[PROPOSAL] Use RabbitHole to acquire new users for PoolTogether

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Greetings PoolTogether community!

My name is Brian and I’m one of the co-founders of RabbitHole. RabbitHole is a platform for users to learn about and participate in crypto protocols while earning ownership in them. We’re excited about the potential of PoolTogether as a new savings money lego and think RabbitHole would be a great fit to help drive more users to the protocol.

Protocols like Gnosis, OpenSea, Matcha, Aave, and others have used RabbitHole to drive growth to their platforms and protocols. RabbitHole has helped distribute more than $100K in rewards and has hundreds of daily active users who are completing tasks across different protocols - and has been driving adoption on the demand side for crypto networks.

Our goal with RabbitHole is to be the best education and growth platform serving the best cryptonetworks. We’re actively playing a large governance role in each ecosystem to grow the number of retail users participating in each ecosystem to foster a higher participation rate.

Proposal Overview:

RabbitHole will run a PoolTogether campaign on RabbitHole to drive new user deposits and on-chain referrals to the protocol.

Task: Deposit on PoolTogether

Total allocation: 6000 PT tokens allocated

Total number of potential users: 500

Rewards to every user: 10 POOL tokens + 1 PoolTogether NFT (design TBD)

Rewards paid out to RabbitHole multisig: 20% of the total tokens distributed

There are currently 2.5% of the POOL tokens set aside in the Treasury for onboarding and education initiatives (outlined here). 2.5% of 10,000,000 total supply is 250,000 tokens. We are looking to do just a fraction of that for this campaign as a way to dip toes in the water and start turning on the growth gears for PoolTogether.

Here’s how it will work:

RabbitHole will set up the queries using the PoolTogether subgraph to track if a user has deposited.

  • If a user has deposited into the Pool, the user will be able to receive a reward of 10 POOL Tokens distributed the day the campaign ends.
  • The user must be BrightID verified to be eligible (to protect against users creating multiple addresses and guarantee uniqueness).
  • The quest will run for one full week after the proposal passes.
  • RabbitHole will have a multi-sig with PoolTogether requiring ⅔ signatures to send the funds to users.
  • POOL tokens received by RabbitHole multi-sig will be vested for 1y and be used in governance.
  • Remaining POOL tokens will be sent back to the treasury.

Goals:

  • Introduce a new class of users to the PoolTogether ecosystem.
  • Training new users in the ecosystem to use the protocol and provide a way to rebate gas deposits with a token reward.
  • Test out RabbitHole as a meaningful paid acquisition channel for the PoolTogether community and test out new features.

As a quick case study and to give some data points, we ran a campaign with Matcha in late December. Here were the stats from the campaign:

  • 611 users made a swap on Matcha
  • 262 users completed the campaign and earned 30 $ZRX
  • $6.40 acquisition cost per user
  • 270 of the 611 users (44%) pooled on Uniswap

In the future, we can run more campaigns on PoolTogether such as voting on proposals, winning the PoolTogether official pool, referring friends to join the pool, and more. This is just the beginning of what’s possible for the PoolTogether ecosystem. As the number of users grow on RabbitHole, the more people that will be introduced and onboarded into PoolTogether.

We welcome any feedback from the community on this proposal. We will be putting up this proposal in the next few days. We hope to see you in RabbitHole soon!

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Considering the current token price of POOL is $20, 10 POOL per user seems very expensive to me.
I’m also not quite clear on why having this separate reward for users would be preferable over giving out tokens for yield farming (as is already in place). They both seem to accomplish the same thing. Is there some data on TVL and user growth of RabbitHole campaigns compared to yield farming?

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Current gas costs make it prohibitive for new users to try out PoolTogether for the first time, and it does not appear it will be coming down anytime soon. If we as a community are trying to create an entirely new way to save, we need to make PoolTogether more accessible. The POOL amount was chosen so that the user is earning more than they’re depositing.

RabbitHole is an acquistion channel which is synergistic with liquidity mining rewards. One is focused on increasing TVL, and one is focused on engaging new users to broaden the community and bring PoolTogether closer to it’s mission of accessible and programmable savings from anywhere in the world.

Happy to expand on this further if needed!

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I’m not sure brute-forcing new users by essentially subsidizing exorbitant gas fees is the way to go.
I think this type of promotion could be a lot more effective when more gas-saving methods have been implemented or gas fees go down. The fact is that currently, Pooltogether is expensive to use. I do think there are many promising improvements in the works and I expect some of these to be implemented within the coming weeks and months. When that point comes I think it makes sense to go target smaller deposits with incentive programs like RabbitHole.
Before then, we’d be forcing subsidies for economically unviable transactions. I think someone buying $50 worth of tickets while paying $120 in gas shouldn’t be encouraged. (This doesn’t even account for the fact that they would later need to pay for withdrawing aswell).

Essentially, I think now is not the time for this. Lowering gas fees needs to be solved first.
I’m happy to hear other people’s thoughts and discuss.

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We can encourage a minimum deposit for this campaign if we want to encourage a higher deposit. Although, there is already a penalty for withdrawing early, so it wouldn’t make much sense from a user perspective.

On another note, there are currently 2.5% of the POOL tokens set aside in the Treasury for onboarding and education initiatives (outlined here). 2.5% of 10,000,000 total supply is 250,000 tokens. We are looking to do just a fraction of that for this campaign as a way to dip toes in the water and start turning on the growth gears for PoolTogether. We shouldn’t be ashamed to be aggressive with the Community Treasury. Many protocols and campaigns spend years holding onto large treasuries without actively encouraging participation in their communities.

