I don’t know, I was just thinking about this because a lot of us who were mining ETH in 2017-2018 and dumping our ETH into failed ICOs and tokens we bought on the first DEXs… we sort of had it rough, mining gear was expensive, electricity costs were high, and then the market dumped. I know a lot of people quit mining and mining became a lot more consolidated. Now that’s become one of the issues crypto and decentralization faces as trends towards PoS over PoW are preferred for lower transaction costs the risks of centralization become greater. Now BSC has grown BNB to #3 market cap and “centralized DeFi” is driving that… even IDEX now is all marketing BSC integration and airdropping to BSC users. Would be nice to see some of those ETH addresses associated with the early smart contract DEXs and airdrop them or create a claim page for them (us). Many of us missed the original defi boom and are now finally coming back to the crypto market due to this bull run. Let’s invite some discouraged early adopters to participate in SOV ecosystem.
I’m generally against airdrops to people who aren’t immediately providing value to the ecosystem. If they want tokens, they can buy them or propose/participate in liquidity mining and earn them like everyone else.
I get that line of thinking as well. I definitely think of this more as a marketing expense and as an effort to build the community that you want. We’ve all observed the trend of decentralized exchanges and defi projects airdropping to defi users. I was thinking about how SOV could benefit from this marketing model in the short and long term. So, with a lot of the purely airdropped defi tokens that were not sold directly, they were creating the market for their project by airdropping like 50% of tokens (not selling any) and then letting the tokenomics and the markets determine their price. Holding the remaining 50% for treasury, development, and expansion. In the case of SOV, token presale is very different strategy so I’m not talking about a huge airdrop, just a small amount of marketing to draw in those early DEX users, particularly with small balances and high transactions.
I’m thinking about ways to foster greater adoption and it seems like we won’t have problems winning the DeFi community to come try the platform. But can we strategically disseminate some SOV in a way that allows ETH address holders meeting certain criteria to claim a small reward? Like ETH addresses with 25 or more transactions in 2017-2018 and which never had a balance higher than 5 ETH or total Wallet value under $5,000, and which interacted with a DEX smart contract… something like that. Someone would have to advanced query Etherscan and get a sense of the number of addresses and the precise criteria. But if SOV price really begins to increase a lot, I just think it would be cool to give a few thousand small dollar early dex users (who may have gotten burned in 2018), the opportunity to claim 1 SOV. It would be like a reward for believing in the fundamental idea early on and receiving an invitation to participate in the next iteration, the matured, grown-up version of decentralization. But I totally see where you’re coming from too. This is what the bitocracy is supposed to be all about, so let’s keep the ideas flowing.
Are you aware of any empirical research on the success of previous airdrops? Like how many holders were retained (vs cashing out shortly after) and/or were converted to active participants in the protocol either via governance or active use of the protocol?
Why would we care about IDEX users from years ago that have no connection to Sovryn?
Airdropping random audiences isn’t a smart use of marketing budget.
The first people using IDEX and other early DEXs are generally people who truly value decentralization. What is Sovryn? What sort of users do we want having a stake in the bitocracy? Have you seen any video footage of Edan Yago talking about his experience with crypto? Watch his interview with Anthony Pompliano: Decentralized I
I think the ethos behind this project is about creating a truly decentralized financial infrastructure for Bitcoin. The labratory for DeFi was happening in 2017-2018. I’m not married to IDEX. I’m just saying if we want to invite the right people to participate in governance, we need to identify who those people may be. I’m suggesting that many people with smaller accounts balances (who also have a proven history of adopting early DeFI) are preferable to me than very big wallet holders who may actually involve themselves in budding projects with deliberate intent to destroy and sabotage them. So that’s why I think some SOV could be set aside in a promotional capacity for this purpose. Who would you like to market too? Are you entirely against SOV airdrops whatsoever? What better ideas do you suggest? Let’s talk about it.
No, I’ve not seen any peer-reviewed literature on the topic, but I can guess that the majority airdrop token launch model does not incentivize token retention and platform participation among those recipients. Also SOV isn’t just another DEX. People sold their Badger and Uniswap tokens because they went up in value and their wasn’t much motivating them to hold them. A rewarding SOV staking program could change that. The fact that SOV is being distributed exclusively through pre-sale right now and not through any airdrop yet makes for a different scenario as well. I think we have a unique opportunity to think about who in the crypto community we want to bring to the table. I want poor people who love decentralization, not rich people who don’t see a problem with Binance Smart Chain, etc.
