Project title:
Smart Recruiting Contracts
Summary:
Croupier is a provably fair sweepstakes bot (XLM giveaways). Outcomes are decided with Keybase’s /flip functionality. It is entirely open source. We have a development plan for using Keybase /flip and smart contracts to conveniently power provably fair social media giveaways and then leveraging our open source Stellar + Keybase design patterns to build a smart recruiting contract service.
Objective:
Attract new users + developers to Keybase + Stellar, increasing XLM throughput for commercial transactions.
Description:
Let’s start things off with a screenshot
We got our feet wet with Stellar with a Keybase bot that enables users to launch a provably fair sweepstakes to give away XLM. One of the best ways for a cryptocurrency to gain traction is through giveaways. This is a pattern that has had historic success in this past decade, exemplified through early mining rewards, airdrops, rewards for sharing content and inviting friends, and faucets. Yes, we started with XLM giveaways because it’s easy and it works.
Keybase internal graph of reaction-activity: guess when Croupier was launched
The bot is currently configured as such that each sweepstakes is complicated by an extraneous game mechanic involving powerups. This game mechanic is extensible/removable: contests could be decided by pure randomness or another means, such as poker.
Croupier is built on Keybase, so the project supports users on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The project is entirely open source and has already served as a pattern to inspire new Keybase/Stellar bots. In fact, several people have built bots to play Croupier itself!
Anyway, the next stop on our roadmap is Twitter integration, which is going to increase accessibility to people on low-end hardware such as Chromebooks and low-end Android phones as well as connect us to the entire Twitter user base. Once we integrate with Twitter, initially, Twitter platform users will be subject to the as-is game dynamics, but once we make this transition (while bringing our existing userbase to maintain momentum), the next stop on the roadmap is to power provably fair + simple + convenient social media RT/Like/Comment-To-Enter sweepstakes contests.
We are so close to clearing a major psychological hurdle: building something user-worthy on crypto where the beneficiaries have no abundant awareness of the crypto tech.
There is a body of law governing sweepstakes giveaways, and after consulting several credible lawyers, we feel strongly that a de minimis amount of legal investment is going to prevent a lot of headaches. A small amount of the grant would be allocated to paralegal attention to the official rules and terms of service.
But, we realize that there are risks in addition to the legal risks. Maybe fairness is not a priority for people who run RT-to-enter social media giveaways – just the perception of fairness. But shipping provably fair social media sweepstakes is just so easy once we leverage what we’ve already built – it would be a shame not to. So that’s our plan, and maybe it’ll get enough traction to dedicate ongoing efforts. Maybe. But if not, our plan, from the beginning, is to leverage the Stellar and Keybase tech to scratch our own itch.
Code For Cash is a software engineer recruiting firm. In recruiting parlance, a “fee split” is when a recruiter agrees to split a recruitment bounty with someone who refers them to a candidate. But there are limits to the dynamic. Recruiters don’t set up split fee relationships with lots of peers because (i) recruiters don’t trust companies to pay, (ii) recruiters don’t trust their peers to pay, (iii) there’s a huge overhead cost in tracking all the relationships, and (iv) recruiters get spammed with garbage referrals.
Similarly, companies don’t set up massive parallel relationships with contingency recruiters because (i) companies have a procurement overhead, (ii) companies don’t want to get spammed with garbage candidates, and (iii) confusion over fee attribution creates liability.
A smart recruiting contract pattern (i) creates professional collaboration & trust between recruiters who don’t already have a relationship cemented by social bonds, (ii) solves the quality problem through incentives on all sides, (iii) enforces good behavior, and (iv) manages reputation.
Our recruiting contract with Keybase, Inc., guarantees them the right to pay our success fee in XLM. There is a validated market for bountying recruitment contracts with XLM; for now, Code For Cash is glad to serve as the intermediary, dealing directly with companies (our clients) and serving as a proxy when funding smart contracts.
While we are in a position to economically guarantee the supply side, the demand side has risks. We are optimistic about a market transition – yes, creating value for companies through expediting the sourcing process, but more meaningfully, enabling developers to properly capture value of their peer network rather than handing that to recruiters. Although there is a validated $100M+ market for fee splits, developers may not enjoy the UX we offer; that could introduce delays as we iterate through feedback and make something easy-to-use and credible that aligns with expectations.
Our backup plan, if developers don’t want to capture network value through smart recruiting contracts, is to bring tech recruiters onto the split fee network since they’re already habituated to fee split behavior. In our recruiting business, we have a proprietary Chrome extension that lets us speed through the engineering sourcing process through applying heuristics (signals that proxy for talent). A lot of recruiters have expressed the wish to pay for this; once we make it available, we will offer free access if they join the split fee network.
While our plan might seem meandering, the point is to, through a series of extremely achievable goals, accumulate user encouragement and momentum along each step of the roadmap, systematically address risks, and develop facility in developing for Stellar.
Key Results / Metrics
We measure the project’s success with:
- Number of unique sweepstakes participants
- New wallets created for winners' first XLM
- New Keybase and Stellar developers (proxy metrics are inspirational anecdotes of people who've been inspired by Croupier to make similar bots and people who've made bots to play Croupier itself)
Once recruiting smart contracts launch, we add two new results to measure the project’s success with:
- Total (XLM) bounty for staked contracts
- Total (XLM) bounties paid for phone screens and successful hires
Technical Plan and Timetable:
Phase 1. Build on our existing momentum and enable virality with Twitter / non-Keybase extensibility
- RT to enter, with winners receiving XLM via Keybase at their twitter address: About one day to prototype end-to-end, with several more to test and bugfix 🙂
- Twitter + Instagram UX for launching giveaways: About one day to prototype end-to-end, several more to test, then several further days for reaching out to influencers and convincing them to tag this to host their next giveaway
Phase 2. Migrate sweepstakes to Stellar smart contracts
- Right now, all the Croupier pots are stored in memory and paged to a mongoDB
- The initial concept is that we could pledge all assets in the pot to a wallet that pays out via a smart contract. Tinkering is required to see whether we could implement a smart contract listener for Keybase random numbers as well. The result of this will be smart contract that solves a real-world problem and paves the way for future smart contract developments.
- We envision two to four weeks for this stage.
Phase 3. Implement Recruiting Smart Contracts
- Leverage our open source modules to spin out an entirely new bot, for recruiting smart contract
- Build Keybase interface to start and stake a bounty, cancel a bounty, accept or reject candidates
- Connect our offline oracle for heuristically scoring a CV
- Stake bounties for approved phone screen roles on behalf of our current client base, including companies like Keybase and Betterment
- Build social media marketing campaign to promote each individual smart recruiting contract campaign
- We envision six to twelve weeks for this stage, including several iterations due to user feedback
Relevant Documentation:
Demo:
The best way to experience the bot is to join the @mkbot#cryptosnipe channel on Keybase. The entire channel is entered into a sweepstakes for 2.01XLM every 2.5h if there isn’t one already live (the amount ensures any participant can receive winnings, even if they do not already have a wallet).
This regularly scheduled XLM propagation costs us just $50 USD/month but gives the project momentum and ensures there’s an active user base, eager to give and receive feedback – creating quick feedback cycles is a key part of our development strategy.
