RFC: Community Content Rewards Program

Ideas & suggestions
1

Summary

This RFC introduces the Community Content Rewards Program, an initiative that aims to attract new active participants in the Reserve ecosystem (RToken deployers, RSR governors and/or RToken holders) by incentivizing content creators to spread the word about the Reserve project (Twitter threads, articles, videos, etc).

Excited to hear the community’s thoughts and suggestions on this proposed program!

Please note that the details of this program are experimental and could be subject to change after future evaluation.

The program

The aim of the Community Content Rewards Program is to reward those that actively spread awareness about the Reserve project, with the intention of attracting the kind of community members that the project benefits from most (active RSR governors, RToken deployers, RToken holders, DeFi brainstorming fanatics, etc).

Each month, anyone will be able to submit a Reserve-related piece of content (Twitter thread, blog post, video, etc) via a Google Form to be eligible for a reward from a 1,000,000 RSR prize pool. At the end of each month, the Reserve core team will choose the most valuable pieces of content, highlight them across various community channels, and reward the winners with RSR tokens from the prize pool.

Awareness for DeFi protocols these days is mostly gained through social media channels such as Crypto Twitter, and we believe a content rewards program like this will incentivize the content creators on those platforms to research and spread the word about Reserve, resulting in a new inflow of contributors that are aligned with Reserve’s goals.

Rewards

At the end of each month, all submissions from that month will be reviewed by several members of the Reserve core team. The submissions that add the most value to the Reserve ecosystem will receive a reward from a monthly 1,000,000 RSR reward pool (the size of individual rewards will be at the discretion of the core team).

The specific reward each submitter receives can vary month by month, depending on the amount and quality of submissions for that month. That being said, the core team intends to pick at least 5 monthly winners that will win a share of the 1,000,000 RSR reward pool.

Judging and payment disbursement

The deadline for submitting content via the Google Form will be the 20th of each month. All content submitted between the 20th and the last day of the month will only be eligible for the following month’s rewards.

Each month’s judging period starts on the 20th, and winners will be announced on Twitter (@reserveprotocol) by the last day of the month.

Payments will be disbursed as soon as possible after winners of the monthly rewards have completed the required tax form (see the section below for more information).

Disqualification criteria & limitations

In order for the Community Content Rewards Program to work as intended and be in full compliance with regulatory requirements, certain limitations have to be applied. The limitations that would be applicable to the program are as follows:

  • A maximum of 1 piece of content per person will be eligible for rewards each month
  • RSR price content of any kind will be disqualified
  • Low-effort recycling of earlier content (e.g. basic explanations) will be disqualified
  • Podcasts/keynotes/community calls where Reserve is the guest will be disqualified
  • Winners of any of the monthly rewards will need to complete the required tax form before being able to receive their reward (W-9 for US citizen/resident W-8BEN for non-US person)
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Hi eli5defi here! been pretty interesting to see the direction of Reserve heading. While the initiative is commendable and has the potential to significantly boost the Reserve ecosystem’s visibility and engagement, there are several aspects that require further clarification and reconsideration.

  1. Intended Audience: The program seems to be designed for the broader community, including content creators and Reserve ecosystem participants. However, it is unclear whether the program is also intended for Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) who could potentially have a significant impact on the project’s visibility. It would be beneficial to clarify this point and possibly consider a separate track or incentives for KOLs.

  2. Prize Pool Scale: The proposed 1,000,000 RSR prize pool might be sufficient for smaller accounts or individual contributors, but it may not be attractive enough for larger accounts or influencers who can reach a wider audience. It would be worth considering a tiered reward system that takes into account the reach and influence of the contributors.

  3. Targeting Larger Accounts: The program could benefit from specifically targeting larger accounts on Crypto Twitter (CT) to act as spokespersons for the project. These accounts often have a significant following and can help spread the word about the Reserve project more effectively.

  4. Tax Form Requirement: The requirement for winners to complete a tax form could be a potential dealbreaker, especially considering that many CT users prefer to remain anonymous. It would be helpful to explore alternative methods of reward disbursement that respect the privacy preferences of the community members.

  5. Low-Effort Content: The disqualification of “low-effort recycling of earlier content” is a bit vague. It would be beneficial to provide more specific guidelines on what constitutes low-effort content and the criteria for disqualification. This will ensure that the community members have a clear understanding of the expectations and can create content accordingly.

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Hi,

I think it’s a good idea in general - and mirror eli5defi’s comments as well as

  1. Examples of inadmissible content - a simple retweet of something written by reserve with 20 word explainer / something involving a chart etc
  2. Potentially have categories for admission to guide people into the sort of content you would like to see created (although this can also restrict imaginative people)
  3. If it’s interaction you would like then consider awarding the rewards based on a classification of weightings - quality / outreach / impact etc
  4. Potentially something like this might not have great outreach but might inspire someone to create an RToken, so it’s a difficult one to pre-judge.
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4

Hey there @eli5defi - thanks a lot for sharing your meaningful thoughts!

