Vlad Todirut
Product Designer
Play to
Govern.
Make governance fun and engaging.
DAO governance is usually boring. Voting dashboards, endless proposals, and a handful of whales making all the decisions. Not exactly engaging.
With Subscape, we wanted to make governance feel alive. What if participating in the DAO felt more like playing a strategy game than filling out a ballot?
The hard part was obvious: how do you gamify governance without making it feel like a gimmick.
Complex mechanics scare people away. Most folks don’t want to learn a whole new game just to stake tokens.
Governance usually feels thankless. You vote, you click, nothing changes for you personally.
Engagement is fragile. A shiny new system can spike participation at first, but if it’s shallow, people churn fast.
So the challenge was: design a system that feels playful but still meaningful, with real stakes and a reason to keep coming back.
THE DESIGN
Feel part of something.
Subscape is a map-control game.
Users join one of several Realms. Each Realm is a subDAO with its own identity and members.
By completing quests and staking TAHO, users earn XP. The more active the Realm, the bigger its share of token emissions.
XP isn’t just a number. It’s the basis for rewards, status, and influence inside the Realm.
The design leaned into light strategy mechanics: map control, community identity, and friendly competition. Enough to make things interesting without overloading users with complexity.
Making the main page feel alive and help you feel part of the community
Each screen would have the following components, making is easy for users to scan.
Scout was there all along to help guide you through the path.
Once BETA was over and users could claim their tokens with a limited supply.
Exploration of a mobile app.
RESULTS
How did it go?
We started with 5 Reals (Arbitrum, Frax, Gitcoin, CyberConnect, zxSync) , and quickly grew to 7 with Base and Galxe joining us after beta launch.
The Beta ran for 6 weeks with 60k users joining a realm and competing to win most XP.
