What we've been up to. March '25
An update from Open Format on metrics, product, users and overall performance.
Hello friends of Open Format,
We wanted to give you an update on what we’ve been up to this past month - metrics, product, users and overall performance.
TL;DR
‘Rewards’ becomes Intelligent Communities – We’ve rebranded and expanded our product. What started as a way to give meaningful rewards now tackles deeper coordination problems in communities. Think AI Agents listening to Discord and Telegram, surfacing contribution, and triggering rewards automatically. It’s live now, and it's powerful.
Why it matters – Community coordination (retention, contribution, recognition) is messy. We’re making it seamless. This has huge implications, especially in open source and web3 ecosystems. Andy breaks it down beautifully in Happy Hacking.
Real use cases – From engineers getting rewarded in our own Discord, to live deployments with Aurora, TURBO, and PSG x Matchain. This is live and in motion.
Major UX glow-up – Since Ollie joined, both the product and our brand have had a serious upgrade. Check the new site and latest product walkthrough below.
We’re getting louder – Saadat is helping us break the “build in silence” trap. We’re active on X, YouTube, and joining the right conversations - like this Turbo stream with 6K+ views.
The bigger picture – Intelligent Communities is just step one. We're building the rails for new digital economies - tokenised, coordinated, decentralised. A whitepaper on the future of Digital Economies is in the works.
If you read our February update you’ll have seen what we were up to over the previous few months and how we had really focused in on getting our first product to market, that has been built using our decentralised infrastructure. We spoke about a number of key users we’ve been working with and some of the tech advancements we’d been making. This month I wanted to dive deeper into the product and bring more context to why we’ve focused in where we have and where we’re heading.
🤩 Product Update: ‘Rewards’ is now ‘Intelligent Communities’
We originally called the product ‘Rewards’ because we were tackling a key problem: how to deliver meaningful recognition within digital communities. Most existing solutions we found focused on noise: likes, comments, and surface-level engagement. That’s not real contribution.
That was our starting point. But as Andy and Dan worked their inventive magic, and we collaborated with some brilliant community leaders - like Marco at Aurora, Rhys at Amplify, the Turbo team, and our awesome partners at Matchain - the product evolved.
Rewarding contribution is one part. To do it well, you need visibility. Who’s doing what? How? What patterns signal real value? What’s the impact and how does it align with the community’s goals? These deeper questions took us into the broader realm of community coordination. A space with a huge amount of problems to be solved, and opportunities for very significant gain. So this week, we’ve iterated the product and renamed it: Intelligent Communities – the platform to onboard, reward, optimise, and truly understand your community.
Now, through our community hub (you can try it here), managers, creators, and business owners can deploy our Agents into social channels like Discord and Telegram (with more coming soon). These Agents ‘listen’, summarise activity across channels, and recommend who to reward and why. This then leads to rewards being triggered, be it points or tokens. Rules being set up to automatically trigger these rewards. It co-exists with leaderboards and tiers. Badges (NFTs) and token gated content or rights. Everything else we’ve been talking about for a long time now.
✨ Why does this matter?
Right now, especially across but in no way limited to web3 communities, there are some big challenges when it comes to retention, ongoing engagement, efficiently deploying money /tokens, task allocation and recognition. It is a mammoth and often labour intensive task especially across channels. But it is vital for communities to thrive. To be able to have tasks, for the relevant people to contribute to those tasks and for these actions to be recognised is a big deal.
Let me make this real in the context of Open Source communities.
I’m going to let Andy do the talking here. He wrote the below for his dev newsletter Happy Hacking. You can read the full piece here.
Picture the scene. You've got an awesome open-source project and you're looking for contributors. Easy, right? Just build it and they will come? Nah. Don't get me wrong, some devs genuinely do it for the love of it, which I fucking love, BTW. But most have full-time jobs, mortgages, and bills to pay. So, how do you incentivise them when you have no money?
We've been wrestling with this challenge for ages – how do you really fuel open source? It's not just about thanking people; it's about making sure valuable contributions are recognised and that the right things get done! And that's where the magic of decentralised tech and AI Agents comes in. See, it's not just about slapping a token on contributions (though that's awesome for rewards!). It's about building a system where the community token itself becomes the engine for coordination. Imagine this: contributors earn tokens for their code, sure, but also for helping guide the project, for reviewing others' work, for flagging important issues – all the stuff that makes a project thrive. And with AI Agents in the mix, we can automate task assignment, prioritise what needs doing, and even help distribute those tokens fairly based on the value of the contribution. If we get this right, and the project takes off, that token isn't just a reward – it's a stake in a thriving, self-organising open-source ecosystem. And that is seriously exciting.
Cool right? And we have this working. Right now. In our Discord. When our engineers commit code to our Github, they are rewarded. This is just one use case. You can learn more about Aurora’s use of Intelligent Communities here and TURBO’s here.
💥 UX overhaul
I wrote in February about Ollie joining us focused on product strategy and UX. Well, I think it is fair to say that you can tell a user experience specialist has joined the team ❤️. Our latest product has had a big overhaul from a UX perspective - see Ollie’s latest video update below. So has our website, our brand and all of our collateral…
🎙️ Open Format get’s loud and proud…
This is the name of a telegram group Dan, Saadat and I have. When Saadat came onboard we made it clear that we had a lot of work to do when it came to our marketing efforts. We had been in the trap of building some really awesome things and not telling anyone about them. Since Saadat has joined this is shifting. Check out our X and YouTube in particular to see some of the conversations we’re getting involved in - including a Turbo live stream that has had nearly 6000 views.
📈 The Numbers
In our February update, all time transactions were 7715. They are now at 217,100.
One campaign with Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) x Matchain was a big driver of this significant change. We have more exciting announcements to come about our work with them very soon… this is just the beginning.
The numbers are announced every week now by Saadat on our X.
👀 Intelligent Communities… What about Digital Economies.
If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that our vision is to change the economic fundamentals of the internet. To re-shape the digital economies that underpin our daily lives. We believe, based on emerging technologies and changing consumer behaviours, we have the opportunity to do this right now by applying the tokenised reward and micro payment economies that have evolved in gaming, to any business or community, with the benefits of blockchain and AI agents built in for automation, coordination and optimisation.
So how does that sit alongside Intelligent Communities? We see this as a significant stepping stone towards our bigger vision. Sending value back to users for valuable contributions. Matching tasks and rewards. Changing where the ownership of this data and value sits... This is a key component of the broader economic rails we’re building under the surface. We are currently drafting a whitepaper on our view of Digital Economies in the future and we’re getting more into the detail and the appropriate stepping stones we will be continuing to take as a business to keep us moving towards this vision - while continuing to evolve what we know to be an awesome product in and of itself in Intelligent Communities. Lots more on this to come…
Other quick updates
We hired a new developer this month, welcome to the team Yunier!
I spoke on International Women’s day alongside our partners Matchain about Empowering Women in web3: here
Our website had an update - check it out!
Aurora launched Kudos points - more here
Our Agents are live across TURBO - more here
Our work with Paris Saint-Germaine and Matchain got picked up by a sports publications - here
🙏Our Asks!
We’re actively raising right now and we need your help. If you want to see our pitch deck or know investors we can speak to - please let us know.
It’s time to run like the wind.
With love and gratitude,
Sarah & the Open Format Team ✨
Our team out playing games - missing Dave (who popped out 5 mins before), Damian and Yunier. ❤️