[2501 BIG] Fund Asami’s Campaign Manager—Earn Tokens for You & the Collective

Grants & Incentives
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Fund Asami’s Campaign Manager—Earn Tokens for You & the Collective

Read in 3 minutes.

Overview

We are Constata, the creators of the Asami protocol, and currently the only member of the club serving as a campaign administrator.

Asami is a club where members pay each other to repost content on X. Advertisers set up campaigns, and collaborators repost content, earning payments based on their influence level.

As a Campaign Administrator, we act as a neutral third party between Advertisers and Collaborators.

  • We connect to the X API to determine collaborators’ influence levels.
  • We register reposts on-chain as an oracle, ensuring payments via smart contracts.
  • The protocol supports multiple campaign administrators, limiting risk to the managed campaign’s budget.
  • It provides flexibility, allowing rewards for various types of engagement across social networks and payments in RBTC instead of DOC.

Business Model

We earn 40% of the Asami tokens issued per collaboration, along with bi-weekly dividends from those tokens.

The protocol also allows us to charge a DOC fee per collaboration, but we currently set this at 0%.

Expenses & Revenue

Current Monthly Costs: ~$2600

  • RSK fees: $700 (avg. last 3 months)
  • X API access: $200
  • Servers: $150
  • Other infrastructure (Cloudflare, nodes): $65
  • Support & Marketing: $500
  • DevOps: $1,000

Current Monthly Revenue: ~$30

  • Direct fees: $0
  • Protocol revenue sharing: $30

Funding Requirements

We seek funding to:
:white_check_mark: Improve the influence level algorithm to enhance fairness for advertisers and collaborators.
:white_check_mark: Support new campaign types (e.g., payments for likes, comments, follows).
:white_check_mark: Develop better advertiser tools (e.g., campaign insights, collaborator selection).
:white_check_mark: Cover operational costs until break-even.

Growth Plan & Break-Even Target

To achieve sustainability, we aim to reach:

  • 14,000 collaborators
  • 115 advertisers spending $500/month
  • $57,000 in monthly rewards paid out

At this scale, costs would rise, but break-even would be achieved at $8,500 in monthly expenses.

To sustain this, we will increase the campaign manager fee to 10%, generating $5,700 in direct revenue.

We also assume gas fees won’t scale linearly, keeping network costs at ~10% of rewards (~$4,900/month).

:pushpin: Note: Our core marketing budget is not included in this proposal—we plan to secure separate funding for that, including an attempt to become an Activated Builder.

Projected Monthly Financials at Break-Even

Expenses: ~$8500

  • RSK fees: $4,900
  • X API access: $1,000
  • Servers: $200
  • Other infrastructure: $135
  • Support & Marketing: $1,300
  • DevOps: $1,000

Revenue ~$8500

  • Direct fees: $5,700
  • Protocol revenue sharing: $2,800

Investment Proposal

Executing this plan will take three years, assuming annual growth of 5%, 4%, and 3%, respectively.

We seek $105,000 to fund operations and feature development over this period. That is $90,000 for ongoing costs and $15,000 for new features.

:bulb: What we offer investors:

  • 100% of Asami tokens earned as campaign managers during this period will be distributed to voters of this proposal and the Rootstock collective.
  • Bi-monthly distributions (or sooner):
    • 50% to proposal voters, proportional to voting power.
    • 50% to the Rootstock collective treasury.

:pushpin: Projected returns after 3 years:

  • Backers and the collective will receive between 2.8M and 4.6M Asami tokens.
  • Estimated total supply: 10M–14M ASAMI tokens out of 21M issuance cap.
  • Each token would receive 0.0004–0.0005 DOC/month in revenue sharing (from $5.7K protocol fees).
  • At 5.5x projected annual revenue, the total tokens received by backers and the collective during three years would be worth $112K–$124K.

Final Thoughts

Our growth and valuation estimates are conservative yet realistic. Optimism or pessimism is up to you. :rocket:

We understand that the Rootstock Collective primarily focuses on grant allocation, whereas this proposal leans more towards a crowdfunding model. However, we believe this is the right place to present it first.

