KEEP NEWS
Playing for Keeps Kicks Off with First Three Judges Announced
12 May
Blog

Zaki Manian, Spencer Noon, Viktor Bunin will be the first to award KEEP tokens for contributions adding the most value to the network


Drum roll, please.

We are honored to announce the kickoff of Playing for Keeps with our first three judges: Cosmos’s Zaki Manian, DTC’s Spencer Noon, and Bison Trails’s Viktor Bunin.

Playing for Keeps, which we announced last month, is a chance to learn to stake and win KEEP tokens by contributing to the community. Anyone can join in and start earning. More than that, it’s about growing as a community. We don’t just want you to join a Telegram channel to swap gossip — we want our talented supporters to contribute something that makes a real difference to the Keep Network. We take community seriously: we want anyone who makes a positive difference to the growth of Keep to flourish with the entire project.

So we’re rewarding support in truly meaningful ways designed to make a real difference in your life and career. Our judges will award prizes from 100–100,000 KEEP for the work that adds the most value to the network in the most critical areas. Beyond the material rewards, Playing for Keeps is a way to get involved in one of the most exciting blockchain projects currently underway — at the ground floor. People who Play for Keeps stand to gain visibility and recognition in the space as key contributors to this exciting project.

What is “Playing for Keeps”?

Playing for Keeps will run during 2020 including during the public stakedrop that starts on June 8th. In fact, a major part of the initial stage of Playing for Keeps is the buildup to our stakedrop, which lets ETH holders earn KEEP by proving their ability to secure the Keep network. One of our illustrious judges will take the lead each month in selecting the best community contributions. Zaki is up first and winners will be announced in early June. We will also be revealing more judges as the game progresses over the coming months.

Starting June 8, the tBTC stakedrop lets ETH holders earn KEEP by proving their ability to secure the Keep network. tBTC, which lets people safely earn with their Bitcoin, is the first app built atop the Keep Network. Anyone can deposit their BTC to take full advantage of Ethereum, and anyone with the capital and know-how will be able to earn fees staking and supporting the bridge.

Join the stakedrop on June 8th, 2020

How do you “Play for Keeps”?

Join our Discord: In order to qualify your submission for Playing for Keeps prizes, you must join our Discord server and give us a quick overview of who you are in the introduction message. We want to get to know everyone and make sure we don’t miss any submissions, so make sure you join the Discord.

Please note: you can make your submission post in #introduce-yourself anytime — it does not have to be immediately after joining the server. However, a message on Discord is required for entry.

Submit a Play for Keeps entry message in #introduce-yourself which includes:

  • A name by which to address you in the channel
  • Why you’re interested in Keep or tBTC
  • What you are submitting for Playing for Keeps prizes — This can be an idea if you aren’t ready with a fully formed idea!
  • If you’ve already produced something you want to submit as an entry

There is a public document at etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Playing_For_Keeps_Submissions which includes a short template for submissions if you wish to submit with more detail here, though this is supplemental to Discord. Please do not delete work that you did not submit. Doing so will result in disqualification.

If you choose staking as your contribution to Playing for KEEPs, you will receive a reward after staking on the Ropsten testnet for four weeks. These awards signify that someone has “graduated” from Ropsten and is now a signer on mainnet. Show your work — we want to see anything and everything you can provide us!

How is ‘Playing for Keeps’ Judged?

Each month there will be a new judging period presided over by one of our six judges. While judges can each determine their own criteria for awarding prizes, to be announced at the beginning of their respective months, equal rewards will be distributed in each period. Prizes range from 100 to 100,000 KEEP.

Judging Schedule

If you have any questions, feel free to ask Kris on Discord.

Judging criteria

Each judge will determine their own key criteria for prizes. This month, our judge is Zaki. He’s looking for ingenuity and creativity in Playing for Keeps submissions and says, “The most important contributions use protocols in ways that were unexpected even to their creators.”

Judges will base the prizes on what’s visible in Discord and Github. Show your work — contract deployments, prototypes, issues and github PRs, medium articles, stuff that’s working perfectly, stuff that’s a little buggy (let’s fix it!), documentation, pretty much anything! Show us your work on Discord and enter any links into this shared document.

Some ideas of things we’d like to see:

  • Simplified documentation including user guides and walkthroughs.
  • Targeting both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Open Format: use text, video, animation, infographics, or other formats.
  • Helping people get staking in our Discord
  • Developer guides and walkthroughs
  • Writing on how tBTC will change the DeFi and crypto ecosystems — blogs, essays, etc.
  • Bug & security reports
  • Improvements to the Keep client & contracts and the tBTC system
  • Translations of documentation and websites
  • Extensions to the Keep token dashboard
  • Staking guides for different kinds of hardware
  • A Keep staking explorer
  • a tBTC deposit explorer
  • a tBTC liquidation auction dApp
  • tBTC on Tornado Cash
  • tBTC on DEXs, especially newer DEXs like Loopring
  • a tBTC deposit widget based on tbtc.js, simplifying integration for new devs

On the translations side we‘re looking for:

  • The actual i18n code done on tbtc.network and keep.network
  • We’d like to see support for Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, and Cantonese.
  • Translations of Keep blog posts, community guides, and content.

We’re interested in the following user research contributions:

  • Usability research
  • User testing with feedback/recommendations
  • Compiled list of user FAQs with answers for documentation

Branding and design contributions we’d like to see:

  • A more extensive brand media kit, based on current Keep Brand Kit. Ideally one that hosts downloadable variations of all logomarks on the Keep press page.
  • Keep swag mockups (any kind of swag!)
  • Animations. For example, transitional animations for the product itself, illustrating use of dApp, etc.
  • Instructive videos or instructive GIFs using the dApp.

We have specific terms and conditions for Playing for Keeps. Again, the best way to get involved is to join the Keep Discord channel and sign up for the June 8 stakedrop.

Those Playing for Keeps won’t be lonely. At the start of the Keep network mainnet launch on April 27, we were thrilled to announce forty leading industry companies partnering to support Keep and tBTC, the open-source project bringing BTC to Ethereum DeFi applications. In fact, the companies already integrating with tBTC now represent 80 percent of the whole DeFi market.

Help bring Bitcoin to Ethereum

tBTC, which lets people safely earn with their Bitcoin, is the first app built atop the Keep Network. As a community, we can make tBTC the first permissionless Bitcoin sidechain in production. Anyone can deposit their BTC to take full advantage of Ethereum, and anyone with the capital and know-how will be able to earn fees staking and support the bridge.

Starting June 8, the tBTC stakedrop lets ETH holders earn KEEP by proving their ability to secure the Keep network. tBTC uses a system of “signers’ groups” to process transactions without a trusted middleman. Normally, tBTC signers need to stake both KEEP and ETH. But the stakedrop allows people with no KEEP to act as signers using only their ETH, with the corresponding KEEP tokens earned over time. Of course, anyone who wins KEEP during Playing for Keeps can then stake those KEEP on the mainnet and also continue to earn more KEEP during the stakedrop by staking ETH.

For more on Keep’s role in tBTC, read here. To learn how to set up a Keep node, read our guide.