Kickback Idea: Call for Airdrops

Airdrops, ads or incentives?

Icons from “Cryptocurrency Icons”

Intro

As ICO started to die down from stricter regulations, I have started hearing more about the importance of airdrops as a away to distribute tokens to a wider audience, without tokens being treated as security. Kyle Semani explains the benefit of airdrops as follows in his blog post, “A new model for token distribution”.

“Sufficiently decentralised can morph in status from (unregistered) security into pure utility”

In his blog post, He categorised airdrops with three examples.

1. OmiseGo conducted its airdrop by distributing it to everyone who had certain amount of ETH in the hope that people will want to learn more about the token in their wallet. Kyle believes that this failed in practice.
2. Quantstamp, Numerai, and Handshake did a more targeted approach to airdrop specific communities. Though it was not stated in the blog, Numerai airdropped directly to Kaggle users which ended up blocking their platform access temporarily, while Handshake targeted individual open source organisations which they can directly contact(disclaimer: I also work at ENS which was one of the listed token distribution organisation of Handshake).
3. Livepeer used “Merkel mining” which allocates token to only users who generated merle proofs demonstrating that a specific Ethereum address was in the set of accounts.

Kyle then concluded that option 3 (Livepeer merkel) mining model is the way to go, especially for teams that are building a layer 2 token or a PoS blockchain and considering some permissionless way for passionate community members to participate in something that is not an ICO.

This basically may apply into every single new blockchain project, as our co-founder Ram predicts that blockchain projects may all eventually become side chain to avoid expensive gas cost of the main chain.

I also like their “Pull Over Push” method to distribute tokens to those who only pay their own gas to claim the “free money” — demonstrating that the users know how to interact with smart contracts and Dapps (normal airdrops can’t distinguish between normal account with ones in an exchange).

However, the option #3 model doesn’t solve the original intention of #1, which expects that airdropping triggers notification on the user’s wallet for marketing purpose. The users have to know about the Merkel mining in some other way.

Kickback as a token distribution channel and notification system.

In my “DevCon4 social event planning guide”, I suggested airdropping Tokens as swag to event participants. I got the inspiration from MakerDAO’s “Dai happy hour” during ETHBerlin and at the Status hackathon, giving away a few DAI to hackathon participants that they could spend at a pub for a few drinks.

I am extending this idea further to test whether there will be an appetite for any blockchain companies or VCs who want to promote their tokens to event participants.

In most local meetups, promoting ICOs are the things event organisers prohibit. That’s partly because not everybody is interested in ICOs. In our case, we ask users who registered on our site whether they are willing to receive marketing related information, which people can opt-in, so we can only airdrop to those who don’t mind.

For those who don’t know what Kickback does, we are Ethereum based event management dapp which ask participants to commit Eth when they RSVP (if you don’t turn up, your Eth will be re-distributed to those who came).

Given our participants ETH addresses are in public Blockchain, anyone can already airdrop to all participants (In fact, Indorse airdropped to all Kyber token holders). However, by partnering with us, we could potentially email this token info only to those who attended the meetup and who opted-in.

We would like to test this concept to see if this airdropping feature adds extra incentive to crypto related meetups/conferences.

These airdrops will even have greater impact if they actually sponsor the meetups in exchange for some presentation time during the actual event. Meetups/conferences are in fact the best way to meet passionate community members.

Also, I would like to mention that airdropping to event participants dont’t conflict with Merkle mining. I actually participated Merkel mining of Livepeer though I had no clue what I was doing. As an event participant, I don’t mind being seeing a quick demo of how the merkel mining work as these are one of the few things we can actually do with Blockchain (besides HODLing and BUIDling).

Summary

I came up this idea while brainstorming some of the benefits a blockchain company can have by sponsoring rural Ethereum events such as “Solidity 0.5 walkthrough at Progressbar in Blatislava, Slovakia”. If you are / or know of any blockchain companies / VCs , please let us know so that we can test this idea.

Any thoughts on this? We’d love to hear from you. Thank you!