This proposal aligns with Rootstock’s incentives, and it feels natural to give back to both our backers and the collective itself. If Asami succeeds, the proceeds can be reinvested into other future projects—some of which we might not even know about today.

We’re eager to hear the community’s thoughts—both on this type of proposal and on the specifics of our request—before submitting it on-chain.

To keep it concise and accessible, we’ve kept this brief, but we welcome any questions in the comments and will gladly expand where needed.

Additionally, we have a sister proposal focused on getting Asami activated as a builder, using those funds to fuel further growth.

If you got this far we also invite you to join the club in https://asami.club

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Sounds like an awesome plan. Awesome to see airdrops planned for RootstockCollective community members.

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Questions

  1. Who is expected to contribute the $105,000 in funding?

  • Are these funds expected to come from individual backers, or the Rootstock Collective treasury?

  • How would the contributions be structured? Would they be made in RBTC, DOC?

  • Who would receive and manage the funds? Would they go directly to Constata?

  1. Can you clarify the tokenomics of ASAMI?

  • Who currently holds ASAMI tokens, and how are they distributed?

  • What are the incentives for holding ASAMI? How do holders benefit financially?

  • Is there a planned allocation or vesting schedule?

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Great questions @Manu!

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Great questions, I’ll answer inline. It’s important to note this is a request for a grant to the collective, so I’ll answer in those terms. (If this proposal fails, we may look for seed funding elsewhere, from individuals and companies, I think some of your questions apply to that scenario, but my answers here may not cover that).

The collective treasury would be contributing the $105,000. While this proposal has elements similar to a seed round, or a crowdfunding proposal, the mechanism will be a grant.

Yes, this is a request for a grant so the funds would be coming from the collective treasury, and the ASAMI tokens delivered in exchange would go 50% to the collective and 50% to voters, proportional to their voting power. These percentages can be changed as part of this discussion.

This is up to the collective, RBTC, RIF, StRIF and DOC work.

They will be received and managed by Constata in a hardware wallet backed account. I’m the company’s managing director.

The ASAMI token is an ERC20 token with a cap of 21M.

Asami tokens are issued when a collaboration is registered, proportional to the collaboration reward size, and adjusted by an issuance rate.

  • 40% of the new tokens go to the campaign administrator.
  • 30% go to the advertiser.
  • 30% go to the collaborator.
    The tokens are initially credited in the user’s ‘unclaimed’ balances, they need to claim them for them to actually be minted.

The issuance rate is adjusted to target 100.000 tokens every 15 days. More collaborations in a given 15 day period will lower the issuance rate, less collaborations would raise this rate.

Asami collects a 10% fee for each collaboration. These DOCs are distributed proportionally to all ASAMI token holders every 15 days. Tokens received in a given 15 day period need to wait until the next period to start receiving revenue sharing.

Apart from the revenue sharing, ASAMI tokens can be used to vote on the base protocol fee, the 10%, can be raised or lowered by holders.

ASAMI tokens are being transparently and fairly allocated to actual users of the protocol by the smart contract itself. No premine, no planned allocation, nor built-in advantages.

Current supply is: 2,641,416.00

The campaign administrator (us) address has: 945,527.00 Rootstock Explorer

This whale status arises from the 40% issuance of all new tokens, while there are no other campaign administrators.

This proposal’s offer is to redirect the ASAMI tokens received by us for the next 3 years, to the voters and the collective treasury, in real time, no vesting needed, they would become holders immediately and start receiving whatever revenue sharing is due every 15 days.

The proposal also does some number crunching about the conservative valuation of those tokens in 3 years, but the amount of ASAMI tokens to deliver as part of this proposal is open for negotiation, and could include the tokens we already own.

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Wow. Thank you for all the answers!! I will support this proposal!

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Hi! Following @Manu 's questions, please find below some more:

  1. How many users actively interacting with Asami’s platform are today?

  2. If funding is granted, expected time frame to achieve break even is 3 years? Also, it would be great if you could provide a monthly/quarterly growth projections.

