Introduction

Can you believe we’re already halfway through the year?

It’s been a stunning few months in web3. On the heels of a global downturn, crypto has reached new lows while our team has continued to build new highs. Between LUNA’s downfall, the evaporation of several firms and protocols, a revolving door of hacks, exploits, scams, and the constant humdrum of a looming recession, it’s difficult for many to foresee the promises that web3 were supposed to deliver in the first place.

But at Layer3, discovery never ends. We still think there’s so much that web3 has to offer, and we promised that we would keep building to create a better experience for our users and communities. It’s why our current website feels nothing like the one you saw back in March, and why our team has shipped feature after feature in the face of what appears to be an endless bear market.

We’re not out of the woods yet—but we’ve done a lot this quarter, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Q2: Build-during-a-bear

You may know us as the company that helped someone earn crypto by getting a tattoo. We’ve come a long way since then (July 2021), and we’ve also come a long way since March 2022.

Our biggest update is that we’ve shipped a modular “Bounty Builder “that allows web3 communities and protocols to build step-by-step Bounties to help users (re)discover the magic of using their products. On Layer3, Bounties are instantly verifiable on-chain and off-chain tasks that users can complete for experience points (XP) or crypto rewards. Using the Bounty Builder, we started releasing daily bounties where users can complete fun “quests” to discover the true potential and magic of web3—and since launching our Bounty Builder in early June, we’ve helped our users complete 307,000+ on-chain actions across various web3 protocols, platforms, and ecosystems.

As our co-founder Dariya recaps in this thread, our Bounty Builder makes rewarding users easy, creating an entirely new framework for “cost-per-action” (CPA) advertising spend in web3. If you haven’t experienced the magic of bounties, you can try them out now.

With bounties, we were able to supercharge interest across various protocols and communities within web3. Just take a look at the following stats:

On Layer3, bounties were responsible for:

• 23.4% of all uses ever of PoolTogether Avalanche
• 10000 new Bungee bridges
• 6875 new Hop bridges
• 3700 new PoolTogether deposits
• 15.8% of all purchases ever on Quixotic
• ~8% of all Aave v3 Arbitrum uses ever

Bounties are available across most EVM-compatible chains, including Ethereum mainnet, Optimism, Polygon, Celo, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Aurora.

Aside from bounties, we’ve continued to add support for popular features. In response to community requests on improving our notification structure, we launched e-mail notifications to keep users up users updated on their L3 activity such as when a Contest they’ve entered announces winners or when they’ve been selected to work on a specific Project. Communities are now automatically notified to select Contest winners so that they, too, can contribute to a seamless user experience. Our newly implemented Discord bot helps communities promote active Contests, Projects, and Bounties directly within their server.

We’ve also been hard at work building our infrastructure to handle the user growth we’ve seen since March. We’ve upgraded our database architecture and payments infrastructure. Our platform is smoother, faster, and simpler than ever before—making it the best place to discover and re-discover web3 every day.

We’ve steadily expanded our partnerships in conjunction with community growth. We’re truly humbled to have worked with some of the best builders in web3, including those from Dune, Synthetix, The Graph, OpenSea, 1inch, Index Coop, and Zapper. We doubled grew our Twitter following from 18k to 40k, and more than doubled our Discord members from approximately 3000 to 8100+, continuing to host recurring Twitter Spaces, Community Calls, and AMAs with our featured partners and community members.

In conclusion: It’s been a packed three months. Read on for a comprehensive timeline of what we’ve accomplished in 2022 Q2:

April

In April, we shipped 3 new features and made significant improvements across the platform.

• Bounties: Any combination of actions, on or off-chain, that instantly reward contributors upon completion. Our version of web3 cost-per-action ad spend.
• Projects: Hackathon-style competitions where the best submissions for a task win and get rewarded.
• Discord Bot: Enabling communities to promote active contests, projects, and bounties directly within their server.

