Season 1 Review for Unicorn.eth
Unicorn.eth went from a hackathon project at Devconnect Istanbul to creating 19,000 subdomains and onboarding ETHDenver attendees to the best UX experience on Ethereum.
This report will summarize our journey.
Background, Mission, and Strategy
Unicorn.eth emerged from Donat3, which won several awards during the ETHGlobal hackathon in Istanbul. It was built to address the needs of the Giveth community for an easy way to onboard nonprofits into a non-custodial wallet that can protect them from the most common patterns that lead to loss of funds. Our mission for the last year has been to make web3 safe, simple, and accessible, addressing challenges of web3 from a novel, practical perspective, while maintaining web3 values. ENS is the tooling that makes this possible. By enabling distribution and storage of data under ENS tokenized subdomains, we can make this dream a reality.
Unicorn.eth applied to became an official service provider in December of 2023, and to my great surprise, we actually made it, as the last project to qualify. This humble nod of support kick started a wild adventure. The support from the ENS community was the validation we needed to take this project to market.
We built prototype after prototype trying to get the UX and business models to work over the past year. I talked to many friends in the space and brought in top experts in the field to join me on this quest to make web3 usable and safe for the masses, and we now have an epic team and a solid foundation to build a product that can go far and solve real problems in this space.
I have tried to address these problems for many years, starting with the Vault contract in early 2017, but taking the public goods approach has proven to fail time and again. Strategizing with the Unicorn.eth team that formed fully in April 2024, we decided to take a different strategy and make this into an investable product with clear revenue streams that can sustain a dedicated team for kickass development. This is our journey. Thank you for reading this far⊠but itâs a year in review, so watch out, itâs a long one!
TL;DR: Unicorn.eth Product Overview
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Goal | Enable any community manager to easily build a branded platform to onboard their members to a simple & safe web3 experience |
| Community Size | Support communities from 1 to 5 million members |
| UX | Effortless onboarding with no 0x addresses, no network switching, no phishing risks, no scary pop ups. Eliminate error-prone features, offer personalized ENS subdomains, and secure assets using non-custodial smart contract wallets |
| Branded Experience | Fully customizable portal with branded design, personalized domains, integrated content/offers, token-gated rewards, and intuitive member search |
| Types of Clients | B2B: 2 different types: Self-serve, for smaller startups looking for a webflow-esque expereince. White glove service, for larger established communities, like ENS, that want to customize the userflows and add new functionality |
| Sustainability | Freemium model for self-serve, along side traditional professional services. Revenue sharing with partners through transaction fees, premium memberships, and paid sponsorship opportunities |
| App Center | Curated web3 linktree custom for each community with revolutionary auto-connect tech and seamless wallet management across communities |
| Marketing | Kick ass marketing, not just grabbing attention, but also fun walk through videos. Who needs to read docs when we can have talking Unicorns explain how things work. Follow us on X: twitter.com/MyUnicornAcct |
| Additional Features | Simple subdomain management, brand-safe dapp curation, approved token lists, comprehensive analytics dashboard, and direct user communication tools |
Chronological Breakdown
Period 1: Establishing the team and the product (Jan â June, 2024)
The year kicked off with Unicorn.eth as a General Magic product, we iterated on several designs but nothing really worked to solve the needs of real users. I talked with many advisors and listened to their words of wisdom, and went back to the drawing board, not not only scrapped the first designs, but also going on the hunt to build a stronger team. An early stage prototype for account.eth.link still exists, but is not maintained and is not operational today.
By the end of April I had assembled what would become the Unicorn Dream team:
In the early days after the hackathon, Marko (markoprljic.eth), Krati (krati.eth), and I were iterating on how to turn Unicorn.eth into a reality from a technical and UX perspective, but we needed help. At ETHDenver 2024, I spoke on a panel about onboarding, and Gardner (glou.eth) asked a good question during the Q&A. We talked afterward, connected, and once I looked into his backgroundâhis marketing work with major brands and his web3 wallet security experienceâ and had a few convos with him, I knew he would be a great leader for our team (later I found out he was denominated for a fricken EMMY). I brought him in as a founder right away. Around the same time, I reached out to Russell (rcastag.eth), whom Iâd met back when he was building MyColoradoâs state-issued digital ID system. I asked for advice, thinking identity might play a role in our visionâbut instead of advice, he offered to join as the second co-founder. Given his business and web3 investor experience (something I desperately lack) it was an easy HELL YES. Then I set off hiring for a Chief Product Officer at General Magic for all our products. I met Alex (sillysausage.eth), a former PM at Sweatcoin, and he stood out immediately. We brought him on as CPO for GM, but it didnât take long to realize he needed to be full-time, focused completely on building Unicorn.eth.
In June, Russell, Gardener Alex and I all met in person for the first time at Consensus 2024, held in Austin, Texas. We got an airbnb with a white board (and sliding glass doors that we turned into a whiteboard) and completely redesigned the product with a new found goal of solving the onboarding issues experienced at one of the largest crypto conferences in the world, ETHDenver.
I also participated in a panel discussion, passionately addressing the critical issue of web3 safety, here are some highlights:
Period 2: ChainID 0 & building a new plan (July â September, 2024)
One big issue we identified was that when people register addresses on the ENS Manager App, by default, they register on chainID 1, Ethereumâs chainID. If the address is an EOA, that address exists on all chains, so sometimes itâs ok to assume if the address registers a name on Ethereum than it exists on Base and all L2âs BUT NOT ALWAYS! If the address being resolved is a contract (like a multisig) then it may not exist on all chains. The proper way this should be handled today is that the user controlling an EOA should make a transaction to add each chainID that they want their identity to live on. This seemed inefficient to us, and if we take the shortcut that many applications do (assume every registered address is an EOA and resolve it on L2s) it could lead to loss of funds.
