Play to govern
DAO governance is usually boring. Voting dashboards, endless proposals, and a handful of whales making all the decisions. Not exactly engaging. You vote, you don't really see how your vote changed the outcome, and for a lot of votes there's no reward at all.
Subscape was Taho Wallet's attempt to fix that: what if taking part in governance felt more like playing a strategy game than filling out a ballot?
Our head of product came up with the game mechanics. I designed everything people actually saw and used: the product UI, the brand (including the name Subscape), The Island, and Scout, the guide.
- Role
- Product & Brand Designer
- Business goal
- Grow Taho Wallet MAU
- Launch with 10 Realms
- User needs
- Make voting worth my time
- Feel part of a community
Making it a game without making it a gimmick
The mechanics were already a proper system. You join one of several Realms, each one a subDAO with its own identity and members. You earn XP by completing quests and staking TAHO, and the more active a Realm is, the bigger its share of token emissions.
My job was to make all that feel simple and alive. The hard part was obvious from the start: how do you gamify governance without it feeling like a gimmick? A few things kept coming up:
- Most people don't want to learn a whole new game just to stake tokens.
- Voting feels thankless. You vote, you click, nothing changes for you personally.
- A shiny new system can spike participation, but if it's shallow, people leave just as fast.
A map as the home screen
We looked at other options, but we wanted this to be a game, and a map made the most sense for that. So Subscape opens on The Island, where each Realm is a piece of territory you can explore and join.
Open a Realm and you see who's there, what this week's rewards are, and exactly what you need to do this week to get your share. That last part is what governance usually never tells you.
Scout instead of a rulebook
We went back and forth on the introduction quite a bit. Dumping all the rules on people up front would have made it feel like exactly what they were afraid of: a complicated new game.
So Scout explains things as you go. Scout is a dog, which fit the Taho brand best, since Taho already used a dog in its visuals. Scout welcomes you when you join a Realm and points you to your first quests. The full rulebook is still there if you want the details.
Making the reward moment feel good
If taking part was going to feel worth it, the payoff had to be visible. XP builds up over the season, and when the beta ended, players could claim their tokens from a limited supply.
For the claim screen, I went for a bit of a celebration: "You have landed!", confetti over The Island and the amount right in the middle. Right after that comes the next thing to do, which is inviting friends.
How did it go?
- 60,000 players joined a Realm during the 6-week beta, and the average session was about 6 minutes.
- 7 Realms by the end of the beta. We launched with 5 (Arbitrum, Frax, Gitcoin, CyberConnect and zkSync), and Base and Galxe joined later. We were aiming for 10, so we didn't quite get there.
- Taho Wallet's monthly active users went up during the beta.
- There was a second season, with more brands and more players than the first.