To ramp up the celebration, and keep momentum throughout, the Council is holding a series of contests!
Tari Ootle Contest Rules
Each month has a new contest, and each contest has its own theme. Entries are judged based on their adherence to the theme (as applicable) and are subject to the following rules:
All contest entries must be new code as of the announcement of the theme (except for the September contest, which will allow for existing projects.)
All code must be written by you (or your team if submitting as a group) and may not borrow code from other submissions.
All code for contest entries must be submitted under an OSI-approved open source license, such as The MIT License, The Apache License, or the Affero GNU Public License. If you’re not sure which to use, go with MIT.
Tari Council members and Tari Labs employees are ineligible
Submissions must be posted to the forum thread created by the council for submissions, and must include:
A publicly viewable link to the code and/or app you are submitting
A description of the project
A Tari payment address to send your winnings to, should you win
A link to a public post on social media, where you are announcing your contest entry
Entries will be reviewed and voted on by the Council, and winners announced the following month.
Each Contest has three placements:
First place: 1 Million XTM
Second place: 500K XTM
Third place: 250K XTM
The theme for each contest will be released at the start of the month.
The cutoff for submission is the start of the first day of the following month, UTC. For example, if the contest is for September, the contest would end at 00:00 October 1st, UTC.
I was just looking over the rules and considering submitting an entry, but there are a few points I am not completely clear on.
First, does the entirety of the code need to be new for the October contest, or could the submission be a new feature or substantial addition to an existing app or platform?
Second, when the rules say the code must be written by you or your team, I assume development using coding agents is fine, provided the idea, direction and submission are your own. If that is the case, it may be worth making that explicit given how common agent based development has become.
Third, does the source code itself need to be publicly available under an approved open source licence, or can a functioning publicly accessible app be submitted without making the underlying code public?
Finally, I am not particularly keen on the requirement to announce the submission specifically on Bluesky or Reddit. I understand the goal of increasing reach, but I do not have a Bluesky account and have no interest in creating one, while my Reddit account is tied to my full name and is not something I would want to use for this. I would rather see the contest focus on getting people building interesting things with Tari, without requiring them to use a particular social platform in order to participate.
September was the only month where you could submit a pre-existing project. For each month moving forward, we will only count projects built as of the announcement post.
However, if you submitted a newly created smart contract used by your project, or a library consumed by your project that others can use, then those would count. The key is it should be a new repo with new code.
The source code must be available under an OSI-approved license.
It is in the tradition of Reddit to make Throwaways. Your submission will be accepted to /r/tari.
Development using agents is fine. Very few in this community are hand-rolling code, and we don’t expect that of them. However, do note that judges may consider code quality in their evaluations.
It is in the tradition of Reddit to make Throwaways. Your submission will be accepted to /r/tari.
Despite how easy that makes things in this instance, I would still recommend not tying future competition announcements or entries too closely to particular platforms.
There have been comments from some council members that suggest a strong personal dislike of X. I would hate for the optics to become that individual preferences about social platforms are shaping decisions for the wider community. Whatever anyone thinks of X personally, the reality is that crypto still has a strong presence there.
While it’s true I dislike twitter, personal feelings have nothing at all to do with this decision.
The point of these contests, first and foremost, is marketing. We’re trying to spread the word of Tari. What Tari is, and what it can do.
That doesn’t work if our community only exists inside of a walled garden. Especially one with declining engagement.
The reality is X has the lowest average engagement rate across all major social media platforms, a decline of 28% in 3yrs. Daily active users are down more than 15% yoy, global app downloads are down as well.
On top of this, the platform has been walled off and API locked down so it isn’t getting scraped for AI and search results like other platforms.
If all of that wasn’t enough - the app is not far off from spyware, and the algorithm is heavily censored. We are a censorship resistant privacy project, so it is fair to assume that people aligned with our values are not as likely to congregate on X, and might even take issue with our only form of outreach being on a platform so antithetical to our stated values.
On the other hand, Reddit is growing rapidly. 18% yoy increase in DAUs, 44% of those being 18-29 - a demographic we are particularly interested in bringing to Tari.
Beyond that, Reddit is one of the top five most-cited domains across AI search platforms/ChatGPT. Increasing these metrics has been the #1 stated goal of every marketing campaign we’ve drafted and discussed going back 6 months now.
And I understand it’s a little annoying. No one likes creating new accounts. But in the words of Don Draper: “That’s what the money is for!”
I don’t really appreciate this. Like I very clearly explained and supported with data, my personal feelings on the matter have literally nothing to do with this decision. We’re trying to market Tari, this is where the data suggests our efforts will have the highest impact.
It is you and others here who are biased towards X, to the point of refusing to use any other platform. To the point that you will ignore hard data and suggest we market based on vibes and your personal feelings/anecdotal evidence.
FWIW I’m pretty sure I’m one of the very few people here actually using every platform mentioned in this post, so me and all my bias are still more objective than you.
When the announcement was left for participants to select themselves, all of them chose X, so in that case our outreach became “only on X”, and the point of these contests is to market where everyone can see.
No one is forcing anyone to participate in the contests either. They’re a fun extra thing we’re doing to help publicize the Ootle launch. The money is there because we’re trying to get people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.
Personally I don’t see the big deal in entering a new email/pw for a shot at 1,000,000 XTM.
I’ll leave that for other readers to decide for themselves. Using a platform (reluctantly) doesn’t absolve bias. I use Telegram, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Slack, WhatsApp, X, YouTube, etc, etc.
