Given the open-source nature of the industry, anyone building a blockchain-enabled product can leverage existing code in order to deliver use cases within their application, as long as they comply with the licensing terms.
This newsletter aims to cover the most relevant web3 product releases so that entrepreneurs and builders are aware that, in many cases, they don't necessarily need to build every single feature from the scratch, potentially saving valuable development budget.
Additionally, some of the products & tools I cover are built by top notch teams, with a proven track-record and in most cases are already audited, which means another potential saving opportunity as audits don't come cheap!
Let's get into it.
User acquisition is perhaps the biggest challenge for both web2 and web3 platforms. While web2 businesses primarily rely on traditional methods such as media releases, publishing, traditional advertising, and IP partnerships, the most popular apps have tapped into VC funding to run rewards and subsidy schemes to get users on board.
Remember when an Uber ride was extremely cheap? Uber, which raised nearly $20 billion in venture capital before going public, may be the best-known example of an investor-subsidized service. Now that Uber has become ubiquitous, subsidies are over.
Most streaming platforms allow you to sign up for free during the first 7 or 30 days. And plesae do not forget to provide your credit card details. If you find the service useful, you will continue using the app. Congrats, you are now officially a customer.
Similarly, in web3, incentive programs like airdrops, quests, grants, liquidity mining rewards, and more recently, points programs have become an important part of what makes the industry thrive.
All of the above are complex incentive strategies that involve coordination efforts and capital requirements (either in tokens or stablecoins). Additionally, projects need to be very careful around legal issues, particularly if their native token is involved in the user acquisition process. These incentive strategies can also span weeks or months, with lots of mercenary capital that comes and goes when the incentives end.
What if there were a simpler but impactful way to incentivize users to complete any on-chain action within your dApp, getting quick results for any objective within minutes, not weeks or months?
Boost Protocol is a distributed incentives network that allows any wallet to deploy incentive offers targeting other wallets to perform onchain actions.
Some other benefits of Boost include:
Fair and aligned incentives: To create a sustainable network that brings value to everyone, all protocol revenue generated is distributed and shared among network participants, including the reward issuer, recipient and affiliates. There are no third-party gatekeepers.
Transparent: All boost transactions can be verified onchain, making it easy for anyone to publicly verify, audit and analyze results.
Configurable: Boosts can be configured by action and audience so that you can get specific about the onchain action and desired target audience you'd like to incentivize.
There are several different ways to interact with the protocol depending on your role in the ecosystem. To understand how it works, it’s important to get familiar with the core components that make up the Boost stack:
Very established crypto dApps have already onboarded to Boost. From L2s (Arbitrum, zkSync) to bridging protocols (Across, Connext, Hop, Stargate, etc), to DEXes (Balancer, Uniswap, Sushiswap, GMX, TraderJoe, Velodrome, etc), to Money Markets (Aave, Sonne Finance) to NFT and Consumer apps (Zora, Manifold, Mirror, Paragraph and Sound).
You can see the complete list of projects in the Boost Registry.
The first step to onboard your app is to add your project to the Boost Registry by building a Boost SDK Plugin. If the token you want to issue rewards with is not currently supported, you can whitelist it.
Once your project (and potentially your token) have been reviewed by the core team, you will be able to start creating boosts for your project on the Boost Manager app. Anyone will be able to issue rewards for your project, no permission required.
The Boost Manager app is the main interface for anyone to deploy, manage and track boosts. Within minutes, you can boost a variety of onchain activities, such as token swapping, deposits into liquidity pools, staking, delegating governance tokens, minting NFTs, or bridging assets across chains.
Once your project's been approved, you will be able to Deploy a Boost by defining:
Action: set your goal and target with the onchain action you'd like incentivize. Boost Protocol currently supports the following onchain actions: swap, deposit, stake, delegate, mint, open a position and bridge. You can request new actions current not available if you need to.
Audience: upload a CSV or choose from a list of preset audiences to create a custom-targeted allowlist.
Reward: select the ERC20 token, the total amount of tokens and reward amount per user that completes the given action. Boost currently support Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Ethereum and Polygon networks.
Schedule: choose to deploy a boost immediately or you can schedule it at an exact time or date in the future. A boost can be active for a maximum of 30 days. Dates are displayed in your local timezone.
Review and Deploy: you will need to deposit the total reward funds into the smart contract, plus the Protocol Fee.
That's it! Once you deployed a boost you can monitor its performance and user insights. See below insights for an NFT song mint on Sound:
Performance insights: shows the total number of users that completed the boost transaction and total rewards distributed.
User insights: shows details of the users that completed the boost, like the hourly/daily breakdown of completions, top protocols used, average wallet balance in ETH, and other transaction history.
A key benefit of Boost is that you only pay for results. If you deployed a boost and there are still remaining funds left after it has expired, you can withdraw the leftover tokens.
Inbox is a Boost-powered frontend where you can find Boosts and apply various filters depending on your interests.
Let's complete a Boost:
This is an episode of Crypto Sapiens on PODS that I listened to and I thought I'd mint. See that it is incentivised with 69 DEGEN worth $1.14 at the time of minting. Given the price of the mint is $2.24, as a user you can interpret this incentive as a subsidy. For the podcast owner, it will boost the episode mints, providing additional visibility for your podcast show.
Notice at the bottom of the image above that users are also able to share a referral with their network and receive rewards for every quest completed with their referral link.
Another frontend where users can discover Boosts is RabbitHole. Users will find a myriad of active quests as well as their rewards, leaderboards and more.
You can also build a Boost client for your app. In fact, I found Boost via Coop Records' Boost client.
The Boost Client SDK is coming soon, which will make it much easier is making boosts accessible on their own frontend.
If you are looking to put eyeballs on your web3 product, setting aside a budget to attract users to perform actions on your platform could be an effective user acquisition strategy. Additionally, you will gain valuable insights into the performance of the campaign and the behavior of the users participating in it.
Even if you do not own a platform, Boost can be a very valuable tool to get your product to a targeted audience. For example, you might be an NFT artist (action: mint your NFT on Opensea), a writer (action: mint/subscribe to your newsletter on Paragraph or Mirror), or, as I mentioned before, a podcast owner (action: mint your podcast episode on PODS).
Established platforms can leverage Boost to tackle voter apathy, a very well know issue in web3, by incentivising tokenholders to participate in the DAO governance process.
I hope you enjoyed the Issue #5 of the Web3 Watch newsletter and I would appreciate feedback both in terms of content and also suggestions regarding open-source projects that will supercharge apps that haven't even been built yet, as long as they are legit of course!
If you are looking to build or deliver a use case via blockchain-enabled technology check Labrys out, this is what we do day in day out. Alternatively don't hesitate to drop me a DM, always happy to have a good web3 chat.
CriptoSpanglish