I’m not a big fan of such airdrop either. Perhaps it would be viewed a nice gesture, but with the very limited supply of SOV it just doesn’t seem needed, especially not to wallets from 3 years ago, a percentage of which have probably been lost access to / are probably not even being used anymore. I’m guessing in the past we’ve all created some extra wallets for maybe one or two-time use and then just stuck to our main ones. Also, while I like the idea of being generous towards smaller wallets, people with little money overall will be more inclined to sell immediately and realize the “free cash”, as it could make a real difference to their portfolio / life. Of course this sounds great, but wouldn’t really serve the purpose we would be trying to achieve here - to grow our community and attract new users.
If we were to do an airdrop of some sort, I’d say to focus on people and recent wallets who interact and/or bring value to the platform. Way too many people viewed similar 1inch and uniswap airdrop as free money and sold immediately for cash or even the new PlayStation…
I really appreciate your reply and it makes a lot of sense. So since people using and providing value to the project are already aware of the project, who can we focus on reaching to grow adoption? Your reasoning makes perfect sense, so let’s say forget about old DEX users and small balances. Maybe the question I should be asking is, “How do we reach BTC holders who aren’t into DeFi already?” Where are they? Coinbase? BlockFi? Binance? Brave?
Will SOV have a referral program? I’m down to keyword stake a SOV ad on Presearch.
Yeah imo that is the correct way to go about it - asking how can we reach all the big btc hodlers. I’ve never been a btc maxi so I’m not quite sure either, but you could make the case that many of them are already closely watching Sovryn. If I was a big btc holder and was left on the sidelines for this defi craze the past 6 months, I would be damn sure to watch out for any defi projects that would bring the opportunity to earn yield on my beloved btc without giving up the keys. Plus, we did get decent some exposure on twitter from Cactus and Crypto Dog, too. However, what we could do is to focus a part of our marketing efforts on those already in defi, but using centralized btc alternatives like wBTC. In the future, I’m sure we will see some pools and vaults arise on the Sovryn platform and if the returns are comparable, there is no reason they wouldn’t want to switch to a decentralized option. Maybe a partnership / promotion with some of the existing crypto projects like Badger would help, but they probably wouldn’t view it as positively as I envision, as if successful, it would lead them to losing TVL on their platform. Not sure how to go about this.
I believe we will have a referral program on the platform and would suggest this works simiarly to other (centralized) exchanges - 10-50% discount on fees for the first 30-60 days, maybe a kickback in the form of (vested) SOV for some of the fees if we’re feeling extra generous. This option would be sort of like an airdrop for those using the platform, and would help them acquire some tokens and try out our voting system without the need to pruchase them first.
But in all cases, even during the early or promotional period, we need to make sure the benefits for newcomers are fair (or the same) towards early participants, otherwise we could see users creating several new wallets just to take advantage of the referral programs.
All good points. I appreciate hearing your perspective. Yes, maybe RSK network could offer incentives for wBTC to rBTC conversions? I don’t know, everything is changing SO FAST right now. REN looks interesting, Unifi protocol, harmony one, etc. So many projects trying to provide cross-chain functionality.
One thing I’m pretty sure of is that BTC hodlers / maxis won’t be very interested in liquidity mining their precious BTC if they understand impermanent loss. So we should definitely have pure single currency pooling / staking options. I think the BTC maximalists we want to bring to SOV are tempted by 6% apy on BTC with BlockFi… but not tempted enough to give up keys. So SOV users should be pretty pleased to keep keys and earn 60-70% of what the leading custodial BTC rate without risk of impermanent loss with liquidity pool and without giving up custody. So that’s my thoughts for reaching BTC hodlers and keeping them long term. There are aspects of DeFi and AMMs that probably don’t appeal to BTC hodlers at all.
Better understanding SOVs relationship to RSK network would be helpful for me. I wonder if there is some way that SOV and/or RSK could offer something like 4% BTC rewards for BTC holders. I’m not whitelisted for the SOV app yet, so I’m curious if SOV users are able to interact with the dapp with their existing BTC wallets? It would be ideal if they could import their BTC private keys via browser wallet and start using SOV without having to create a new BTC address or convert to rBTC.
In some cases, the highest dollar value BTC accounts are held in a hardware wallets or even coinbase vaults by users who are not technical at all. I know a guy who maxed out like 10 credit cards to buy BTC, but he has no idea how to use a browser wallet, dapps, etc. I’m thinking about him and others like him. SOV seems oriented towards BTC users who understand the importance of keeping your own keys… people who are already “SOVRYN”, but I think there may also be an opportunity to reach this other type of BTC maximalist who may be holding 10 BTC in Coinbase custodial account.