[Dive #118] Underdog Protocol

🐶 Everyone loves to root for the underdog

For anyone that’s been interviewed for jobs or interviewed others for a job, one question you’ve probably heard before is:

How would your coworkers describe you? or How would you describe yourself?

You might answer the question with words like ‘helpful, transparent, executes, integrity’, or a host of other words that represent yourself. Whatever it takes to get that job 📝

If you go far enough in the interview process, the hiring manager may request references to make sure you’re the real deal.

But what if this ‘song and dance’ could be enriched with reputation…on-chain?

That’s what Underdog Protocol is tackling.

🦮 What’s Underdog Protocol?

Most of us have been underdogs at some point in our lives. I myself am currently an underdog, but aspire to be an overdog. I gave up a career trajectory in Growth to type into the void on Substack. 6 months in, I have 27 subscribers (jk 😉).

Tony and Kevin want to help underdogs build their reputation in a quicker, more reliable, and richer way. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me!

Sure LinkedIn Recs are great, but do people look at them? What do recs look like beyond the professional lens? What about when shit hits the fan or when it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty?

These are sincere recs though, I didn’t tell them what to write 🙂

Underdog has built a platform that allows for communities to recognize contributions through NFTs.

Underdog is built on Solana for speed, low prices, and scalability purposes. This makes sense as Underdog onboards larger organizations and their respective communities.

🐕 Why does Underdog make sense?

My conversation with Tony and Kevin was interesting not only because we went over their product, but we also discussed the broader concepts of credentials and reputation.

Some examples of credentials and reputation in today’s world:

• Where you went to school or your degree

• How many followers you have on Twitter or Linkedin

• Founding a company or leading a project that reaches a large audience

• Building a portfolio of work (design portfolios, TPan’s archive of 100+ written pieces)

However, there’s a lot that gets lost from those headlines:

• Where you went to school and degrees become less relevant over time (there are plenty of exceptions, but in business this is true)

• How have you influenced or positively impacted those 10,000 followers?

• How has your company or project impacted your customers

• Has your portfolio work inspired others? What do they think about it?

That qualitative social info should at least partially be captured somewhere.

At my last company, we created a weekly shoutout thread on Slack to provide recognition to all the individuals and teams that moved the needle.

This initiative is great for team and company morale, and recognition is important. But what happens to that recognition when you leave that company? 😔

The problem applies to students as well. When I was a student centuries ago, I was a part of several college organizations, held leadership positions, and was overall a decent guy (ok I’ll stop there, this is turning into a Tinder profile lol). What happened to all the social capital?

One of the areas of focus for Underdog is with University Blockchain groups.

t◎ny ⬇️🐶 @tonyplasencia3

We’re announcing our Partnership with @DukeBlockchain. Let’s dive into what it took and why they decided to come on-chain. We launched yesterday :)

t◎ny ⬇️🐶 @tonyplasencia3

We’re announcing our partnership with @TigerBlockchain. Let’s dive into our plans with a Solana first blockchain club 😜👇

They also launched partnerships with John Hopkins, Wash U, Illinois and several other colleges in the pipeline.

Underdog is also partnering with Web3 communities to capture and recognize contributions from their members.

t◎ny ⬇️🐶 @tonyplasencia3

We just onboarded @lirnio community onto @BackAnUnderdog 🤯 The cross-chain movement has begun

🐕‍🦺 How does Underdog work?

Communities first create their collective token. Nice mustache Tony 🥸

Once created, community members claim their membership pass.

I was invited to the Underdog Season Zero community and minted my membership NFT, which cost 36 cents (thank you Solana!)

There are 3 types of contributions you can send to other members - Helpfulness, Participation, and Action

In a live example while writing this, I was trying to connect my Twitter account to the Underdog web app but got a bug. I pinged Tony and Kevin about it and Kevin fixed the bug in ~5 minutes.

I was impressed at the quick response time and Kevin’s technical wizardry, so I’m going to send him a Proof of Helpfulness.

There are 3 steps to submitting the Proof of Helpfulness NFT

1. Uploading the metadata: “Fixed a Twitter OAuth bug quickly! Thank you!!”

2. Minting the NFT

3. Issuing the NFT

All in, this cost about .014 SOL, or 49 cents. I primarily do Ethereum things…but Solana is pretty nice. Dammit Tony and Kevin, are you guys converting me?!

The activity feed shows that I sent Kevin a Proof of Helpfulness NFT. The NFT shows up on Kevin’s profile once he accepts it (free to do, just pay for gas which is like…1 cent).

Over time, users will receive more NFTs, building up their reputation.

When discussing Underdog with Tony and Kevin my primary concern was around bad behavior with on-chain reputation

• Can users ‘lend’ their own NFTs to a friend to make them look better temporarily and get them back after a certain amount of time?

• What if users send each other these NFTs to beef up their qualitative ‘resume’?

For the first point, Underdog’s NFTs are SBTs (soul-bound tokens).

TLDR: SBTs are non-transferrable, they’re attached to that wallet.

On LinkedIn, I can’t send a recommendation I received from a colleague to a friend. The same concept applies to Underdog. That way, that individual’s Web3 identity and achievements have a sense of permanence.

As for gamifying reputation (eg: 2 people send hundreds of Proof of Helpfulness back and forth to each other to boost their rep), there are self-reinforcing factors at play:

• [Ecosystem Reinforcement] The activity feed is transparent. If I see Bob sending and receiving dozens of NFTs to the same person, I know there’s something fishy going on

• [Collective Reinforcement] Individuals are part of a Collective. Bad behavior makes the Collective look bad, so the Collective itself is incentivized to discourage bad behavior

• [Individual Reinforcement] Reputation is vital in the professional world. If you’re caught exhibiting bad behavior (especially on the blockchain), the consequences will hurt. Ask any celebrity or public figure that has been cancelled.

🐩 What’s next?

Thinking about where Underdog can go from here, things get interesting (my thoughts):

• Underdog profiles become an additional ‘portfolio’ to provide more insight to accomplishments. Because Underdog NFTs are more in the moment, this provides a helpful indicator of personality and working style versus a buttoned up Linkedin Recommendation. LinkedIn is still valuable, but Underdog can provide another dimension for candidate evaluation.

• Interoperability opportunities are endless for Underdog, and it doesn’t have to be in a Web3 sense. Users could add their Underdog profile links to their Twitter, Linkedin, Discord, or other profiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were automations in the future where every Slack shoutout turns into a minted Underdog NFT. And it’d only cost something like $20 a month in Solana minting and gas fees to operate this for a small company.

• Social and professional clout are valuable. If you’re known as a helpful person, flaunt it with your Underdog profile! I can see some interesting growth activations where Underdog can help users get jobs.

• As more users join and participate, sentiment scoring can provide further insight on users and help individuals understand their strengths, opportunities and possibly even what career paths are most complimentary to their skillsets based on their Underdog NFTs.

Of course traditional forms of credentials and reputation will always matter. But there are other ways to build them as Web3 enriches what exists today.

Premium Subs

If you’re a TPan Premium subscriber, Underdog is offering a 1 year subscription to use the platform (up to $250+ in value) for your own community for free!

Underdog is free for everyone to use but the premium goodies aren’t. But TPan has your back :)

If you’re interested in the offer, DM Tony and tell him I sent you.

I’ll see y’all next week! I’ll be in San Diego speaking at the Crypto Business Conference, so I probably won’t be on my regular writing schedule.

That said, I’m excited to be back with my infamous Precaps 😏. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’ll find out soon.