  1. Re: intended audience: I see this program achieving its intended purpose only if most of the content that gets created monthly originates from these Key Opinion Leaders you mention, rather than existing community members. I’m mostly thinking of the kinds of people that have amassed a significant following by writing about DeFi protocols (e.g. Eli5DeFi, DeFi Ignas, rektdiomedes, etc).

  2. Re: prize pool scale: we’ve concluded the amount of 1,000,000 RSR based on trying to find a healthy balance between staying conservative with treasury funds while also competing with other programs like this one (i.e. Liquity, Angle, Frax, etc). Important to note is that the reward pool can be unevenly distributed based on the quality & reach of the contributor (e.g. it could be possible that 1 contributor receives 70% of the reward pool and that the remaining 30% gets distributed among the other 4). I’m curious, since you are yourself one of the people that would be a good fit for this program, what kind of reward would make it worthwhile for you to compete in this program?

  1. Re: targeting large accounts: agreed - the idea is to reach out to these types of accounts (some examples mentioned above) to make them aware of the program and have them participate.

  2. Re: tax form requirement: you’re totally right, CT users prefer to stay anonymous and this could potentially pose an obstacle for them participating. The Reserve entity that would pay out the rewards is allowed to pay rewards up to $600 without tax forms. However, since anyone is free to participate in multiple months, if the total paid amount per person increases to above $600, the tax form also becomes a requirement. So I don’t yet see a way to run the program as described while also staying compliant without tax forms. Do you happen to have experience with other programs like this one that did not require tax form completions? (PS: I think many CT people would be fine revealing their identity to Reserve, as long as they can stay anonymous to the general CT public).

  3. Re: low-effort content: the reason I included this category is because we did a Gitcoin content program in the past which attracted a lot of mercenaries simply copy and pasting text from the website (or asking ChatGPT to rewrite that text) and submitting that 5-minute job for the program. Or they do some research, but their contribution does not add anything new to others that have done 10 minutes of reading about the project. In short, we simply want to avoid paying a prize to these kinds of submissions. Since the low-qualitiness of those submissions is often so obvious, I think it’s fine to have this be entirely at the discretion of the Reserve core team. Do you agree?

Thank again for the input, it’s highly appreciated!

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Heyo! Schizoxbt here!

So I’m gonna echo a few points made by eli5defi up there.

Definitely agree with their being a tiered reward system because you want there to be a good amount of people doing threads and speaking about your protocol. In order to do that, you need a good balance of large twitter accounts and medium size.

If its heavily weighted towards one direction, it’ll alienate people. Bigger accounts obviously command more money for their work so if you want the size and reach, you have to pay for it.
Whereas middle of the road types, like myself, don’t command in the 1k-2k per thread but yknow.

Also something to consider might be a prize pool in something other than RSR if possible. Speaking for myself here, I rarely take payments in the project’s coin. For one, if I’m getting paid 500$ or something and get the payment on a massive downswing, I’ll be a bit chuffed if my 500$ is worth 300 now. But also 95% of the time, I’m selling it for ETH or USDC anyways. Just seems like unneeded sell pressure for the token. Just my 2 cents on that!

And might need to clarify low effort content, because for a lot of people it may be the first time they’re hearing of Reserve, and they might do an intro thread. I’m sure that’s being taken into account but still something to consider.

I’m ambivalent on the Tax Forms but I do see where that could cause some friction. It honestly might make people shy away from participating and tbh, not sure how to combat that ruling. But I do see where issues could arise there.

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Hey - I like this idea and think you’ve addressed the above comments well. For context, I came 2nd in your content hackathon and currently write for top DeFi projects like Ripple and Synapse.

From my POV, this would be interesting to participate in as I already know a lot about Reserve. However, as someone new, my calculation is that 1M RSR is ~$1,800 at today’s price. Given that that’s split amongst 5+, it’s likely I’d get $200-400 for an article. That’d certainly be more next bull market, but it’s a small fraction of the usual rate for more advanced writers.

The implications are: a) it might impact who’s willing to submit, b) there might be other ways to attract great writers, or those with an audience. Getting them coverage, or the tiered system, are a couple ideas that come to mind. The RSR amount could also adjust based on existing token price.

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7

Hi guys, I think the idea of the program is great, it would be great if content could be made in different languages in order to achieve a greater reach :').

It would also be a good idea to specify the minimum length/duration of said contents, example:

Videos: 5 minutes.

Twitter threads: 4 Tweets.

Articles: 800 words, etc.

We could also try to publish content in the different subreddits related to the Crypto/DeFi world (without spamming, of course).

8

This a good plan. Well done for the post Sinatra! I look forward to seeing this progress.

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