What is Pairwise?
Pairwise is an open source and battle-tested voting tool designed to allow multiple stakeholder make decisions in a simple, fair, and engaging way.
It has been built for communities and groups that need to allocate grants, distribute capital, or make strategic choices across multiple options. We aim to enable many stakeholders to vote with minimal overhead in a fun, fair and simple way. For example, token holders, builders and other stakeholders can vote to give grants to teams.
It lets users and stakeholders select between one of just two options at the time and then aggregating their choices into a quantifiable result that can be edited or fine tuned. At the heart of Pairwise there is a ranking algorithm in the background that abstracts complexity from the user and prevents choice overload. Pairwise converts these simple subjective inputs into objective, measurable outputs, minimizing the cost and cognitive burden of voting.
Get in touch to explore if Pairwise is a good fit for your ecosystem:
Value proposition:
- Better governance: Customizable voting power to multiple stakeholders, more representation of the community, expertise-driven voting less voter apathy thanks to liquid democracy, and a better voting UX.
- Marketing and Virality: By enabling delegation on Twitter, it’s meant to create buzz in crypto twitter, grow the community and exposure to projects.
- Data Insights & Analytics: The results of the voting can be use to draw insights from the community.
Our measurable impact and progress.
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Optimism RetroFunding: Pairwise has been used in the last five rounds to help the Optimism Collective distribute over 50 million OP to 1,000+ projects, with participation from 900+ stakeholders.
- RetroPGF 3: First Pairwise iteration.
- RetroFunding 4: Multiple stakeholders experiment (badgeholders, token holders weighted by tokens and recipients) and ZK voting privacy enabled.
- RetroFunding 5: Star rating enabled to minimize the number of comparisons in a vote.
- RetroFunfing 6: Enabled liquid democracy through casts, reducing voter apathy and building virality as votes are being delegated on Farcaster.
- RetroFunding 7: Integrated Deep Funding for this round.
- Deep Funding: We are Supporting a capital allocation experiment in collaboration with Vitalik Buterin and multiple additional projects, where AI models are trained on expert opinions to fund public goods, particularly key repositories.
Use Cases.
- Ecosystem Growth: Easily distribute grants to projects or teams through community voting—supports both traditional and retroactive funding.
- Budget Allocation: Rank initiatives to fit your budget, making funding decisions clear and fair.
- Compare & Curate: Stakeholders rank projects, content, or impact, creating a decentralized suggestion system.
- Fund Key Software: Deep Funding powers AI-driven support for critical ecosystem tools and dependencies.
- User Research: Engage your community with fun, simple polls to uncover preferences.
- Social Governance: Boost participation with social notifications (e.g., via X or Farcaster).
- Seamless Integration: Works with tools like Snapshot, Agora, and Optimism for effortless governance.
Key Features
- Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making: Attribute customized voting power to the different stakeholders in your ecosystem.
- Liquid Democracy: Stakeholders can vote themselves or delegate only with a tweet, making governance highly marketable since the community is delegating through twitter.
- Mobile and desktop friendly UI: Vote whenever from whichever device.
- Pseudo-Anonymous Voting: Enable private voting.
- Flexible and adaptable to other governance tooling: Integrate with your governance tech-stack.
- AI-Enabled Summaries: Make decisions easier for the community.
More details about Pairwise here:
Pairwise Product Deck
Here is how we did it:
- Voters log in with traditional web2 login methods to create an AA wallet (via Thirdweb)
- The voters then can connect this new AA wallet to their existing address which holds their Superchain reputation using a zk proof (via Semaphore group managed by Bandada).
- The address is never used again and the voter uses their AA wallet to create votes as attestations (via EAS), and to maintain anonymity, we sponsor the transactions.
- The zk tech, to be specific, “the semaphore group” of users’ anonymous identities is what makes the Pairwise experience anonymous and the AA wallet experience is what makes the voting experience so magical.
Tinder Filtering: One of the feedback points we received during the Optimism RetroPGF round was that many projects a badgeholder didn't want to support kept reappearing. And we developed this flow, and people love it. In the future, we will also include direct feedback for projects so that we can collectively shape any ecosystem!
Key Links
Pairwise: Empower your community with smarter voting. History
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accepted into GG23 OSS - Web3 Infrastructure 1 week ago.
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