  3. Asami’s proposal is to achieve the total amount of the grant at once? Or getting funding after fulfilling certain milestones is an option? If so, what are the proposed milestones?

  4. By receiving ASAMI tokens two features is to decide on the protocol fees and to receive revenue every 15 days, correct? Is there any other feature linked to the token?

Two additional comments:

  1. I believe that this is a treasury allocation proposal. Incentivizing voters to vote in favor of a project is a Collective Rewards feature and I believe we should not mix concepts. If funding is granted, I strongly believe ASAMI tokens should go to the DAO treasury for the benefit of the entire community.

  2. If you could share ASAMI token whitepaper or similar document it would be great.

Question to the @GrantsTeam: Does the DAO treasury support holding ASAMI tokens?

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Hi! I’ll reply in place.
Sorry for the late reply, I had to think a bit about the answers.
I’m at the same time thinking about how fitting this proposal would be for rootstock collective and for Asami. See, I have to take your questions mostly as suggestions to consider if the proposal fails.
Usually plan and roadmap negotiations occur with a representative of the investing parties, but I think we don’t have anyone in that role here (or do we?) I think not having a single investing party to negotiate a deal is to be expected in a decentralized platform, but also means I don’t know how changes to the proposal actually improve or reduce its chances of being funded.
So, it seems like the best course of action for Asami is to trial-and-error to discover this, unless anyone has a better suggestion.

80 distinct X users in the past 30 days.
200 distinct X users since june 2024.

Yes, projected break even is in 3 years if growing YOY 5x, 4x, and 3x, which is extrapolated from industry standard numbers.
You can probably handle the quarterly growth estimates yourself. I just want to emphasize this grant would be the equivalent of seed money, projections are to be taken with a grain of salt. If anything, I would draw backer attention to whether they think the team has the skill and commitment to achieve this, and the upside for the Asami tokens delivered in exchange, plus the value for the Rootstock ecosystem.

This proposal’s intent is to achieve the total amount of the grant at once.

A plan based on milestones is certainly possible, since the tokens delivered are proportional to the funding, and most of the funding is for paying operational costs. The 15k for new features stick out a bit, but roughly “one third the funding for one third the Asami tokens” seems like a natural partition of this plan.

Exactly, at the moment those are the only on-chain enforceable features: Vote in the protocol fees (no frontend for this yet) and receiving revenue sharing (no frontend needed, you get them in your wallet, we pay the gas for dividend distribution). That’s in the smart contract and cannot be changed.
But as a campaign manager we could offer voting on things we manage, such as which projects to advertise for free.

Only sending Asami tokens for this proposal to the Treasury and none to voters sounds reasonable. I’m also considering there may be some level of either centralization or cohesion in the community that favours this distinction.
I can leave this type of voter ‘bribe’ as an experiment in the backburner, if anything.

Thanks for your feedback and questions!

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I appreciate the questions and responses in this thread; they’ve been very helpful.

Following @Inopor’s question about structuring funding in milestones, I’d like to explore this further. You mentioned a division of “one-third of the funding for one-third of the Asami tokens”, could you clarify what specific milestones you envision for each phase? In DAOs like Arbitrum, grants are often disbursed in stages based on clear metrics, such as validated user growth or the implementation of key features before releasing additional funds. Would a similar approach be feasible here?

Additionally, this discussion could open a broader conversation within Rootstock Collective and the community on how to improve grant allocation frameworks. Would defining clearer evaluation mechanisms and phased funding distribution benefit the ecosystem? I’d love to hear the community’s thoughts on this.

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I can outline a roadmap with milestone-based funding—something we’ve already done with the initial grant from Rootstock Labs.

In practice, though, we had to deviate from that roadmap as we uncovered new insights along the way. Ultimately, progress depended on the good will and mutual understanding of both parties.

A rigid plan can also be unfair if the founding team commits to a three-year roadmap while the funding party only commits to a fraction of that timeframe. Additionally, unforeseen challenges, miscalculations, or new opportunities can arise. If funding is too tightly structured, securing additional resources would require extra administrative effort.

