Referral Retro — Let’s Talk About the Across Referral Program
tl;dr It has almost been a month since the launch of our referral program. We saw over $100 million of referral-related volume in the first 7 days of the program’s launch, which allowed us to really stress test the bridge. The program was developed to achieve even more mindshare around Across. Although there were some speed bumps in regard to the announcement and volumes we achieved, the program has been largely successful. We have a hearty Referral Ranger community, and the links continue to be used frequently.
The end of this week will mark a month since Across’ referral program launch. Let’s sit by the toasty virtual campfire and go through it — why we launched the program, how the launch went, some speed bumps and successes.
Why a Referral Program?
The team at Across has been talking about implementing a referral program for a while. We really believe in our bridge; we think it’s the fastest, most cost efficient and secure bridge on the market… and we wanted to really expand our mindshare.
Our philosophy is such: If we can get someone to use our bridge even once, they’ll want to switch to Across as their go-to bridge.
Enter the referral program; a way for those who are already using Across to refer those who haven’t tried it out yet. We reward the referrer with some extra ACX for spreading the word about Across, and we reward the referee with a great bridging experience, and some extra ACX.
In addition to contributing to Across’ brand awareness, we also wanted to test our system to see how capital efficient it really is. This taught us a lot about the capabilities of our bridge, and allowed us to find even more ways to improve it. More on this later.
Launch
We ended up launching on Tuesday, July 19th with a tweet thread, Medium article and follow up AMA. (A huge thank you to everyone who attended our AMA, read our Medium article and amplified our announcement!)
Our initial launch tweet was one of our most popular tweets, ever, resulting in over 170K impressions and over 8000 interactions! So truly, thank you for spreading the word of the launch.
Speaking of the Announcement…
Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate that people would see the announcement and think that the launch of the referral program automatically meant that this was the airdrop. The whole idea behind the referral program was to get more eyes on Across and create ways to get ACX in your wallet before the airdrop happens, not for the referral program to be the entire airdrop. This definitely gave us an important lesson on ensuring that our communications are very precise, especially when it comes to foreseeing a certain interpretation of the news.
So, to reiterate for those who haven’t seen our tweet replies and threads — the Across Referral Program is not the airdrop… that’s still coming. If you like using Across and you’d like to earn some extra ACX in the meantime, we encourage you to generate your own Across referral link.
Community Cohesion
Although they were spicy words thrown at our Twitter, overall, we have seen great reception of the referral program. As evidenced from our volume, a lot of people have been using their link.
People seem to be excited to share their link around, and excited about the opportunity to earn some extra ACX.
Another great part of seeing the referral program grow has been development of the Referral Rangers. For those who don’t know, this group has weekly calls and their own chat where they discuss their wins, tips, tricks and different strategies on how they’re earning $ACX through their link. Many of them have leveled up and are now chasing down ways to increase the value of the $ACX they’ve already earned.
If you’re interested in becoming the latest member of the Referral Rangers, you can suit up here.
Volume, Volume, Volume.
The goal of the referral program was certainly to drive more traffic to the bridge, but we didn’t expect it to be similar to L.A. at rush hour.
The day of launch, we did over 13 million in volume, which was an incredible start to the program. What we didn’t expect was that day 2 of the launch, we would bring over $36 million in volume. As the days went by, we were truly amazed by the amount of volume we continued to see from Across bridgers.
Just 7 days after the launch, we had seen over $100 million in referral-related volume.
A Farmer’s Guide to Confidence in Across
As expected, many users were farming ACX through this referral program. To us, this shows a confidence that others have in the future of our protocol.
By bridging with the referral link, users were effectively buying ACX at a low valuation. As you may know, our token has not launched yet. These farmers are willing to hold and “invest” these funds until we launch, showing us that these farmers believe in the value of ACX, and Across as a whole.
People seem to really want ACX, and we think that’s fantastic.
Looking Forward
The referral program taught us a lot, all while allowing new people to learn about Across, grow a Referral Ranger community and allow people to earn some sweet ACX.
Moving forward, we plan to talk to users more beforehand to learn about their desired features. For example, ENS support for the referral link program has been a highly requested feature. As we build more, collecting these “user stories” will enable us to have those features ready at launch rather than adding them further down the line.
As we mentioned earlier in the article, we knew the referral program would bring in volume, but we were pleasantly surprised by just how much volume we actually saw. We did end up lowering rewards from 3x to 2x to slow down the intense amount of volume we experienced.
The lesson here? Always anticipate the best to anticipate all. Or at least get darn close to it.
Have you used the Across Referral Program? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments below or join the conversation on Twitter by tagging us and using the #AcrossReferralLink hashtag.
Happy referring!
