JokeRace: A New Era in Blockchain Governance

A project has been slowly gathering steam to fix blockchain governance called JokeRace — and it’s no laughing matter. On Wednesday, the project announced it has raised $3 million in fresh capital, in a round led by Maven 11 and approximately 30 angel investors, adding to the 100 backers that funded their seed round.

The three-person team has developed an easy-to-use, no-code app that allows developers to launch on-chain contests and hackathons, as well as issue grants and other incentives to community members. The idea is to incentivize participation for meaningful projects by offering crypto rewards.

JokeRace launched last year and is now live on over 90 chains. It has created a solution to launch on any EVM-compatible platform “in a matter of minutes” and is currently being utilized by major brands like Polygon, Farcaster, and Bankless.

With the project gaining traction, the team plans to use its funding to expand—particularly in marketing and business development.

“The past year has been very qualitative… we’ve been focused on achieving product market fit, making a core product people really enjoy using, building a community, and adjusting to feedback from established users,” said JokeRace co-founder David Phelps in an interview with The Block. “At this point, we’ve partnered with basically every single major business or chain in the ecosystem — it’s super validating.”

Originally, the project was sparked as a competition among friends to post the funniest joke on Twitter, serving as a proof-of-concept that co-founder Sean McCaffery wanted to expand. A favorite joke among interviewees was a repeatedly posted photo of Phelps at a conference, which continued to degrade in resolution as it was shared.

“The goal with all of this was — if this starts taking off, then go out and create the full platform for this that will let anyone create these kinds of contests for submission,” McCaffery explained.

“A lot of what we’re really trying to think about is incentive alignment. We want to ensure that, in the spirit of crypto, our users are the ones who are getting the upside from what we’re building,” they added.

Disclosure: A podcast at The Block uses JokeRace to crowdsource guest appearances.