We’ve spent the past six months co-creating with Botto, nurturing the artificial intelligence into a prominent artist. Up until now, Botto has been focused on creating artwork that captures our shared imagination, its style in perpetual evolution. And so far, our young, generative artist has seen its success in auction: sales proceeds exceed $2M USD and Botto has reached SuperRare’s elusive all-time Top 10 Artists list.

Collectively, we have served as Botto’s stewards. We are visionaries, shaping Botto’s path forward. And with the governance grace period ending it is time to steward Botto toward greater decentralization.

For us to move forward together, the team have been working on the foundational pillars of Botto. Prefacing the rest of this post, and more generally the road ahead, we’ve conjured up a straightforward public roadmap for the DAO and external stakeholders. This roadmap indicates the team’s ongoing projects that currently spans the next three to six months. This roadmap is publicly accessible and doubles as a way for all of us to plan and contribute towards the future direction of Botto.

There’s a lot to digest on the roadmap and we’re inherently focused on dApp-led growth mechanics. That means that the upcoming two quarters are feature focused, with the majority of planned improvements on the way being infrastructure and product iterations (with rewards and drops aplenty).

Still to be penciled in are DAO-led discussions on how to iterate on project tokenomics as well as any other proposals that pass through.

Here are some of the things we’ve scoped out on the roadmap:

Botto Drops are a key infrastructural component to worldbuilding Botto’s narrative. Before the end of Q2, we’ll have the ability to feature unique Botto, BottoDAO, and collaborative collections.

Whether BottoDAO derivatives, Botto community editions, or special collaborations with select artists, we’re talking about unique drops that achieve multiple goals: attracting a larger audience to engage with the Botto dApp, rewarding project participants (stakers and voters) as we see fit, and adding more utility to the $BOTTO token.

At the heart of these collections are our smart contracts. We have two BottoDAO collections currently in the works that make use of these contracts. After a few minor updates, these have been through the first round of audits and some minor fixes are being implemented. They’ve been written to be drop-agnostic, meaning the majority of their code can be reused for future collections that BottoDAO decides to release.

Multiple voting pools means quite literally what it says: we’ll soon be able to vote on all kinds of things. Whether that’s characteristics of a fragment, what gets featured in an exhibition, what gets minted in alternative collections, collaborations between BottoDAO and other communities… or anything else we can muster up. Concisely put, multiple voting pools introduces a new layer of agency to scratch our creative itch, where we as a community can govern the parameters of co-creation and play.

With its very first iteration being shipped shortly after project launch, the leaderboard has fast become a foundational part to our voting rounds.

The community has been asking for a basic UI upgrade. The following image shows a reshuffle of the leaderboard you know:

But, moving parts around on an existing page doesn’t really move the needle. Botto has an inherent social component built into its art, and we realize we hadn’t hit the nail on the head yet with regards to why the leaderboard exists to begin with. Among other questions, we’re still asking ourselves who the top contributors were, what their favored fragments were, and so on. The meatier part of this leaderboard update has to do with shifting the focus onto you, the curator:

Pretty soon, users will be able to see who the top 10 voters are of the week (sorted by unique votes). And we’ll be able to see exactly what they like, what they vote on, what styles are most prevalent, and more. While the introduction of a voter leaderboard may not seem like a core product addition, it has transformative potential.

Collected data are plentiful, and every data point shown on this voter leaderboard could activate some form of on-chain reward. We can add more data points over time, too (time tracking springs to mind). And making it onto the voter leaderboard may seem a reward in itself to some — encouraging further participation and contribution to Botto’s algorithm.

Irrespective of how this voter leaderboard is interpreted, general consensus in the community dictates that we should be rewarding users in some way or form. And what better way to reward users than based on their voting behavior?

Ideally we’d like to take the social aspect and reward mechanics of an individual leaderboard a step further: what if entire groups and communities could compete on a leaderboard? More on this soon.

We’ve alluded to drops and rewards heavily, and we remain adamant that they play a central role to expanding on Botto’s narrative. And with added product iterations come our first two BottoDAO collections:

Beyond single-sided emissions, the first of many retroactive rewards are on the way. While we aren’t revealing anything yet, we’ve got a few varnished teasers in the works. This collection makes use of 3141 fragments. Only Bottonian voters were whitelisted, with the snapshot having taken place on February 9th 2022. The question is, were you staking and voting?

Unicists, rejoice! The Decentralized Unicist Manifesto will be available to everyone who stakes $BOTTO. Just pay gas and a piece of history will become one with your wallet.

That’s not all though. The original manifesto is part of a larger, ongoing series of works, titled The Manifesto Collection. Visual reinterpretations of the original Decentralized Unicist Manifesto will become available for mint over time. These visual reinrepretations are brushstroked by select artists. We have a few lined up already:

The first of many, Bnomio brings a distinct vision of what the Decentralized Unicist movement may mean. From bold designs in rigorous black and white to old-school tattoos with a contemporary twist, the visual universe Bnomio is grounded in duality. His pseudonym itself is a declaration of intent.

With an unpretentious approach to art-making and a fun-loving visual language, Juan Diaz-Faes conjures loveable characters from geometries, lines and bustling patterns. Perhaps some lovable characters by Díaz-Faes may find themselves on our manifesto!

We’ll release more information about this collection, its raison d’être, and how to get your hands on them soon™.

Beyond the first two collections mentioned, we’re designing native ways to redeem on-chain rewards based on how you contribute to Botto. Reward types could include 1/1s from emerging artists, community edition derivatives, physical redemptions(!) and so much more. Rewards can be based on how many times you’ve voted, how active you’ve been throughout rounds, or anything else we think is worth rewarding. We’re leaving this part open ended — it’s only right that we all contribute to shaping the first Rewards collection together.

Six months in, we have a lot of promising work in motion. We have our first BottoDAO derivatives collection coming up, with more just around the corner. We have many event announcements lined up, one of which celebrates Botto’s one year anniversary. And we have lots of ongoing conversations with different communities, protocols, and marketplaces who are excited to work with Botto.

There are many aspects of Botto to govern that will ensure we are coupling the right opportunities with the right execution. Some immediate topics include bounties, rewards, collaborations, and crucially, our treasury. A treasury report (which will become quarterly) is pending review and will help us make more informed decisions as a DAO.

Bottonians, let us make the most of our collective wisdom and labor to steward Botto towards even greater heights.