development.

A group of friends can use Commit Club to commit to improve at a skill.

A neighborhood could commit to greater recycling efforts in a measured way.

A sports team could commit to five miles run daily.

A tutor could use sponsorships or goal-based challenges to give a partial refund for daily attendance or class performance.

Any group could incentivize members with NFT badges.

Sponsorships

The API + sponsorships allows for an individual to receive money or NFT badges from an organization or other individual in return for completing a challenge.

A father sponsors his daughter for doing a 30-day Spanish challenge in Memrise.

A group sponsors a friend to quit smoking.

Nike sponsors a disabled person doing daily training for a marathon.

A boss uses the feature to reward salespeople who are hitting quotas for Salesforce calls made.

Again, this could be sponsorship with an NFT badge, with cryptocurrency, or with both.

Alternative to airdrops

Tokens from any organization will be possible rewards for users. Combined with sponsorships, group challenges, and Proof of Trusted Witness this will create a powerful way to incentivize people.

An employer, for example, could use tokens that represent a company’s equity to automatically reward employees for hitting KPIs as measured by an oracle.

Week challenges

Week challenges allow for people to use a week time interval as opposed to a day.

This is ideal for achievements that are too difficult to measure granularly on a daily level.

Commit to losing a certain amount of weight each week.

Commit to reducing blood-glucose levels every week.

Non-linear rewards

Non-linear rewards will be introduced.

Users will be able to start with small rewards that increase as a challenge goes on.

There will also be randomized rewards and periodic rewards.

Rewards of this nature don’t just have to work with cryptocurrencies, but can also work with NFT badges.

Single goal-based challenges

With single event-based commits validated by an oracle, especially with decentralized smart contract functionality, the use cases of Commit Club expand dramatically.

Groups could commit to accomplishing a single task rather than checking in daily.

An individual could commit to completing an assignment or piece of work by a certain date.

There are endless business examples where employees could be rewarded for accomplishing goals that are measurable – such as the Salesforce example mentioned in the Sponsorship section.

Groups of people could sponsor an individual into completing any single task.

First-to-complete and winner-takes-all challenges

Like the famous Seinfeld episode, a user who holds out long enough could get the bounty staked by the group or, alternatively, a prize given by the group administrator.

There will also be first-to-complete challenges where a user who is first to complete a challenge receives the entire stake and/or sponsorship. This could range from climbing a mountain, to finding a hidden item, to achieving a speedrun in a video game.

APY

Users can choose to have their commitment stakes earn APY.

The APY will only be given to a user when a challenge is completed in full.

If not completed, the APY goes to the Loser Pool.

Commit Club becoming a DAO

As is evident from this whitepaper, Commit Club is a digitalized version of many social mechanisms, services, and tools that already exist in the analog world which are usually carried out by “man in the middle” actors, like the attestation of world records in the Guinness World Records.

Instead of becoming a monopolist company that uses its power for the profit of its owners, it should belong to anyone with a significant interest in it.

It is therefore intended to gradually find capable actors and incentivize them with digitalized governance power over Commit Club, the tool, its mission and growth; to eventually return it into public hands.

The DAO will, for instance, evaluate and approve witness contracts, allocate funds on the development of future iterations, and expand Commit Club’s reach.

Details will be announced in the DAO Whitepaper (TBD).

Conclusion

The Commit Club MVP is the first step of many towards creating a public-owned commitment device.

This is a new type of commitment device – the device also functions as a trusted public record of achievement and a platform that encourages society through a variety of incentives.

Anything can be encouraged with this device and blockchains and accountability partners prove to the public that the tasks being encouraged actually took place.

Finally, this isn’t going to be a company-owned platform, but a community-owned and governed one.

Thank you

This is a huge undertaking and even though many challenges are individual-based, the challenge of building this platform will be undertaken as a community.

We welcome all feedback and participation requests.

Please get in touch with us through Discord, Twitter, or our contact page.

Thank you for reading.