At this early stage, a plan primarily demonstrates that we’ve done our homework. But for the project to succeed, we need the flexibility to adapt when necessary. This applies to both long-term and shorter-term plans, though balancing structured planning with adaptability is difficult to convey. On one hand, I need to present reasonable projections to make the opportunity compelling. On the other, the project is still evolving, with many unknowns—meaning the real bet is on the Asami team’s ability to figure things out.

With that in mind, I propose an ongoing/renewable funding mechanism:

  • We request a sum, outlining its intended use, expected outcomes, and relevant KPIs or metrics. We also estimate the timeframe for delivering results.
  • However, we retain the right to use the funds as needed, even if that means deviating from the original plan or taking longer than anticipated.
  • In exchange, we send the collective treasury a sum of ASAMI tokens, upfront, we can do this using tokens already owned by the campaign administrator. The amount is open to negotiation, depending on how we engage with the decentralized community. We will also provide projected token valuations as with the plan above to help you have an idea of the upside.
  • Once the funds are used, we present a report detailing how they were spent, the results achieved, and a new funding request with another token allocation. If the results are satisfactory—even if they don’t match the original plan—funding can continue. If not, the funding party can walk away while still keeping the tokens.

Would this approach work for you?

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Thanks for the detailed response, Nubis—I appreciate the thought put into this.

I agree that overly rigid plans can sometimes be counterproductive, and this approach strikes a solid balance between flexibility and accountability, which is crucial in crypto.

You mentioned that Rootstock Labs previously used a milestone-based funding approach—I’d love to learn more about how that played out in practice. What worked well? What could have been improved? Are there any key takeaways that could be applied here?

Looking forward to hearing more insights and perspectives!

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I was just checking my notifications and realized I still owed you a reply about this. Sorry about that.

Thanks for the detailed response, Nubis—I appreciate the thought put into this.

I agree that overly rigid plans can sometimes be counterproductive, and this approach strikes a solid balance between flexibility and accountability, which is crucial in crypto.

You mentioned that Rootstock Labs previously used a milestone-based funding approach—I’d love to learn more about how that played out in practice. What worked well? What could have been improved? Are there any key takeaways that could be applied here?

Looking forward to hearing more insights and perspectives!

The milestone based approach consisted of submitting a series of milestones such as features in the product, or meeting other KPIs defined by us. They had no demands, we just wrote what we thought we would do, and some time estimation on when we would get it done.
We planned 3 milestones, which split the 25K grant into 10K-10K-5K.
All milestones were written as an appendix to the grant contract.
The wording on the contract was a bit ambiguous, it could be understood as if we were getting the grant money after reaching each milestone, but in practice we used grant funds to reach them.

The communication, delivery of the funds, mutual understanding, and overall good will worked very well.

The pre-set feature set and goals not so much. (I’ll continue in the next message)

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These are the initial milestones we had, and comments on how things turned out.
The quoted text was written in the grant agreement. But in informal private conversations we anticipated we may have to deviate a “little bit”, in retrospective that was an understantement.

First Milestone: The First Milestone shall be achieved within 1 month after the
execution of the agreement and shall consist in having a platform that explains the main
workflow and relation between Advertisers, Members, and the smart contract that binds
them, as follows:

○ 1) Advertiser journey, including:
■ Advertisers can sign up with their wallet and submit the post they want to
have reposted.

We overdelivered this one, we had web2 login with facebook and X, and advertisers could suggest campaigns and publish them without paying on the site itself. (This free advertising was later removed)

■ Asami Platform makes concrete suggestions about how much they should
spend, and what the reach would be: “Pay 500 USD to reach 30000 people
on X and Instagram, or 200 USD to reach 8000 people in X and Nostr,
through genuine reposts”.

We had this, but with not enough data it was pointless to keep it, so it was later removed.

■ Advertisers can pay for their campaigns in USD or RBTC. We will
onboard advertisers with trial campaigns paid by Asami Platform.

