Beyond farming, enter the Jellyverse.
Intro
One of the key ideas to come from our collective experiments within crypto is the emergence of incentive engineering. The use of incentives and rewards power entire networks, protocols and the actions of bots and users alike. The room for creativity is limited to the technical few. For the most part, projects with token incentives are going a path with no lights, guided by survivorship bias.
The rise of DeFi saw the great hunt for alpha. Farming farming, all day long in search of greener pastures, a nomadic lifestyle limited to the few. These rewards, when perfected have incredible power. Projects that miscalculate rewards, however, have been industrially farmed into the dust.
Our appetite for these sweet, sweet rewards was first packaged by Synthetix and brought to every table by a fork from the MasterChef of everyone’s favourite Sushi restaurant.
From Farming to the Factory
Fast forward an entire DeFi summer and ignoring the environmental disaster from all these barren farms, we still see the same farm contracts and their forks. Onsen’s double rewards was a great step forward, and sure, there are other exceptions on the protocol side with OHM and all its forks racing to the bottom.
Incentives when done right, thrive, yet are impossible to predict months in advance. Once rewards start flowing, it becomes non trivial to migrate existing farmers, or worse, keep them.
The Jelly Hypothesis
At Jelly, our hypothesis is simple.
- Rewards should be delicious
- Rewards can be flexible
- Rewards should be sticky
- Rewards earned taste better
Delicious in the sense that they are desirable. Sure your project has to be worth it, but at the same time, it makes little sense for them to be too sweet and have those first at the table glut themselves into whales. Nor does it help for them to be so sweet that they are diluted amongst the masses.
Flexible that they can change over time, adjusting to demand and matching the incentives needs of the project. We call this wobbliness and its super important.
Stickiness is nice to have in a world of anons. There should be more interesting incentive structures to reward not just actions, but acts over time. Stickiness has a compounding effect over time.
Lastly, treats are best when earned. There is an unspoken value that is imparted into a gift that is earned. This can come in many forms, from being lucky, to performing actions that result in a win win.
The Invention Room
Our scientists have come up with an approach with the perfect amount of wobble. It all starts at the heart of the Jelly Factory where we first clone secure vaults, SAFU but still able to control and adjust the amount of rewards. There will be a selection of rewarders, bonuses and merkle trees that we will have prepared, where technical connoisseurs are able to replace with their own creations. The idea being that incentives should be adaptable, and adjustable as needed. Our first product on mainnet will be for distributing rewards in the form of Airdrops, but re-engineered and crafted in such a way that will grow as we innovate, and take advantage of any future wacky incentive scheme that is popularised in the zeitgeist.
Gummy from R&D has been asking questions like…
“What about an airdrop that doesn’t drop all the tokens all at once… more like a stream?”
To which I say, nothing is impossible. We can combine the reward distribution concepts from Staking, Farming and Vesting with Airdrops and come up with new features to make Airdrops stickier.
“Can you have NFTs and token rewards together?”
Sure thing, NFTs and tokens are friends! Should you wish to incentivise NFTs in the future, both token pools should be able to share rewards and combine rewarder logic.
The future of Incentives
The design space for incentive engineering runs deep and limited only by pure imagination. I cannot wait to share with you some of our ideas, new types of rewards, and some of the experiments that are still yet to set. As more products get added to the Jelly Factory and become open to market, we look with great curiosity with what other devs cook up, and what treats taste best.
To learn more about what is being crafted at Jelly, please join the Discord server. If you have some crazy incentives you’d like to see become a reality, please share them in the #invention-room.
We also like to experiment on our own rewards and believe in a meritocracy.
If you want to join our research team, become an incentive engineer or just help out and earn sweet $JELLY rewards in the process, please contact Dr Jiggle or myself, Prof Wobble.
https://twitter.com/DoctorJiggle
— Dr Jiggle (Head of Rheology)
https://twitter.com/ProfWobble
— Professor Wobble (Chief Gelatin Crystallogist)
Visit us at
https://www.jelly.io
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