Introduction to Forefront

First we need to understand what Forefront is and what its objectives are. So, lets begin by understanding what forefront is. Forefront is an insight aggregator across the social token landscape.

Social tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that a brand, community, or influencer can use to monetise themselves beyond the typical means. With social tokens, the content creators can eliminate this barrier and bring forward a new principle of ownership in the digital economy.

Objective

Visualize the growth of curator roles for forefront token over time and provide thoughts on increasing growth.

Methodology

1. Introduction to forefront and curator roles
2. Distribution of curators
3. Growth of Curators over time
4. Analysis of growth
5. Increasing growth
6. Summary
7. References

Making Forefront table.

To create a forefront table on flipside, ethereum.erc20_balances table was used. The contract address of Forefront is '0x7e9d8f07a64e363e97a648904a89fb4cd5fb94cd'. All user addresses holding Forefront were filtered. To get the growth over time, group by function was applied on the balance_date column. Using the forefront table, all the successive analysis were created.

Curator roles

Who are curators ? According to the textbook definition, "A curator is someone employed by a museum or gallery to manage a collection of artworks or artefacts". So in our case, we can say a curator is someone who is employed by the community to help and manage the community work.

What is their work ? The curator's role is to curate weekly content for Forefront; popular content topics on Forefront include the creator economy, social tokens, DAOs, and tokenized communities.

April 7 announcement

Though the question tells us that the curator role needs 1000 FF tokens, User addresses with more than 100 Forefront tokens will be considered to be as curators. This is because there was a change in the minimum requirement which was announced on 7th April 2022.

On April 7 2022, the forefront team announced that the curation channels will now be gated at 100 FF tokens rather than the 1000 FF tokens as before. This resulted a massive increase in the number of curators post announcement.

It appears that there are 1277 users who own FF tokens. Well, the graph does seem interesting. It shows that around 80 % of the users are now curators while only 20 % have less than 100 tokens.

Before the announcement, only whales and humpback whales were curators. that is only 20 % of the users. So, in order to increase the number of curators, the team might have reduced the minimum number of tokens.

But how much should they lower it to?

From the graph, we can see that almost half the number of users were dolphins (100- 500). So it makes perfect sense to reduce the number of tokens to 100. This is what the Forefront team also did.

Growth of curators

Now, we start with the main objective of this article. That is, to visualize the growth of curators over time. We first look at the data based on a monthly basis.

As it can be seen, there appears to be a massive increase (around 4x spike) in the number of curators from 7th of April 2022. This is due to the change in forefront policies. It was announced on 7th April that the minimum number of FF tokens needed to be a curator would be reduced to 100 tokens from the previous minimum of 1000 FF. Due to these changes, the graph witnesses a spike.

For the link to official announcement, as well as the reasons for it, head to the references section.

While the above graph displays the growth, the huge increase makes it difficult to visualise the organic growth of forefront. Hence we split the data into 2 buckets. One, before the announcement was made. Second, after the announcement was made

Growth of curators before change

We'll now look at how the growth was before the announcement was made.

As it can be seen, the number of curators has averaged around 230-240 users. However, it appears that the number of user is on an upward trajectory, increasing by 10 in a single month.

Growth of curators after changes

The change of policy included the reduction of the minimum token from 1000 FF to 100FF. We now check if the reduction resulted in any significant changes in the growth.

It appears that from April 11, there was a good number of increase in the number of curator roles. This indicates that by reducing the minimum number of tokens required, the community has become more accessible to users with low finances. However, this should be taken with a grain of salt, as the the number of days passed is very low ( ~10 days only) and the increase might be uncorrelated or just noise.

If we were to look at the same graph, a couple of months later, we will certainly be in a position to say with confidence how the change in token requirement has affected the growth.

If you would like to read the entire thread, here it is. https://discord.com/channels/821312706312273921/827982636127223818/961333616426745896

Note: Here after, in the analysis, announcement means the reduction of minimum tokens to 100 FF from 1000 FF tokens

Distribution of Curators.

To start off, let us visualise how the distribution of users and analyse the graph. We shall also look at the effects of the new announcement made by the team

Improving the community

In order to improve the community and make it more engaging. it would be beneficial to have more curator roles. Forefront could do this using a number of approaches.

1. Reward Discord interaction : Forefront being a community that is very active on discord, can take advantage of it. Users who interact constructively with the community can be rewarded with FF tokens making them eligible to become a genuine curator

2. Shoutouts to creators on public platforms : Acknowledging and giving a shoutout to budding creators can help them feel appreciated by the community. This can be done on public platforms such as twitter or linkedin.

3. Introduce referral system : Provide incentives to users who spread the word and increase the reach of Forefront.

4. Increase benefits : The current benefits to holding 100 FF is given below. The team could expand the list to include Offline meetups, one-on-one interaction with creators or industry leaders.

Summary

1. The decision to reduce the minimum holdings to 100 FF was the most optimum one.
2. The announcement has drastically increased (4x) curator roles, the number of curators now being close 1000
3. The community showed growth before the announcement, however the growth appears to have increased after the announcement. (The number of observation days is low)
4. To incentive's growth, the community can reward discord interaction, give shout out to creators, introduce referral system and increase the benefits of being a curator.

References

If you would like to know more about forefront and its working, go through the below resources.

1. Social token course : https://forefront.market/learn/social-tokens
2. Forefront analytics : https://forefront.market/creators/forefront
3. Discord channel : https://discord.com/invite/9tfgWCQn6m
4. Announcement on discord : https://discord.com/channels/821312706312273921/827982636127223818/961333616426745896

It appears that initially there was a massive spike but the number of curators more or less started saturating in the later months before the announcement. In order to get get a better understanding, we increase the granularity to now view the data on day basis. We restrict our data to only the last 3 months.