ALN Participation Mining — Aluna.Social Airdrop #3: Reflections, Governance & Distribution
Aluna’s most recent participation mining campaign incentivised users to connect their cryptocurrency exchange API keys to the Aluna.Social trading terminal, and to execute trades on BitMEX, Bitfinex, or Poloniex to take part on the Aluna Leaderboard.
The campaign attracted a total of 782 participants and generated over $40M of trading volume from 12,700+ trades executed over 8 weeks. 80,000 ALN (worth over $20,000) has been distributed to all participants.
In this post, we reflect on the lessons learnt from the campaign, introduce community governance, share the audited results and distribution details, and end with improvements for the next airdrop for Q2 2021.
Aluna.Social Airdrop #3: Reflections
The airdrop was designed such that users had to complete three tasks to qualify:
- Connect MetaMask wallet
- Connect exchange API key
- Open or close one position on BitMEX, Bitfinex margin, or Poloniex margin
After qualifying, users could do more tasks to earn more stars, which earns them a larger share of the airdrop reward. There were three reward tasks:
- 50 ⭐ per position opened or closed
- 1 ⭐ per $1 trading volume
- 200 ⭐ per qualified referral
However, this mechanism created several undesirable outcomes, such as:
- Unlocking more ALN based on the total number of participants gave rise to unwanted behaviours
- Earning stars based on number of positions opened/closed gave rise to unwanted behaviours
- Reward distribution model is extremely top-heavy
→ 90% of the reward is earned by the top 3% of participants
→ 90% of participants earn less than 20 ALN - Recent surge in ETH price and gas fees meant that it would cost more in gas fees to send <20 ALN, than the ALN itself is worth, making 90% of the transactions extremely wasteful
Unwanted behaviours included users:
- Creating multiple Aluna accounts connected to the same exchange accounts
- Spamming trades on stable/stable pairs e.g. USDT/USD
- Doing the bare minimum to qualify i.e. executing only 1 trade to qualify with the minimum volume allowed by the exchanges
- Farming stars by opening and closing multiple trades with an average trade duration of 5 minutes or less
As with all previous airdrops, Aluna audits the airdrop results to ensure that cheaters are disqualified.
Progressive Decentralization: Birth of Aluna Community Governance
In line with Aluna’s goal of progressive decentralization, we invited the community to participate in the decision-making process with our first governance discussion on Discord.
It was an extremely fruitful discussion, and we thank everyone for the valuable feedback.
ALN Airdrop Governance Discussion: Rule Changes
Our first proposal included adding new rules to have a minimum trading volume of $1,000 and to increase the minimum ALN per participant to 20 ALN. This was rejected by the community, including both the top ranked traders and those with under $1,000 trading volume.
ALN Airdrop Governance Discussion: Filtering List for Cheaters and Spammers
Based on feedback from the community, we went back to the drawing board and submitted our second proposal, which kept the original rules unchanged, while removing cheaters and spammers from the list. This was passed by the community with 100% support.
ALN Airdrop: Audited Results and Distribution
The seemingly trivial fixes for the airdrop resulted in ramifications that spanned across a lot of other problems and open issues, one more complicated and delicate than the other. Many of the problems required detailed migrations on the database for re-constructing some data, where errors could have been catastrophic. This required us to build several routines very cautiously to make sure we do not lose any data in case of problems, which meant having granular backups for each step individually, and other similar considerations.
Our team worked tirelessly to get this sorted out, pushing 100+ commits over the last weeks to fix not only the airdrop but also a spaghetti of issues related to volume calculation, position data and other inconsistencies.
Thank you all for your patience throughout the process.
Here are the final results:
- Qualified participants: 782
- Total ALN unlocked: 80,000 ALN
- ALN earned per participant: 0.059 ALN to 11,735 ALN
- Total trading volume: $40.4M
- Total no. trades executed: 12,700
- Median trading volume: $341
- Top 10 participants earned 65.2% of the total airdrop reward
The estimated ALN you would receive based on your trading volume is as per the table below:
To see the number of ALN that you should receive from the airdrop, log in to your Aluna.Social account and navigate to the Airdrop page, and look for the amount of “Estimated ALN to receive”.
80,000 ALN was distributed to 782 addresses via two transactions here and here.
If you hold more than 1,337 ALN in your Web3 wallet (e.g. MetaMask), join 50+ other Alunauts in our Strong Holder Chat Groups on Telegram and Discord. For more information about our token-permissioned chat groups, read this medium post.
ALN Participation Mining: Aluna.Social Airdrop #4 (Q2 2021)
We are grateful for the tremendous support from the community, and look forward to hosting a new participation mining campaign on Aluna.Social.
Building upon the feedback and lessons learnt, improvements will be made to the airdrop, including:
- UI changes to improve user experience and user-friendliness
- Adding clearer instructions with link to Medium post guide
- Removing task for opening/closing positions
- Adding a minimum $1,000 trading volume to qualify
- Replacing reward unlock mechanism with volume-based tiers
- Calculation of reward per participant using `SQRT(No. of Stars)` instead of `No. of Stars`, which will reduce the reward disparity between participants with the most vs least stars
A new BitMEX-only airdrop will start next quarter. If you don’t already have a BitMEX account, sign up for one with our referral link to get 10% off trading fees for 6 months, and complete your KYC before adding your API key to Aluna. Stay tuned for details on the new airdrop coming soon!
Official Links
Website: https://aluna.social/
Discord: https://discord.gg/hsadykv
Telegram Channel: https://t.me/aluna_ann
Telegram Group: https://t.me/alunasocial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/alunasocial
YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/alunasocial
