Back in college, I participated in a design bounty for Superteam Earn. They are a gig marketplace on Solana where crypto founders hire freelancers. The goal was to build a talent leaderboard for their platform.

The problem is that they already had over 18,000 users. If you just make one massive global leaderboard, it gets demotivating really fast. If you are ranked somewhere around 14,000, you just stop caring because the top feels unreachable. A single list also invites spam from people just trying to game the system, and it makes it hard for sponsors to actually spot the best talent. Up until then, every new bounty just felt like starting from zero because nothing carried forward.

I decided to throw out the idea of one single list. Instead, I designed Superboard around a league system with platinum, gold, and silver tiers that update every week. This way you only compete with a few hundred people at a time. I also created a custom metric that I coined "SuperPoints" to tie in perfectly with their existing naming conventions. To prevent spam, the SuperPoints formula gives way more weight to actual money earned and bounties won instead of just rewarding people for submitting a lot of low-quality work.

To keep users motivated, I designed the table so that if you are in the middle of the pack, you only see the people ranked right above and below you. It also tells you exactly how many points you need to level up. Visually I kept everything native to their existing indigo branding so it felt like it naturally belonged on the site, but I added custom badges, rank movement arrows, and an animated banner to give it a highly competitive feel.

I ended up winning the bounty with this design. Breaking down a massive list into smaller weekly leagues turned a boring table into an actual race. While they didn't build out the full gamified league UI, the live Talent Leaderboard they ultimately shipped adopted the core foundation of my project: it ranks top contributors based on real earnings and skills, giving freelancers a persistent profile and finally making top talent discoverable to sponsors. It proved that gamification works best when your next goal feels close and specific.