Introducing Common Protocol: Programmable Communities

Overview

Launching a token is only the first step in creating a successful community. Projects need continuous coordination of attention and capital to support the core idea that the token represents. Various activities drive progress for communities: onchain transactions like funding or voting, offchain posts on Farcaster or forums, and grant proposals. Typically, projects must cobble together a variety of tools, protocols, and core team members to orchestrate this coordination.

Common Protocol is a primitive that enables coordination in a programmable manner. This enables anyone in the world to contribute and be rewarded without needing one person to manage this process. At its core, the protocol creates loops that incentivize an on-chain tx or off-chain action that drives community progress.

What is a Loop?

Loops have built-in hooks that and tap into a network of nearly 300k wallets, allowing developers to create new loops that expand and automate the range of actions. For example, developers can chain loops together and trigger actions on external contracts, such as governance votes, controlling DeFi vaults, or minting new memecoins. We expect loops to be initially created and managed on common.xyz, but as developers build, these loops can expand across existing and emerging social platforms designed specifically for Common Protocol.

We envision loops evolving into core infrastructure that enables AI agents to collaborate with humans to drive onchain activity.

How Do Loops Work?

Any individual or community can deploy customized loops. They become a creator by defining the following for a loop:

1. actions—such as Farcaster Posts, or onchain transactions, forum votes, or proofs from a zkTLS operator
   • Each user action has the following properties:
   • user actions are submitted directly to each loop, structured as an offchain intent.
   • User actions **** may be sent directly by users, or by a relayer.
2. reward schedule—can choose to reward all actions with an NFT, fungible token, or a subset of actions like only the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place actions.
3. duration one-off or recurring, and/or end date
4. hooks that reference external contracts may trigger programmatic action before and after—like calling a governance contract or limiting the set of user who may claim rewards to certain token ownership.

Once a loop has been created onchain, any user can submit actions. With relayers, users don't need to worry about submitting transactions directly. Instead, action submissions and reward payouts happen seamlessly in the background. Here’s a contest loop that we’ve deployed, so you can see what this looks like in practice:

• 1. actions—
• forum posts in the Common Community / Meme Topic,
• forum upvotes on each Common Thread
• 2. reward schedule—a total of $100 granted per week
• 1st place earn 50%,
• 2nd place earns 30%
• 3rd place earns 20%
• 3. duration
• repeats for 4 weeks
• 4. Hooks that reference external contracts may and trigger programmatic action before and after —like calling a gov contract or gating a user
• on upvote action weight upvotes by the number of ERC20s held.

What Can I Do With Loops Today?

• For Communities: Drive a specific and growing set of community actions with targeted rewards, whether you are looking for more engagement on Common—stake, contests or soon on Farcaster.
• For Users: As an individual, get rewarded for things you are already doing or for capital you already own. For example governance assets just sitting there, Farcaster casts, and anything in between.
• For Builders: As a builder, easily build new social experiences. Instead of focusing on contract deployments, indexing, or bootstrapping a network effect. Developers can leverage our network to quickly go to market:
  • Nearly 300k verified wallets and roles: Thousands of active participants weekly leveraging the protocol for various communities.
  • 3k Communities: Each leveraging Common for discussion, rewards, and governance.
  • Over $12 billion governed: Assets governed by these projects using Common which can be staked, used as rewards, and more within created loops.

What Can Developers Build with Loops?

As the Common Protocol evolves, we anticipate developers creating new clients in three main categories. Here are some exciting ideas we'd love to see built:

• capital formation: around memecoins or new ideas.
  • Decentralized Memecoin Launchpad: Memes thrive on attention, but current platforms often rely on centralized distribution through "Key Opinion Leaders" (KOLs) who may have hidden or conflicting motives to pump or dump coins. It's worth exploring decentralized incentives that can drive attention and capital more transparently. For instance, a loop that collects fees from all trades and allocates them based on the most mentioned coin on X (formerly Twitter) for that week would be one way to do this transparently.
  • Launching Vertical-Specific Funding Platforms: Picture bio-research networks or public goods funding for repositories. Imagine creating launchpad coins for every GitHub repo and using a contest loop to allocate fees between different repos—permissionlessly funding public goods. These launched coins could then incentivize bounties on GitHub Issues, further driving development.
• incentivizing social engagement (on any social app)
  • Subculture-specific Social Networks: Loops can help rank content, enabling social content to populate feeds based on onchain governance activity in Cosmos or on different networks.
• driving governance via grants and votes
  • Points for Governance Actions: Loops can drive governance by unlocking underutilized assets through incentivized delegation. They can rebalance between delegates and proposal votes, boosting participation and helping DAOs achieve desired outcomes.

As new clients develop, we hope to see Common evolve into a rich community, default-open community platform.

Where Are Loops Heading?

Common Protocol is live today. Onchain, you can already utilize existing factories to create various loops—including namespace, stake, contests, Farcaster-specific contests, launching, and King of the Hill competitions. Looking ahead, our roadmap outlines improvements that will expand how developers, communities, and users can leverage loops:

• Q1 2025: Deployment onto EVM chains and integration into the reference Common Client (common.xyz)
• Q2 2025: Expansion to additional chains, and deploying new loops focused on governance delegation and more.
• Q3 2025: Delivery of V1—a single factory that allows developers to deploy loops to drive engagement for web2 and web3 use cases
• Q4 2025: Scale, decentralize loops, and implement agents that communities can use to participate in loops and provide engagement

Today, Common Protocol enables onchain coordination for existing onchain communities—supporting governance, memecoins, and everything in between. Communities can already create loops to drive conversation with contests, facilitate governance delegation, and generate funding for community initiatives.

Agents are already hopping on new coins, but as they get more powerful they will be conduct novel bio and research, write substantial code, and even create companies. This distribution already mirrors the communities using Common—VitaDAO, DeFi projects, and compute infrastructure like Vana and Kyve.

We see agents driving loops in real-time, with each API call, not at the speed of a bureaucracy. Common Protocol hopes to serve as socio-economic infrastructure that keeps pace with this rapid growth but also enables LLM agents to create economic value.

Get In Touch

You can find us on X at @commondotxyz, join our Discord, and of course post on our own forum.