RFC: The RFaucet

Ideas & suggestions
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The RFaucet

Introduction:

There may be a cool opportunity with Base to make a product that can help RTokens become more easily understood and allow for experimentation.

If you’ve ever been in training for something, you might have noticed that you learn more from the training if you are able to get hands on experience. Reading words on a screen or hearing someone tell you how something works isn’t quite like going through the process yourself.

Perhaps this same concept can be applied to understanding RTokens. It’s a simple enough concept of course. Choose collateral, smart contracts get created. Get collateral and put them into contract, get RToken out. Want the collateral back? Just put the RToken back into the contract and you’ll receive your collateral. Awesome.

But how many people are going to be doing little experiments minting and redeeming RTokens on mainnet Ethereum? It’s not cheap! Maybe Base can help on this front - allow people to experiment and learn about the protocol by doing.

Proposed Specification:

What I am proposing is the RFaucet. A tool that allows users to request either the collateral pieces of an RToken, or the whole RToken, so that they can experience the action of minting or redeeming certain baskets.

However, I think this isn’t enough and with a bit of cash, you might get some explosive results:

What if you allocated (for example) $10,000 to the RFaucet education fund? Each individual user could request the collateral for Electronic Dollar or High Yield USD, up to $5 total per user, and they could experiment with minting and redeeming (and maybe minting again) these RTokens. For $10,000 and the development costs of this faucet, you could potentially have 2,000 new RToken holders. Maybe they get an NFT when they complete both the minting and redeeming steps?

Risks and Conclusion:

I will note that this idea is exploitable by means of sybil attacking the faucet to obtain all available remaining funds. Limiting faucet use to only holders of certain Base Summer NFT’s? Once per IP address? No VPN’s? The team probably has a better idea of how to handle this than I do.

You could of course incorporate within this tool access to deploy their own RToken and the backtester. Maybe an action button down at the bottom, when you have completed everything, that you can "see what other RTokens exist”?

Even if the person forgets about their RToken that they’re holding, there is always the chance they come back to in a year or so and do more research (that’s how I came to learn about Reserve myself!)

RFaucet
RFaucet550×550 88.5 KB

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Thanks for posting this @Braden had a few questions:

What would be the location (Discord? Register? elsewhere?) and the steps to use the faucet? a diagram of the steps would be helpful!

How do we ensure people using the faucet are retained in the Reserve ecosystem?

How does the faucet prevent sybil exploitation?

Can you tell us about the Base Summer NFTs? how many wallets hold them? how did they get them?

Thank you.

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James,

Ah, yes I should have certainly included these things in the initial post. I am often not perfectly clear.

Probably just a separate webpage. I think trying to contort Register into a more simple faucet might be too hard. faucet.reserve.org could be the page? There should be links on this page that lead to the rest of the Reserve ecosystem of course, but I’m not sure what to include. I’m sure Reserve’s designers can reason about this better than I can.

How best to keep them in the Reserve ecosystem? Maybe once they have completed the quest you can give them a link to the 30 minute intro video, the Discord server, or prompt them to sign up for the email newsletter.

The sybil protection mechanisms are entirely at the discretion of Reserve. Reserve and it’s core team has done much more thinking and research on this topic than I have. I am simply trying to convey an idea that I think has great potential, but also highlight some potential issues with implementation. There are Base NFT’s like the one below that have been minted over 370,000 times, with 77% of those being unique wallet addresses. Using this NFT as a qualifier for a unique individual may be a very poor choice.

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@Braden I absolutely love this idea! Thank you for proposing it.

The hard part of designing this campaign is to make sure that people don’t just walk away with the $5 or whatever, and we efficiently funnel them to Register. Designing on-going/phased incentives is a possibility but adds a lot more work to the project. I think we can expect at least some churn here, so we have to be effective with driving conversion. I think the higher the amount with give, the more perverse incentives we provide for people to walk away. So maybe a lower amount like $3 could be better? @0xJMG We could link this to an on-chain quest which I think will help a lot in this regard.

All this sufficiently separate from Register that this work can be carved out as its own project without bugging the rest of the protocol devs. Best if we get started on scoping this work to potentially launch concurrently with Reserve on Base :muscle:

On the topic of sybil protection:

  • Ownership of Onchain Summer NFTs might not target the right audience. I’ve been using Base, but haven’t minted any of their NFTs (@0xJMG it’s the NFTs here)
  • I think that the following combination might be sufficient to make the program bot-unfriendly:
    • Verifying a tweet the site prompts the user to post
    • Only 1 drip per wallet
    • Throttle to $100 (or some other amount) disbursed per hour
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My primary concern was botting, but with the countermeasures you’ve identified it should be relatively robust. Is it physically possible on a contract level to require the users to mint using register.app in the same transaction as claiming the $3?

Perhaps something on the demand side could be implemented too, say some prize for the most elaborate use of minted RTokens because while this prize is good for getting people to mint / redeem it does not do anything to drive further demand for it.

Nonetheless, I am very pleased that you made this proposal and hope that we reach an interesting consensus. Well done @Braden !

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