Absinthe helps businesses launch loyalty and incentive programs that feel modern, measurable, and tradeable. With our white-label builder and adapter protocol, companies can issue points, track analytics, and even tokenize rewards that users can buy or sell before redemption.

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This week’s highlight is a nifty safety feature we call Points Caps, which lets projects limit the amount of reward issued by specific behaviors.

One of the biggest concerns around incentive distribution campaigns is hidden within the very nature of its construction. Incentive campaigns are games, and games are an open invitation for the smartest and most determined participants to find ways to maximize their rewards. Some players (or users, depending on what you call them) will use bots and other automation tools in order to gain an advantage against canonical usage of the underlying product. This is generally referred to as “sybil usage.”

At Absinthe we believe that useful activity is more important to a business than “human users.” We live in a world where agentic participation might very well surpass human participation across the digital landscape. Why, you might end up in a position where you want to make your product bot friendly.

That being said, good campaigns are those which distribute rewards equitably and to deserving parties who put in the work. In order for the big-brain CMOs we work with to design such a system, they needed the ability to set up guardrails onto their issuance conditions. That’s where Points Caps come in.

Points Caps are limitations placed on a certain unit of usage or users, such that once that limit is reached, that unit ceases to earn more rewards. This benefits both projects and participants. For projects it allows for a clear picture of how their incentives are going to be distributed. Users on the other hand have guarantees that regardless of the capital or time availability of other participants, they stand to earn a significant amount of rewards.

At Absinthe we offer 4 different types of Caps. To understand them better, let’s use an example of a set of points issuance conditions and then break down how each cap helps construct a solid incentive program.

JingleDEX is building an incentive program. They have $100,000 in JING tokens to distribute at the end of 3 months, and they have decided to run an incentive campaign to determine how those incentives are distributed. There’s a sexy leaderboard with badges and users are competing to earn the most points to get a bigger share of the rewards. JingleDEX has determined the following reward conditions to issue points during this campaign:

1. Users will earn 1 point per $1 of trade volume they bring onto a set of 5 pools they’ve whitelisted.

2. Users will earn 1 point per $100 per day of active liquidity provided to those pools.

Now these conditions may be susceptible to exploitation by some savvy participants. In order to build guardrails, JingleDEX makes use of Points Caps with Absinthe. Let’s walk through each available type and how JingleDEX might use it.

You wouldn’t want a user to take a flash loan of a million dollars and then execute a wash trade to earn 2 million points. So instead, JingleDEX implements a “per transaction” points cap of 10,000. This means users can earn at most 10,000 points through each transaction (or trade) that they execute.

There happen to be a lot of time-rich and capital-rich individuals who have no problem setting up automations that can pump tremendous amounts of volume through your DEX. While that might be beneficial from the point of view of vanity metrics, it might alienate other users given the competitive disadvantage this creates. To counteract this, JingleDEX sets up a daily cap of 100,000 points per user, meaning that each participant can earn at most 100,000 points in a single day. This also ensures steady points inflation and prevents sudden spikes in supply.

Each reward faucet (such as trading volume or liquidity provision) has different risk profiles for abuse. For example, trading volume might be gamed more easily than liquidity provision. To mitigate this, JingleDEX sets a cap of 50,000,000 points per week per faucet. This ensures that no matter how aggressively one faucet is targeted, it cannot dominate the entire issuance, and rewards stay balanced across multiple behaviors.

Sometimes activity surges at the start or end of a campaign, distorting long-term distribution. To smooth this out, JingleDEX adds a monthly cap of 800,000,000 points per faucet. This allows the team to pace rewards evenly across the three months of the campaign, ensuring they don’t blow through the reward budget too early or leave users discouraged late in the season.

Want to see Points Caps in action? Find us at x.com/absinthenetwork.

To register for our Cohort of tradable points, sign up here: Tradable Points Cohort 1