This is good first step to start encouraging the usage of these buckets which could become one of the main sources of user growth for the PoolTogether ecosystem.

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i am conflicted on this proposal. on the one hand, we have pools like the USDC with $14 million deposited and only 350 players. clearly there is a ton of room to grow the community. this proposal has been shaped by a lot of consideration and enthusiasm for onboarding users at the cost of 2-3% of the education/onboarding funds (2-3% of 2.5% of the total supply). this could very easily double the number of participants in most of the pools.

On the other hand, this fuels the nightmare i have where ethereum as a whole risks attracting a huge crowd of blockchain beginners only to sour the taste with constantly high barriers (gas fees+eth price) that turn people away in disappointment. it seems to me that there is a bigger need in education than onboarding right now.

i personally want to see this proposal and onboarding happen, but i think the best time for its execution would be after $POOL stabilizes and after network congestion issues are starting to be resolved. this is tough to consider given that timelines are speculative and the barriers to entry are largely out of PT/RabbitHole’s control.

TL;DR Great proposal but perhaps wrong time? Feels like it could be executed better in the future.

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A few questions come in mind after reading your proposal.

How do you ensure people joining PoolTogether are new users? I could deposit again and still earn 10 POOL tokens right?

Why would a reward, 20% of the total tokens distributed, be paid out to the RabbitHole multisig? The way I see it, we would also help develop your company so the PoolTogether treasury should also receive some tokens in compensation.

At a current valuation of $32.88, the cost of acquisition would be 32.88*6000 / 500 = $394.56, we are far from the $6.40 of 0x campaign.

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Thanks for your questions @qwercus and @Pierrick! I’ll answer each concern individually:

On the other hand, this fuels the nightmare i have where ethereum as a whole risks attracting a huge crowd of blockchain beginners only to sour the taste with constantly high barriers (gas fees+eth price) that turn people away in disappointment. it seems to me that there is a bigger need in education than onboarding right now.

A large part of what we do at RabbitHole is user education as well as onboarding. We plan on creating supporting content to accompany the campaign and teach the users the ropes on how to use the protocol.

I personally want to see this proposal and onboarding happen, but i think the best time for its execution would be after $POOL stabilizes and after network congestion issues are starting to be resolved. this is tough to consider given that timelines are speculative and the barriers to entry are largely out of PT/RabbitHole’s control.

I totally resonate with your concerns here! Waiting for price to stabalize is a cat and mouse game, the thing that won’t change is the supply and the amounts allocated. We’re confident that we will deliver for the PoolTogether community to bring more users to the protocol. If this campaign is successful, we plan on proposing more campaigns to help with voting incentives, winners, and testing new features as well. This should be seen as a longer relationship between the RabbitHole and PoolTogether communtiies!

How do you ensure people joining PoolTogether are new users? I could deposit again and still earn 10 POOL tokens right?

We are totally open to limiting it to only new users or opening it up to anyone retroactively. This would be great to get your input on. The way it could work for new users is by limiting rewards to people who only deposited after a certain block number. This is pretty easy to do from our side if we want to go down this path.

Why would a reward, 20% of the total tokens distributed, be paid out to the RabbitHole multisig? The way I see it, we would also help develop your company so the PoolTogether treasury should also receive some tokens in compensation.

PoolTogether tokens are ownership in the protocol. We are fully abiding by a vesting schedule and plan on being an active participant in governance. We will be advocating for the small retail user who doesn’t have a lot of say in these governance proposals because of the whales who are participating in liqudity mining. We plan on handing these tokens off to the DAO and the users of RabbitHole, which who will vote on how RabbitHole’s PoolTogether tokens should be used. However, this won’t be until 2022+.

At a current valuation of $32.88, the cost of acquisition would be 32.88*6000 / 500 = $394.56, we are far from the $6.40 of 0x campaign.

This is a tough comparison given gas costs were 5-10x cheaper from when we ran the Matcha campaign. The individual price of the reward is to guarentee that users are receiving more than what they’re paying for depositing. We’d be open to reducing the amount of tokens to be more in-line with gas costs and given fluctuating prices in $POOL. Typically for a campaign, we estimate 25-30% for a reward from the amount spent on gas costs to complete the campaign. We don’t think gas prices are going to get any cheaper here given this chart either.

Really great questions! Looking forward to discussing more to see how we can help grow the PoolTogether userbase :slight_smile:

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Rabbithole could also be a great way for getting to roll out different forms of A/B testing for onboarding campaigns, apart from the points made by Brian wrt lowering barriers; while the initial period for yield mining is something that is extensible (if so chosen by the community), it might be nice to enable the utilisation of Rabbithole as a platform to consider parameters pertaining to : i) deposit duration ii) specific communities/connections thanks to Rabbithole’s existing userbase iii) tracking specific cohorts of users for participation in governance.

Would be good to see if the community would like to track any specific metrics in terms of deposit size/duration that could be tracked and incentivised.

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RabbitHole es un canal de adquisición sinérgico con las recompensas de la minería de liquidez. Uno se enfoca en aumentar TVL, y el otro se enfoca en involucrar a nuevos usuarios para ampliar la comunidad y acercar PoolTogether a su misión de ahorros accesibles y programables desde cualquier parte del mundo

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Heads up - I’ll be moving this to a proposal some time next week. We’ll be modifying the rewards distributed per user to ~50% higher than the gas costs, so the number of POOL that users will be receiving will be lower than what is currently being proposed.

Would love any other feedback on this proposal and happy to answer any more questions!