Decentralized Staking Support Group

The 'Decentralized Staking Support Group' is a proactive, multilingual team assisting current and potential stakers in public channels with DOT staking queries, providing up-to-date guides and motivational content to navigate the complexities and challenges of staking.

Background:

After our initial proposal for a DAO terminal with news aggregation received justified criticism, we continued our market research. We analyzed DOT communities in various languages and noticed a significant volume of questions related to the use of tokens for earning APY (staking, liquid staking, crowdloans, etc.). These questions often involve tokens stuck, losing rewards, crowdloan unlocking, vote locks/stuck, liquid staking mapping, wallet UI, pools, and many more. Especially following recent unlocking events.

Problem:

While staking in Polkadot offers attractive APY and draws user interest, the ecosystem's complexity, including aspects like parachains, slot renewals, liquid staking, exchange staking, pools, validator selection, and wallet migrations, makes it exceedingly challenging for average users to resolve issues independently. The decentralized and (VERY!) dynamic nature of Polkadot further complicates self-help solutions. Community responses are often unavailable, and in some cases, resolving issues, especially those specific to certain wallets or liquid staking of parachains is nearly impossible without up-to-date knowledge.

All of these processes occur in different places across diverse platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Discord, as well as within wallet and validator communities, and unfold in multiple languages, including Vietnamese, Spanish, and Russian. The same applies to new features related to staking, pools, and voting. All of this is further complicated by the complexity and decentralization of the ecosystem.

​​Objective:

We aim to proactively support stakers (especially with the changing staking rate and the onset of unlocking phases). We aim to provide detailed, up-to-date, and relevant answers, assisting users with staking, pools, unlocking, liquid staking, etc., in the channels where they are most comfortable. Additionally, we aim to onboard them into a content channel (as proposed by Kian) dedicated to staking proactively and all events focused on it.

Proposal:

The proposal consists of two interconnected elements:

1. Decentralized Staking Support Group: staking experts in various language groups and channels provide support, providing detailed guides, and assisting with staking-related queries.
2. Staking-related Content Channel: Collecting emails and adding users to a news tg/Twitter/email with the latest staking news and guides.
   Both elements are linked: the support group constantly updates channels with new cases and refers to their content, allowing users to interact with both the channel and the moderators in their preferred space. The content channel offers an organic user onboarding method: it consolidates all guides and news simultaneously, allowing users to subscribe directly via the guides.

Product Setup:

1. Content Channels: Maintain up-to-date channels on Twitter, Substack, and Telegram, providing necessary guides in the main languages.
2. Team Notification System: Implement a notification system to aggregate relevant questions across different channels, utilizing hashtags, keywords, and LLM-based solutions.
3. Multilingual Support Team: Deploy a team proficient in multiple languages to respond to and guide users effectively. Part of the Support Team will be recruited from the validators/nominators/ambassadors.
4. Active Monitoring and Assistance: Ensure the support team actively monitors both new and existing channels, continuously updating question sets and providing timely assistance to users.
5. User Engagement: Motivate users to subscribe to staking channels for the latest news and guides.
6. Informative and Motivational Content: relevant information about rewards and user-friendly guides to engage and educate the community for all-levels of stakers.

Benefits:

A key strength of the DSSG solution is its decentralized approach: independent support members autonomously engage with users at the point of their problem, offering assistance in a language the user understands. This community-first concept enables more independent responses than what might be provided by a specific company (wallet, team, service, etc.) or a Parity/w3f. Additionally, the system self-improves with each case, updating guides that are openly accessible to everyone, everywhere.

1. The support group's neutrality allows for unbiased responses in various ecosystem groups (wallets, validators, and so on).
2. The company is independent of Parity and does not provide investment advice.
3. Proactive audience engagement.
4. Ability to monitor and decentralize the latest events for the community.
5. Open-source up-to-date guides.

Budget Proposal:

Project Duration: Three-month test period, preceded by one month of preparation to gather relevant information.
Languages: English, Spanish, Turkish, Russian.
Test Components:

1. Database of Guides (4 languages): One month of preparation + three months of support.
2. Support Notifier Backend (LLM, tags, etc.) + simple bot + backend database: One month of preparation + three months of support.
3. Substack (Guides + News) + Telegram Channel + Twitter: Three months of content creation (no prep).
4. Three non-eng Moderators for a Trial Period: Three months of content moderation (no prep).

Budget Allocation Draft can be found here

Reporting:

Monthly reporting.
Metrics of success:

1. Guides per staking problem. Expect 20+ guides in 4 languages in 4 months (80 total)
2. Content about staking: 4 posts per month for 3 months, 12 total per language (48 in total).
3. Emails: 4 per month for 3 months, 12 total per language (48 in total).
4. Support queries: demand based.

Team

DSSG team has a strong team with solid Polkadot traction. The primary research performed by the team was focused on the research of governance and messages and on-chain activity.
Nikita K: served in and led marketing teams for crypto Launchpads on Polygon/BNB/Avax networks from 2020.
Dmitri: Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript. Solutions in database organization. Served both small-scale start-ups and large corporations. github.com/redboo

Contacts

1. Address: 15SN9iNKxCJJjQ5f6JXEDxiaS6bRHxxTZtsfm3wCSSjyoENg (DAO_)
2. Matrix is the best way to connect: @dao_:matrix.org
3. Alternative way: [email protected]