Improvements

• Payments Infrastructure
• Redesign focused on simplifying UI/UX
• Database Architecture

May

• Shipped the bounty builder
• Optimism Support
• Improvements to DAO Dashboard, Contest & Project creation flows
• Modified user profiles to better showcase work across categories
• Better and smoother site performance
• Launched partnerships with OpenSea, The Graph, 1inch
• Partnered with Index Coop to acquire 96% net new INDEX holders
• Partnered with Synthetix to improve engagement for existing token holders (our first Optimism bounty!)
• Won a partnership with DappRadar following a Snapshot vote, winning 98.6% support over DeWork
• Completed first cohort of the Contributor Bootcamp
• Engaged users in our first community-wide, 5-day marketing campaign to launch Projects

June

• Reached 250,000 on-chain actions with daily bounties
• Avalanche, Celo, Aurora, and Arbitrum support for bounties
• Launched e-mail notifications for both users and DAOs
• Shipped DAO dashboard and admin-facing improvements
• Nurtured the Builders Lounge, an exclusive Discord channel for top-talent contributors
• Initiated summer user research sprint
• Reached 7,000 newsletter subscribers
• Updated bug and Twitter verification infrastructure
• Coinbase Wallet integration

In conclusion: The devs and non-devs have indeed, done something

As we continue to build towards our v1 launch, don’t hesitate to suggest new features via Canny or Discord. For any product suggestions, you can also reach out directly to our Product Manager, Yahya (yahya@layer3.xyz).

WTF is Layer3?

Oh hey anon, you must be new here. That’s okay—we all start somewhere, and we’re glad you started with us. Whether you’re one of our users, a core team member, a freelance contributor, or someone looking to dip their toes into web3 and crypto, Layer3 is for everyone!

Our guiding star is the idea that discovery never ends.

Every day, we’re exploring and discovering web3 in a way that has never been done before. Call it curiosity—or call it an infinite “beginner’s mind,” where every step we take is done with the curiosity and open-mindedness of someone approaching a new concept for the first time.

That’s what it feels like to be a user on Layer3: The magic of discovering and re-discovering all your favorite protocols, communities, DAOs, and companies, all in one place.

We’re here to revolutionize the future of community and enable anyone—regardless of skill—to discover the magic of web3 and become a contributor. We want to help the world embrace web3 by providing everyone with simple and intuitive tools to get sh*t done. The permissionless and decentralized nature of web3 means that creation is happening on a scale that we’ve never seen before, and it’s easy to get lost amongst the debris.

So our goals are simple:

• Become the best platform for web3 learning, discovery, and contribution.
• Enable communities to acquire users via community engagement and work coordination.
• Help people find their tribe in web3 by giving everyone the tools to get involved.
• Ensure that discovery in web3 never ends.

We’re here to arm contributors and communities with the tools and knowledge to move towards this new horizon.

Let’s discover the magic of web3, together.

Community

We love the Layer3 community and couldn’t have built our product without valuable feedback from our users and partners. Here’s what they had to say about us:

I got my first full-time web3 job with Blockworks...I'm the first data analyst that they hired!

The L3 team and platform were a true catalyst for me turning this year around. You guys were the best resource for me to build out my portfolio! Ultimately, I had to do my final research project with them in Python, but they also were interested in looking at my Dune work.

The L3 team is amazing, you guys are out here changing lives. Respect. 🙌

— Anthony, Data Analyst @ Blockworks

We are extremely happy with the Layer3 platform!! We are blown away with the level of engagement it has brought to the governance forum (and a lot of the superstars are new users so we know they found their way to the forum via Layer3!)

— Jordan, Marketing @ 1inch

I’m part of at least 20 web3 communities, but most DAOs don’t care at the root level ,and I dislike spending time in most of them due to that. Dune and Layer3 [are] where I spend most of [my] time, and I only joined last month, which says [that] you guys are doing something right, thank you!

— Dune Wizard and contributor @ Layer3

I started using the platform in February and feel like its a totally different company today. The product is 20x better, the discord is more active, and the communities & work are way better. You guys are moving fast, can’t believe you’re only a few months old.

— David, Contributor Bootcamp Cohort #1 member, Global Insights Manager @ Google

Conclusion

If you’ve made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading!

In the meantime, feel free to complete some Bounties, join our Discord, or read through our Docs. Feel free to subscribe to our newsletter as well!

This report is available as a free NFT on Optimism for the collectoooors and supporters who want to celebrate another 3 months of Layer3 (you can also earn 100XP for collecting it via Bounties). Until next time ✨