Bankless: The Next Phase of Cryptocurrency Airdrops

DeFi之道

特邀专栏作者

2023-01-13 13:30

This article is about 2931 words, reading the full article takes about 5 minutes

How to make airdrops more effective?

Originally Posted by Nathan Snell, Co-Founder and CEO, Raleon

Compilation of the original text: The Way of DeFi

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The Next Phase of Cryptocurrency Airdrops

Airdrops are a native Web3 marketing strategy. Done right, they can help drive new user growth, retention and TVL.

With this in mind, we took the time to research past airdrops such as UNI, HOP, ENS, 1INCH, Mooncats, and Optimism to determine the true effectiveness of the airdrops. The results of the airdrop with the current method are not very good: the retention rate is as low as 1%.

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Why are airdrops important?

First, it's important to understand why airdrops are so important to Web3 today. There are two reasons:

1. Airdrops are one of the best available strategies for reaching anonymous users

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What does the airdrop look like at this stage?

Every project that uses airdrops uses it as a Web3 marketing tool to acquire new users. Yes, they also hope to form a community to allow users to continue to use the product, and hope that users hold (hold) instead of dump (sell).

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Push airdrop

This is when a legitimate Token or NFT "magically" appears in a user's wallet—usually through an allotment, or sometimes through a claim.

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Pull Airdrop

This is when the user actively needs to claim the reward. Most projects fall into this category, such as Uniswap, ENS, 1INCH, and Cow Swap.

Pull airdrops are usually the result when a project announces that they will reward users for using their project, most commonly via tokens or NFTs (less commonly). The purpose here is also to help the project acquire new clients. The exact criteria for claiming rewards are often kept secret, like a sort of "nuclear activation code" for the project, to keep people from gaming the system.

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Challenges of airdrops at this stage

The professional researchers at Dune Analytics have put together a nice in-depth look at the UNI airdrop, as well as a quick look at some of the others. Given that we recently wrote about tracking other important Web3 project health metrics, we wanted to correlate Dune's analysis with some of these metrics, such as customer acquisition cost, payback period, retention rate, and customer lifetime value. ).

These metrics give us a basic understanding of the sustainability and health of the project. Analyzing these metrics with the results of the airdrop will help us understand the effectiveness of the airdrop as a sustainable Web3 marketing and growth tool.

First of all, what is the structure of the UNI "Pull Airdrop"?

They distribute UNI to over 250,000 users

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How does the airdrop work?

As with most projects today, a large percentage of users are expecting airdrops - which is one of the benefits of airdrops as a marketing tool. Given that the Uniswap airdrop appears to be the first of its kind, it may gain more users if it is more anticipated.

If you want a deeper analysis of some of the above metrics, Tomasz Tunguz uses these numbers to compare Web2 and Web3 customer acquisition costs (CAC). You can also dig into the data in the Dune query to see how we arrived at some of these numbers.

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A Framework: Making Airdrops More Effective

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1. Encourage cycles of behavior

When considering Pull airdrops, their current criteria mostly fall into the generic category of "Used Goods". While generous to users, today’s airdrop is not generous to the project itself, as it doesn’t actually “hook” users to the product.

An example of a good behavior hook from Web2 is Twitter.

Thinking about behavioral loops has the added benefit of identifying who your ideal users are and what behaviors you think might “engage” them. This effort will have a downstream effect on acquiring new users and retaining them through other marketing efforts.

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2. Reputation-based airdrops

The criteria for who gets the airdrop needs to be upgraded to a "reputation criteria" as the project goes from being equivalent to a blind date to finding a match.

General Criteria: You have a pizzeria that had 500 customers in the last month. You can give these customers $50 each and hope they come back.

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3. Airdrop "Wave"

Blur and Optimism do a great job of this. As opposed to massive one-time event airdrops, planning airdrop “waves” based on more targeted criteria would be effective for two reasons:

1. It encourages people to keep using your product

2. It allows you to use data to test your reputation criteria so you can see if it is creating the desired outcomes for the project, such as better retention and customer lifetime value (CLV).

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4. Create project loyalty to retain users

Loyalty matters not only because of how much marketing dollars you spend to acquire customers, but also because repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers (using web2 as a proxy).

Looking at Dune’s analysis, whether it is UNI, 1INCH, or other projects, it is not surprising that the retention rate is so low when most users sell after the airdrop and 98% of the airdrop users did not participate in any UNI voting up.

Governance and purely economic benefits like staking have not proven to be the most effective means of encouraging user retention.

We need to find new ways to build loyalty. If we look at some of the most successful Web2 and Web3 brands, they build loyalty by:

Tailor the experience to the customer, showing they know the customer

Well-Designed Token Economics and NFT Design

Give their customers a reason to come back

Make customers feel like they are part of the brand

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Case Study: What might the next generation of airdrops look like in practice?

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do know that some projects are already experimenting with some of the ideas mentioned above, as well as other strategies like airdrop attribution. We're big fans of testing, tracking results with usage data, and sharing, so here's an example of an AirDrop 2.0 program.

Item type: DEX

Behavioral goals: When a user becomes a Liquidity Provider (LP), its "sticky" peg is strongest, which makes our second peg actually trade on the DEX. Your behavioral goals may also depend on what you're optimizing for, and you should be optimizing to drive the most value out of your project and the best return for your users (your hook).

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Airdrop Wave:

Wave 1: LP small batches. Here are some examples of reputation criteria a project might add:

Created or added two LPs of $10,000 or more

Traded at least 5 times with the protocol for an amount of $1000 or more

Traded at least once last month and this month

Has served as LP on Uniswap for many times

Be active on DEX every month in the past 6 months

Wave 2: Smaller exchange batches. Reputation note: Given the broader scope this time around, we'll be looking for exchange-centric behavioral hooks and hope to weed out as many airdrop hunters as possible. Examples of reputation criteria:

At least 20 transactions with an amount over $50

Traded at least once last month and this month

Has been active on DEX for the last 3 months

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