A competition where the team with the most Twitter follower counts at token expiry wins

The idea in a paragraph: A synthetic token with the total follower count of two baskets of Twitter profiles as the reference index. You’d be turning long and short positions into a bet of whether basket 1 (long position) will receive in total more followers than basket 2 before token expiry or vice versa (short position). Fun part is, the reference index can be manipulated by the investors.

Composition of each team would include but not be limited to NFT artists, crypto traders, influencers, NFT collectors, magnates and teachers of the crypto/DeFi variety. The Twitter follower count of each member within each team will vary.

Who’d be interested in this and why do it? By monetizing an increase of follower counts on a social media platform a positive feedback loop is created that can expand rather quickly. This can result in a high turnout of players/investors which is what makes this exciting. This can be discussed in more detail. Also, the idea is to give the ‘small’ accounts that have something big to offer our crypto community the chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with the bigger accounts and be given a platform. I’ve spoken to some amazing artists and traders that say they enjoy being a part of the community but that it’s so hard to gain any traction and a resultant following, whether it’s the artist trying to sell their NFT or the trader providing accurate sniper leverage trading positions.

Speaking with another community member there is also the idea of integrating some form of creator coin/social token aspect which I found very interesting.

Reference indices ranging from the direct source to third parties can be used.

  1. https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/show

  2. https://www.followeraudit.com/

I’m still new to derivatives and synthetic tokens so from a technical standpoint I’d love to hear the opinions on the validity of this project. I can go into much more detail about the specificities of the idea so feel free to ask any questions or if you can think of any potential hurdles throw them down too!

I see this as being a slightly different spin on this idea also posted in our discourse. There is an interesting niche for “social” markets. I’m also not sure how reasonable it is to have a market where you can so easily game it but from your description, you seem to want this to be a feature - which may be part of the market dynamics.

I do however like the creativity you have put towards thinking about the use case for the token.

As a suggested route forward, I’d recommend partnering with the guys who are looking to create the YouTube index and perhaps with a few more minds at this a product can come out of this?

Happy to hear more ideas on this

Just discussing the idea on the Yam DAO’s discord server and the point of a vulnerability to sybil attacks and bot manipulation was raised. I have replied back with the below comment which I’ve added on here for purposes of a continued discussion to anyone who wants to respond.

With regard to guarding against sybil attacks and bot manipulation, the idea is to have a website that would be the hub of the competition. Like degenerative.finance you’d be able to connect your wallet and action your trades. You’d also be able to track how the competition was faring and which team was winning. The data of each competition member would also be provided there, ranging from their bio to how much their follower count has increased since the start of the competition. (Have a few cool NFT related ideas for the website too.)

So the idea was always to have traffic flow from Twitter onto this website. This website can also act as a final stage to a multi-factor authentication process. If you want the issuance of your ‘follow votes’ to count for the purposes of the competition, you’ll then need to connect on the website using a ‘sign in with Twitter’ option (please see attached example which is a seamless action for users of the site). I think this may help against sybil attacks and will protect the integrity of the data. You can also add a 'prove you’re not a bot option to further reduce chances of bot manipulation.

I’m not from a dev background so if someone could let me know if that is all possible and whether UMA’s infrastructure behind the project would remain unaffected?