JokeRace, a community contest platform co-founded by David Phelps and Siobhán McCaffery, has launched its most ambitious feature yet: Vote and Earn.
The new mechanism introduces an incentive model that rewards voters financially for accurately predicting the outcome of subjective contests, forming what Phelps describes as a new category in crypto: Persuasion Markets.
With Vote and Earn, JokeRace enables any user to create a contest where participants can buy votes for their favorite entries. Seventy percent of the funds used to buy votes are funneled into a reward pool distributed to those who vote for the eventual winners. This simple but powerful change turns any contest—whether it’s a meme competition, demo day, or community award—into an interactive, self-funded game where both speculation and social coordination are rewarded.
“It took me years to realize there is a magic formula to onboard retail: Speculation + Social Consensus,” wrote Phelps in a post announcing the launch. “Together they enable a new category I call Persuasion Markets.”
A New Framework For On-Chain Participation
Unlike traditional governance systems that often struggle to motivate voter turnout, Vote and Earn makes voting not only consequential but also financially engaging. Any user can now create a contest in minutes on jokerace.io, without the need for oracles, upfront liquidity, or institutional backing. The ease of creation, combined with the potential to earn from correctly identifying the most popular entries, transforms each contest into a social prediction engine.
“If I put out a poll asking if I should cut my hair or what shirt I should wear today, there is now incentive to vote,” said Phelps. “In theory, I can incentivize anyone to care about anything.”
This flexibility makes Vote and Earn applicable across a wide variety of use cases—from DAOs deciding which token to list, to creators letting fans choose their next release, to communities running cultural debates. Crucially, every vote cast is a public signal of belief with financial gain on the line, incentivizing participants to advocate for their picks and drive broader engagement.
How Vote And Earn Works
Each contest using Vote and Earn operates with a few core mechanics:
- Participants buy votes on any entry in a contest.
- 70% of funds go into a rewards pool for voters who backed the winning entries.
- The remaining 30% goes to JokeRace, serving both as platform revenue and as a strategic deterrent to vote monopolization.
This setup creates a dynamic incentive landscape. Voters must weigh not only which entries they think will win, but also how many others are likely to vote similarly. For example, if a voter purchases 80% of the votes on an entry that ultimately earns only 70% of the rewards pool, they could still lose money, forcing more nuanced strategy and encouraging vote distribution across multiple entries.
Why It’s Different From Prediction Markets
While Persuasion Markets resemble prediction markets in their speculative mechanics, they are fundamentally distinct in purpose and structure. Traditional prediction markets focus on objective, oracle-resolved outcomes—like sports results or election outcomes. Persuasion Markets, by contrast, are built for subjective decisions that resolve through collective social consensus, with no oracle required.
As Phelps explains: “Prediction Markets require liquidity to bootstrap so users can trade their positions. In our Persuasion Markets, users take a position upfront with funds going into , so contests can entirely self-fund. No liquidity is required.”
This architecture allows Persuasion Markets to be fully user-generated, lightweight, and expressive—ideal for fast-moving internet communities and experimental governance.
Game Theory Meets Social Signaling
Vote and Earn is not only a feature—it’s a game. The economic design encourages users to form teams, campaign for their preferred entries, and maximize reach. Since rewards depend on others voting on losing entries, there’s a built-in incentive to drive contest visibility. The more participants a contest attracts, the more rewarding it becomes for accurate voters.
Each contest can also customize its payout curve. Organizers can choose how rewards are split among first, second, third place, and beyond, further shaping the strategic landscape. JokeRace’s default configuration prioritizes a diverse set of winners, making it difficult for vote whales to dominate outcomes through sheer spend alone.
“The best thing to do is to persuade other people to share your beliefs—or oppose them,” wrote Phelps. “The best thing to do is to build teams, play a game, and have fun.”
Back To The Beginning
Vote and Earn isn’t just a product milestone for JokeRace—it’s also a return to origins. In early 2022, Phelps created the original “JokeRace” as a joke-driven voting game designed to parody on-chain governance. It went viral and sparked its own micro-communities before being discontinued due to external platform limitations.
Now, that same contest has been relaunched as a demonstration of Vote and Earn—complete with the original bad jokes from the 2022 edition. Voters can once again compete for rewards by picking the funniest entry, proving out the thesis that gamified governance can be fun, sticky, and financially meaningful.
The Future Of Persuasion Markets
Vote and Earn may be just the beginning.
As JokeRace continues to expand, Persuasion Markets could emerge as a foundational primitive for on-chain culture, enabling more nuanced community decisions, driving attention toward emerging creators and projects, and fusing speculative dynamics with genuine social engagement.
For more information or to launch a contest, visit jokerace.io.