So we worked with the Ethereum wallet standards community to create ChainID 0. Which allows EOAs to register as ChainID 0 to identify that they exist on all standard EVM chains. This was eventually added to the scope of ENSIP 19, and hopefully will become the standard for name registration for EOAs.
In this period we also struck a deal with ETHDenver to provide our infrastructure to onboard their attendees to SporkDAO. We scrapped the old codebase to build out to a revised vision which would have custom UX for ETHDenver but would be built on a modular foundation that anyone could use to create their own account infrastructure using an onboarding wizard.
Building on our new direction and clear business plan, we all 4 reunited again for some more valuable IRL time at ETHCC in Brussels where I gave this great talk about the level up that Unicorn.eth will bring to wallets:
Period 3: Heads down building for ETHDenver (October â December, 2024)
In October we announced our partnership with ETHDenver, finalized the onboarding flow and executed on it. We enabled one-click smart wallet sign-ups, integrated $SPORK airdrops, and custom subdomain addresses for attendees. Our marketing efforts went into overdrive alongside the launch of our subdomain registration for ETHDenver.
We did a variety of marketing campaigns to support ETHDenver onboarding, Gardener even presented at the House of Web3, a coworking space in San Francisco, and we felt honored to have responses like this:
Behind all this marketing though, there was also a lot of building. We were working hard with our partners. We used Namespace to manage the subdomain registration and eth.limo to manage the ETHDenver.com subdomain resolution to really highlight what is possible with ENS tech. We also built an incredible partnership with Thirdweb to make the UX of interfacing with smart contract wallets and dapps, so easy you wouldnât even know itâs web3, more on that in the next section.
Period 4: ETHDenver Launch and OrangeDAO (January â Now, 2025)
As 2025 began we celebrated a major milestone: 10,000 sign-ups for ETHDenver 2025 using our platform! But the platform had very limited functionality, users could get a subdomain, navigate to their personalized ETHDenver website, apply for and get a ticket, and thatâs about it. But we had a plan for much more!
We brought in 2 designers and 5 devs from General Magic to build out all the functionality we wanted to show off at ETHDenver. We built so many cool features, but I want to highlight 2 in particular. We worked closely with Thirdweb to update their SDK to do 2 things:
- Auto-connecting Dapps: Our users never have to fumble around with wallet connect qr codes or weird confusing pop ups. Click on a dapp and you are connected. The UX improvement here cannot be understated.
- Account Abstraction on External Dapps: After automatically connecting to a dapp, you can just click around, make transactions, and never see any confusing pop ups, never worry about having to get the gas token for that chain⊠never even have to worry about the chain! Everything just works.
While building, we also began our 12-week accelerator program with Orange DAO. The mentorship and resources we have been receiving as part of this program has been incredible. We also validated the demand for the value we provide by signing up a few other clients, VDAO, House of Web3, Opolis, and a few others.
We also launched the self-serve version of our product, which you can try yourself at unicorn.eth.link to better understand the power of our Infrastructure. The self-serve model is very similar to what we hope to build out for ENS Accounts. We had over 100 potential clients sign up to try it out at ETHDenver alone!
Our booth at ETHDenver was a huge hit! We showed off the power of our infrastructure and gave out stickers, unicorn horns, and succulents; we even had real grass for people to touch!
We impressed a lot of movers and shakers in the space, like Joe Lubin who remarked that Unicorn.ethâs infra was âcommunity in a box.â And Bridget, the Unicorn.eth mascot, made her first IRL appearance, spreading joy all over the venue.
Our marketing is backed up by the productâs magic. To get excited about how we made onboarding to the web3 side of ETHDenver drop-dead-simple for normal users:
Go to app.ethdenver.com on your phone (or desktop).
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If you went to ETHDenver, login with the same email you used
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If you didnât go to ETHDenver, create an account with your email & click: âNo you are not a sporkDAO memberâ and âYes you want a free ticketâ to speed run the onboarding.
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Notice we airdrop tokens, stake them for you, solving ETHDenverâs onboarding issues, and we give you a personalized ENS ETHDenver subdomain, like your-name.ethdenver.com.
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Now when you go to that domain, and this is your personalized portal to SporkDAO. We can make something similar for any community, including ENS!
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But the real magic is the ecosystem UX! Not only do we put all the dapps a community needs directy into their account, we were able to cut out almost all of the weird popups that too often make web3 feel complex and scary.
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Try it out! Go to the âSPORK Staking DAppâ and watch it pop up in a new tab, auto-connect, and then try unstaking your SPORK.
Then tell me this isnât the most magical UX youâve seen for a web3 community.
Here is Gardner breaking down the product we built for ETHDenver as a follow up video that we sent to some of the potential clients we met:
Conclusion
We worked hard over the last season, finishing with an incredible product that shows off the power of ENS. Our platform succeeded on the biggest stage in web3, creating over 19,000 personalized ETHDenver subdomains, and using them to make web3 accessible through simplified onboarding, and a truly magical UX that eliminates confusion while maximizing safety. As we look to the future, weâre excited to use this foundation to build and operate ENS Accounts, bringing more community members into the ecosystem with our powerful product and experienced team.