Highlights

Popula, an Web3 application for onchain communities with various Web3 native tools to facilitate community growth:
1. Community onchain feeds
2. Community member Leaderboard
3. Token-gating contents
4. Community management tool
Each community is an Independent Smart Contract. It records every bit of information about a community from the moment it has been launched.
Every single engagement, such as Post, Comment, Like and Share has a TX that is recorded on Near Protocol, with media files stored via IPFS.
Build the Drip Protocol that issues Drips (Non-transferrable Fungible Tokens) on Near Protocol. Popula integrates the Drip Protocol that rewards Drips to members based on their social engagement behaviour within a community as Proof of Engagement.
Thanks to NEAR unique account model, Popula allows Web2-like social engagement experience, which means we have the ability to bring MASS TXs to Near ecosystem.

Try it out: https://metabuild.testnet.popula.io/communities

Inspiration

Background

Web2 media users' attention is jointly monopolised by Web2 tech giant companies
Brands are realising the importance of building their OWN communities
BUT, Modern communities reside on Web2 social platforms
Technologies around blockchain are booming & Awareness of Web3 is rising

Problems we address

Build communities on the Borrowed Lands
Members can NOT effectively Prove / Verify their engagement status
Web2 Platforms' valuation grows while participators share ZERO financial benefits

Why Choose Near Protocol

Both Popula and Near are targeting mainstream adoption, building a world where people have control over their assets, data and power of governance. The technology and ecosystem of Near Protocol will support Pupula to achieve the goal. From the protocol level, Near is a Proof-of-Stake(POS) blockchain that has a sufficient distributed number of validators and delegators to secure the protocol. Near incorporates Nightshade (sharding) and Doomslug (consensus mechanism) to boost scalability and efficiency. The Near unique account model gives the user control in a simple way, and WASM in Rust and Java Script is designed friendly to developers.As an open-source protocol, Near has a thriving ecosystem. The infrastructures including Aurora, Rainbow Bridge and Octopus network offers interoperability and more scalability solutions, Pagoda as a startup platform offers a lot of developer tools and RPCs to let more developers onboard. Meanwhile, the DeFi, NFT, and other token facilities bring more assets and liquidity. Moreover, there are many guilds, regional hubs, VCs and the Near Grants Program to bootstrap the whole ecosystem to move on.

What it does

Our Mission

Reshaping Community & Ownership

Drip Protocol

Drip Protocol is an open-source and permissionless smart contract to issue Non-transferrable Fungible Tokens(Drips) on Near Protocol. Unlike the NEP141 standard, the non-transferable nature of Drips means that the users can only earn Drips via specific interactions rather than transfer between different addresses. Drips can represent in: Credit points, Loyalty points, Karma, etc.

About Popula

Popula is a Web3 Application built for onchain communities in the ownership economy, powered by the Drip Protocol to signal community members' engagement rate and the Ownership Protocol to distribute the ownership of Popula among all participants. We believe the verifiable contribution and fairer distribution of ownership can incentivise all to better create and collaborate.

Popula Drip Protocol Implementation

Proof of Engagement

Popula integrates the Drip Protocol to record social engagement behaviour within a community, such as Post content, Comment, Like and Share. The amount of Drips gained by each member represents their engagement rate, it also signals their total contribution to the community, it’s an on-chain proxy for their reputation.

Untitled

Each community will have its own independent Drip system as the community's cultural symbol, the Drips utility from different communities may vary.

Possible utilities of Drips

Hold Drips to access gated content & experiences
Consume Drips for exclusive subscription / Pass
Hold Drips to access communities’ internal governance

Popula Application

Whether communities are originated by an individual or a group, they all pursue the same fundamental goals: to gather a collective with similar interests and appropriate incentives for community members to contribute and build lasting relationships.

At Popula, DAOs, guilds, NFT Communities, brands or any individual creator can launch their sovereign on-chain community in the form of an Independent Smart Contract. It records every bit of information about a community from the moment it has been launched. The community social graph also records in the contract, members’ belonging status can be verified via Txs. Meanwhile, Popula equips various Web3 native tools to facilitate community growth, moreover, the quality active community will be rewarded unique domain name.

Community Facilities

Community Feeds (Social & Engage) Community Feeds is where members share ideas and engage, enhancing collaboration to build community. Popula retains the Web2-like engagement experience while all the social engagements are recorded on Near Protocol, and decentralised storage solutions are implemented to ensure the participants’ truly own content. Meanwhile, powered by Drip Protocol, all members' engagements will be rewarded by the community Drips.
Leader Board A leaderboard displays each member's total Drips earned, signalling the activity rate of members' engagement, and also represents the rank of their contribution and reputation in a community.
Token Gating The token-gating feature allows members to unlock the exclusive contents and activities via Hold to access.
Community Management Tools One key aspect of the community is cultural exclusiveness; it can reject those who do not follow the rule or respect the culture. Popula allows all communities to set their unique community rules and customise the permission to join, post and engage etc. Members and contents management dashboard is also applied：
- members role group
- content report & delist

How we built it

Smart Contract: Communities have their own subaccount to hold code and state. Code can be updated through the master account
Server: Use near-lake-framework to index related txs and store them into mongodb. All front-end data except account data is from APIs we provide.
Front-end: multi-community contracts are signed up along with joining community tx, then limit access keys are managed by browser, so the experience is more like a web2 app

Challenges we ran into

The most significant issue is how to process large scale of data that come from users’ content. The solution we figured out is to put the raw contents in transactions and our smart contracts save the hashes of those raw contents through near-fixed-bit-tree which can decrease bunch of storage. For webapp, we found communication with near RPC and broadcast TXs could last 3-5 seconds, so we asynchronous TX broadcasting, then it seems like publishing contents immediately

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Non transferrable fungible token
Content stored directly in transactions
- Public
- Encrypted as token-gated
Using Bitree to verify ownership

What we learned

How to respond related on-chain TXs rapidly
The infrastructure of near smart contract
How to break the line between protocols and dapp and make them organically integrated to make the protocol easier to use for variety of dapps

What's next for Popula

Tools that we hope to bring to the communities soon:

NFT Toolkit
- with NFT Drip Royalty
- built on top of Mintbase NFT Contract
- Popula Collection Proxy
Optimise the token-gating function
- add consume to access
- $NEAR, Community Drip, NEP-141 Token, and NFT (NEP-171) are all available to set gated contents.
- customised access rules.
Community Governance
- Drip-weighted vote
- build on top of SputnikDAO
Treasury Vault
- shared ownership of the community
- built on top of SputnikDAO
Quest Board
Ads Slots
Data terminal
End-to-End Encrypted DM

Popula, a Web3 Application powered by Drip Protocol