TL;DR
This document is a proposal for the Allominati community. It is written in response to Coi’s recent initiative to use a Cookie Jar for research, a proposal that has sparked a crucial and timely conversation. The goal here is to build upon that conversation, analyze the tools at our disposal, and outline what I believe is the most powerful and effective path to achieving the ambitious mission laid out in Allo.Capital’s official strategy.
1. A Cookie Jar
The Cookie Jar is a powerful mechanism with a rich history, emerging from the Gitcoin ecosystem, iterated upon by Raid Guild and DAOhaus, and now spun out as its own team. It is designed for a specific purpose: to permissionlessly and autonomously reward contributions.
How it Works & Its Core Tension
The mechanics are elegant in their simplicity. Funds (“cookies”) are placed in a treasury. Trusted, whitelisted contributors perform work and then simply take a cookie, leaving a small note as a justification. There is no formal approval process, no bureaucratic council, and no DAO vote to release funds.
This presents a fundamental trade-off:
- The Pro: It dramatically accelerates the distribution of funds by eradicating the friction of bureaucracy. Great!
- The Con: It dramatically accelerates the distribution of funds by eradicating the oversight and quality assurance that bureaucracy, in its ideal form, provides. Oops.
This forces us to confront an age-old challenge: the tension between enabling rapid, autonomous action and ensuring quality and strategic alignment.
The Critical Flaw: Incentive Misalignment for Deep Research
The core issue with using Cookie Jar for deep, strategic research lies in its incentive structure. The mechanism is designed for low-friction, low-value rewards. As a contributor, my compensation is a “sugary snack.” This has two dangerous consequences:
- It Incentivizes Minimum Viable Work: As a knowledge worker, I am not incentivized to produce the highest possible quality of work. I am incentivized to ship the most minimally coherent morsel of information required to justify taking a cookie. This is antithetical to Allo.Capital’s goal of producing “Seminal Thought Leadership.”
- It is Disrespectful to Knowledge Work(ers): As a knowledge worker, I find this model incongruent with the principles of rewarding deep, thoughtful, and risky intellectual contributions. The highest-quality work requires careful, nuanced analysis, not just from the contributor but from peers who can validate it. Some intelligence contributions are exponentially more valuable than others, and our funding mechanisms must be able to distinguish that signal from the noise.
A proposal to solve this by creating a review council misses the point; such a council would have no hard, on-chain power, only the soft power to defame by reputation - an approach that is culturally destructive.
Matching the Tool to the Task
Cookie Jar is a brilliant tool for the right job. If our goal were to incentivize bite-sized, high-volume tasks like retweeting messages or making minor documentation edits, it would be perfect.
However, if our goal is to generate surgically sharp, philosophically coherent, and strategically vital research - the kind of work that can define a new market category - then its speed and low-fidelity incentives make Cookie Jar precisely the wrong tool for the task.
2. The Scale of Our Ambition
Coi’s proposal correctly identified a vital need: we must activate our community to contribute to research. But the kind of research we need is defined by the monumental scale of our shared ambition.
As detailed in their Category Creation Strategy, Allo.Capital is not merely building a new product. They are undertaking a mission to architect and dominate an entirely new market category: Intent-Based Allocation (IBA). Success hinges on a pivotal “Lightning Strike” at Devconnect in November, where they must formally launch the IBA category and establish Allo.Capital as its undisputed leader.
To do this, they need to arrive with a portfolio of tangible assets: seminal research, compelling content, and validated use cases. This requires a coordinated surge of what our Community Strategy defines as High-Value Contributions (HVCs). The low-fidelity outputs incentivized by the Cookie Jar model are fundamentally mismatched for the high-level strategic assets AC is required to produce.
3. The Solution: A Raid Guild Cohort for Strategic Execution
To generate HVCs, we need more than a funding spigot; we need a stream of coherence! We need a structured environment with mentorship, collaboration, and quality control. This is why I propose a formal handshake with Raid Guild to design and steward a community activation cohort.
Raid Guild is not just a vendor; they are a uniquely synergistic partner with a proven track record of solving this exact problem.
- Proven Framework: They possess a battle-tested framework for mobilizing Web3 talent, proven and refined over eight successful cohorts.
- Deep Thematic Alignment: Their Cohort 8 was explicitly themed around Agentic AI and EVM Blockchain Integrations, a perfect match for our vision of AI-driven capital allocation. They already speak our language.
- Operational Force Multiplier: This partnership allows our lean core team to outsource the operational overhead of running a complex community program, so we can focus on building the product and serving clients.
- Cultural Scaffolding: They provide the mentorship, structure, and quality control mechanisms that are essential for transforming individual contributions into a cohesive, high-impact portfolio of assets.
It’s worth noting that the Cookie Jar mechanism emerged from a Raid Guild cohort.
To execute our strategy, we might consider translating the ambitious goals into concrete, actionable work organized into three tracks:
Track 1: The IBA Research & Innovation Lab
- Objective: To build the intellectual foundation of our category by rapidly expanding the Capital Allocation Pattern Language (CAPL) - a core library of mechanisms with teeth.
- The Work: Crowdsourcing mechanism research, game-theoretic analysis, and novel design patterns from the best minds in our network.
Track 2: The IBA Content Guild
- Objective: To create the market education engine required to define our narrative and win the category.
- The Work: Generating a pipeline of high-quality, accessible content - essays, explainers, case studies, and social toolkits - that communicates the unique value of IBA.
Track 3: The IBA Pathfinders & Builders Program
- Objective: To de-risk the speculative product development by creating a validation lab for service models and future Allo.it platform.
- The Work: Providing structured, high-signal feedback on prototypes, identifying user flows, and building proofs-of-concept that test and showcase IBA in action.
4. The Path Forward
This proposal honors the spirit of Coi’s initiative by activating community research, but it equips that effort with the structure and support necessary to meet our strategic objectives. It gives the Cookie Jar team a valuable, battle-tested use case by potentially using it within the cohort for appropriate bounties. It gives the Allominati a clear, impactful way to contribute. Win-Win-Win.
The path to launching this initiative is clear and sequential:
- Community Alignment: Let’s use the comments on this post to discuss, debate, and refine this proposal. Your input is critical.
- Formal Proposal: With community support signaled here, we will provide the detailed strategic documents to Raid Guild. They will return with a formal cohort plan, including budget and timelines.
- Allominati Approval: That formal plan will be presented to the Allominati for a final vote to deploy our 15.5 ETH community treasury to fund this strategic initiative.
- Launch: We will target a cohort kickoff in the first week of July. This gives us four months of focused execution to build our arsenal for the Lightning Strike at Devconnect.
This is our opportunity to unite, activate our shared resources, and take decisive action to win a new market category.