We had the trial campaings, we still have a program to run campaigns free of charge for advertisers. But they were never able to pay with RBTC, it’s always and only DOC.

■ Advertisers will get their own dashboard listing their campaigns and
metrics such as how many times they’ve been reposted and by which
members.

This was delivered.

○ 2) Member journey, including:
■ Members can sign up with their wallet and then connect their X, Nostr and
Instagram accounts by posting a message “I joined https://asami.club to
make my reposts count. [#<unique_code>]”

Partially delivered: We dropped Nostr because we didn’t have critical mass and would-be members were not interested. Instagram was there, but we removed it at a later date.

■ Members get a dashboard with their past campaigns, and their
accumulated rewards in Asami Platform tokens.

This was delivered.

■ Members have a button to immediately convert and transfer their Asami
Platform tokens as DoC or RBTC.

We did not deliver this. The Asami token took much longer to develop because we added revenue sharing and voting power to it. (it’s even better now, this was the v1 of asami, we’re at v2)

○ 3) Deploy Asami Platform in testnet.

We delivered this.

○ 4) Reach out on social media spreading the word: One instagram live, and one
twitter space, about micro-influencing, the value of reposts.

We overdelivered this one at the time.

● Second Milestone: The Second Milestone shall be achieved within 2 months after the
execution of the Agreement and shall consist in getting people to use Asami Platform,
make login more accessible and get actual campaigns in mainnet.

○ 1) Login with social: Advertisers and members will be able to log-in using their
social media accounts besides their wallet.

This was delivered in the first milestone.

○ 2) Reach out to brands and NGO’s to have them run their own campaigns.

This was delivered, arguably it was an onoing effort since the beginning of the project.

○ 3) Offloading of reposts to third party platforms:

■ Until Asami Platform can provide a reasonable amount of reposts by its
members, campaigns will be forwarded to “repost” companies).

■ Asami Platform will have scouted the best providers and have the process
in place for this offloading.

We never did this, as we made up our minds about what genuine influencing is, and how this contradicts our goal of measuring it.

○ 4) Online presence: Landing page, social profiles on X, Nostr and Instagram.

This was delivered except for Nostr. Instagram was later abandoned as we focused only on X.

○ 5) Asami Platform shall be released in Mainnet.

We were in mainnet at the time, paying DOC rewards, asami tokens, and even revenue sharing.

○ 6) Reach out to specific communities to get more members signed up: Taringa,
telegram groups.

We reached out, we signed up a few groups. Funny enough Taringa closed about 6 months after we wrote this, and we couldn’t manage to get hold of them to at least suggest Asami to their users.

● Third Milestone: The Third Milestone shall be achieved within 3 months after the
execution of the Agreement and shall consist in the following:

○ 1) Releasing press releases and community events, to get more members.

This was under delivered.

○ 2) Add stripe payments for advertisers (and slow down on the free campaigns).

We slowed down on the free campaigns, got some actual advertisers, but never offered stripe payments, as the community had not reached the critical mass, so we didn’t have a good fit for advertisers.

○ 3) Deals with traditional agencies and similar platforms such as fantastic.app to
offer them reposts as service.

No deals, just exploration.

○ 4) More ways to spend rewards:

■ Members can use their Asami Platform tokens to participate in raffles for
rBTC, DoC, (and maybe other real or digital assets).

■ Members can spend their tokens in charity and get tangible public
appreciation.

Not delivered. Instead we implemented a ‘gasless claim’ mechanism so that people coming from web2 could use their DOC rewards to pay for gas, and get some extra RBTC in their newly created wallets. That way they can go and spend their docs however they want.

○ 5) Transactions: Achieve at least 100 transactions on Rootstock

This one we greatly overdelivered. I don’t remember why we were so ‘conservative’ with this number.

One thing to note is that sometime while working on the second milestone we realized the contract fees were absurdly high so we had to rewrite the contract and change the functionality of the club considerably. We also decided to drop Instagram too.
We also had to deal with some abuse/exploitation of the system by bots and had to prioritize improvements in how we measure ‘genuine influence’.

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