I was researching how the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) works late last year and I had a simple idea for a basic service that uses EAS to show that people have done something onchain. I wrote about it in a Figma frame and forgot about it until I came across Commit.wtf a few weeks ago.

Commit is, in the words of its founder, "an onchain accountability protocol." The idea is for people to commit to things onchain openly and transparently, but also for these commitments to cost you something if you fail to keep them.

rev on Warpcast

reintroducing /commit — an onchain accountability protocol your commitments should mean something and there should be a cost to not keeping your word.

Farcaster

Think of commitments like the Ethereum Proof-Of-Stake mechanism. In PoS you stake some money to get the opportunity to validate Ethereum transactions and earn rewards, but, if you default on your duties as a validator you lose some of the funds you've staked as a punishment. The staked funds are incentives for you to follow through on your commitment to be a validator.

Likewise, with Commit, you can create or join a commitment onchain by putting up some amount of a token decided by whoever created the commitment, and should you not follow through on your commitment, you lose your funds. So, I can make a commitment and set an entry fee of 300 Higher for anyone who wants to join the commitment. There is a set timeframe to fulfil the obligations of the commitment and failure to meet those obligations within that timeframe means you lose the money you put up to join the commitment. Pretty straightforward

Watch La Liga My Dawgs

Last week I created a football channel focused commitment to try and get people to watch La Liga games. I think the channel is too EPL-centric (and the conversations tend to center on the Big 6 teams), so I'm always trying to diversify the conversation. I want the channel to be a home for all football discussions, La Liga, MLS, Serie A, whatever league!

The commitment itself was pretty simple. Stake 300 Higher (about $3 at the time of writing) and commit to watching at least one La Liga game during matchday 25 of the ongoing La Liga season (this past weekend).

Commit App

Commit Protocol is an accountability protocol designed to incentivize participants to join and commit to various activities such as showing up at events, fitness challenges, product milestones, and more.

https://www.commit.wtf

Unfortunately, it didn't catch on this weekend. Only Ash joined the commitment for the weekend, and I'll have to try again. Maybe I need to play around with some variation of some of the commitment parameters to see if this is a viable route to getting more people to watch non-EPL leagues. For example, if the reward pool were potentially larger (say an entry fee of 10,000 Higher), would people be more interested? I don't know, we'll see.

If you're reading this and you are part of the Football channel and interested in watching more La Liga games (or Serie A or Bundesliga etc), by all means, let me know what you think.

Thoughts, Thoughts, Prayers

My La Liga commitment may not have taken off but, I did enjoy the process and I have some thoughts about Commit and what they're trying to achieve.

I think that Commit is going to be another interesting tool for like-minded individuals and communities to coordinate around shared goals onchain. Communities especially, I think will eventually find this a useful tool. Right now, it's mostly individuals creating commitments and getting other like-minded people to join them.

But, I can imagine commitments created by a channel on Farcaster with funds from the channel wallet, and other channels can join the commitment if their members vote to do so (voting done with Ponder of course). It's really up to anyone to imagine what can be done using this tool as long as more than one entity wants to collaborate on something and keep each other accountable for their end of the bargain. It's basically an onchain escrow for shared goals.

Of course, the process of making and executing a commitment is far from perfect right now.

One problem right now is how to verify that people have fulfilled the terms of a commitment.

Right now the verification mechanism is centralised. It depends on the creator of the commitment to manually verify that the participants fulfilled their commitments. Not only does this leave a lot of work on the creator's table, but it also makes it easy for people of ill intent to falsify credentials and claim to have done things they didn't do. (There is also a self-verification mechanism, but again, there's no way to ascertain that people did the things they claimed they did).

One way to address this problem might be to use the "pictures or it didn't happen" approach and require people who commit to provide pictures proving that they followed through on their commitments. Some commitments have already been created that require this kind of proof, but the functionality is not baked into the Commit website's tooling as of right now. 

This doesn't solve situations where one might need to verify commitments for which getting pictures as proof is not exactly feasible.

A good commitment where this problem shows up is the Higher Self commitment. The brief is to pick a skill you want to get better at and get better at it over a certain period. I read that brief and it immediately occurred to me that there are ways to get better at a skill by doing things you can't exactly provide pictorial evidence for. Say I want to get better at reading, for example, I can read books but how do I prove that I read them? Especially if, like me, you like reading physical books. I could just take a picture of a stack of books I read and upload that but how can anyone be certain that I read all those books?

And even in the case of pictures, there is also the problem of verifying that the pictures are not fake, possibly AI-generated or copied from elsewhere (maybe this is where the Roc camera comes in?).

I do believe that we will get better at figuring out how to verify real-world actions onchain in a decentralised and trustworthy manner, and I'm excited to see how that happens.

There is also the issue of incentives.

Right now the incentive for joining a commitment is simply that you are on board with the goal the commitment is aimed at and you'd like some mutual accountability as you pursue the goal. There is, of course, the possibility that some people default on their commitment and that those who follow through receive shares of the stake put up by the defaulters.

There is also the fact that anyone can add funds to the reward pool of a commitment to further incentivise people to commit along those lines. So, if KMac creates a commitment, say, to get people to eat four candy bars every day for two weeks. Even if I don't join this commitment, I can add funds to the reward pool to further incentivise excessive candy-eating on the Farcaster network.

In essence, there aren't some crazy, speculative, potentially incredibly enriching token incentives to commit to things. It's just intrinsic motivation + the possibility of extra rewards from generous donors or commitment defaulters. I like this model because it bucks the current trend in crypto of gravitating towards products with outsized financial returns but incredible volatility (aka memecoins).

In a time when everyone seems to be looking to make a ton of money, it's refreshing to see a product that's aimed at solving something that is a real problem in a non-speculative way.

Commit to something today.

Higher. ⬆️⬆️⬆️