Scaling Onchain Contests to $1M in Rewards with JokeRace

JokeRace is a platform for anyone to earn by voting with conviction on their tastes, preferences, and beliefs. Creators can launch campaigns for anything, including demo days, community awards, polls, group decisions, design contests, and even reality TV shows. Players can buy votes on entries: their funds go into a rewards pool, and voters on winning entries earn a proportionate share of the rewards across dozens of EVM chains.

This year, the platform introduced persuasion markets: a new onchain mechanism where users can earn by voting with conviction on winning entries. Major projects like Polygon, Arbitrum, and EigenLayer use JokeRace to run hackathons, governance votes, and community awards, transforming any collective decision into a game with real incentives.

Para has been JokeRace’s wallet partner through this evolution, helping them onboard users, control UX, and scale transaction flows to over 1 million in rewards.

Background: JokeRace’s Journey

JokeRace has evolved from an MVP into a core onchain platform for communities. What began as a “best joke of the week” experiment quickly expanded into tokenized contests with features like vote-and-earn, token gating, and reward distribution. In the first two months after launching price curves—which give higher ROI to early conviction voters—JokeRace has generated over $1,500,000 for voters.

From Onboarding to Scale: Why JokeRace Chose Para's Cross-Chain Growth and Compatibility

JokeRace runs contests across more than 25 EVM chains, which can be confusing for users having to deal with network prompts or different setups each time. To make participation seamless, they needed an embedded wallet that worked across all of them and supported new user onboarding.

“Choosing Para was a no-brainer for us because maintaining optionality for ourselves as builders and our users is a top priority.”  said David Phelps, JokeRace co-founder. “We spent nearly a full year evaluating embedded wallets… Para was the logical choice.”

With Para’s Distributed MPC wallets, a single account works across all EVM chains. Whether a contest is on Ethereum, Polygon, or Arbitrum, users can join without extra steps.

Scaling Transactions & Building for Everyone

As JokeRace’s contests grew, so did the stakes. Votes and reward distributions scaled into the millions. To keep up, they needed infrastructure that could handle sudden spikes in activity without slowing down or putting funds at risk.

At the same time, growth depended on getting more people in the door. Asking newcomers to install MetaMask or manage seed phrases was too much friction, especially for communities where some members weren’t crypto-native. By integrating Para’s embedded wallet SDK, JokeRace made onboarding feel as simple as signing up for any web app: users could log in with an email or social account and instantly receive a non-custodial wallet. Crypto-native participants weren’t left out either, since Para works alongside RainbowKit for those who prefer their existing wallets.

“Anyone can [now] come to our site, pick Para as their wallet, and start playing in contests — no crypto experience required,” noted the JokeRace team.

The combination of reliable infrastructure and accessible onboarding helped JokeRace expand rapidly, while keeping participation open to everyone.

Strategic Optionality: Avoid lock-in. As David Phelps, co-founder of JokeRace, put it: “Many embedded wallets require you to depend on them as your wallet kit provider… Para makes it easy to integrate alongside any other wallet… That means your whole business isn’t dependent on them.”

From Iteration to a Million-Dollar Milestone

With the right wallet infrastructure, you can focus on building your product while confidently scaling to meet demand. JokeRace’s journey with Para showcases how a Web3 app can scale from MVP to million-dollar contests without compromising user experience. If you’re interested in trying JokeRace, head to their platform to join or create a contest. 

To explore how Para’s wallet SDK can help your own application scale and delight users, check out the Para docs or get in touch!