The release of the validator LST product https://x.com/sanctumso/status/1898126493198565463 massively expands the range of LSTs available which now means Sanctum has a discovery problem. Plenty of people, even the most earnest of Clouds, will have never heard of most of these.
Not to mention there’s an onboard to solve as well as we need validators to engage with their LSTs.
Yet we know from the pump.fun experience (the most profitable crypto app in history) that more tokens = more usage.
So I want to propose a marketing program akin to another wonderland but focused solely on the long tail of LSTs and activating more usage.
It would also give the community something to focus on while Sanctum does more core development work. And take the pressure off releasing Season 2 Wonderland too early.
What follows is not a strict design, just a suggestion of the general framework of a campaign.
A 4 month campaign to earn points for CLOUD rewards.
How to earn
hold a minimum amount of an LST to earn points. You earn by holding more LSTs rather than holding more of an LST. The incentive is to hold as many LSTs as possible
boost points available by posting about LSTs. You only get one post qualifying for each LST. So you can’t just post about INF or bonkSOL endlessly. This again encourages width not depth. I envisage some sort of “submit post” feature on each LST page so people can see easily which LSTs they’ve submitted posts for. Extra points if you post about an LST you hold.
onboard an LST. Big bonus for onboarding a new LST. This one I’m less sure what the mechanism should be but I think probably the basic referral pathway is best. Referral codes likely work combined with filling out a form to submit to Sanctum.
Love to hear people’s feedback and alternative design suggestions.
There’s a lot of energy in the Sanctum community without a lot of outlets as we wait for Season 2. Hopefully something like this could help keep people engaged whilst also directly growing the core product.
I’d still love to see us explore this more. It seems, to me at least, to be a prime area we could push community energy that would have long term value.
It’s the lowest hanging fruit I can see at moment and much more targeted approach than threads on X about how great Sanctum is (which just end up mostly re-treads of the billion other threads about project X,Y and Z).
@andrewsaul, thank you so much for taking the time to write this out. I think it has potential!
In general, I really like the idea that the community would work together to onboard new LST issuers to join the Sanctum network. However, I take issue with the idea that “more is better”.
I am not sure that “you earn by holding more LSTs” is a good idea. I feel that it might get people quite frustrated to have a lot of different LSTs that they don’t particularly care about, just to get some extra points. Ditto with the “bullpost 1000x different LSTs”. I think we don’t want people to hold 1,000 LSTs, we want them to have 1,000 good, meaningfully differentiated LSTs for them to choose between, and for them to pick their favourites.
That said, let’s explore the “help onboard a new LST” a little bit more. I think anyone who can bring a new partner to join the Sanctum network is very valuable, be it a validator, institution, or even a non-Web3 brand. However, I would want to have some minimum TVL bar to hit (maybe 10,000 SOL) before we reward that referral. Maybe we can think along these lines?
How can we accurately give credit for a referral?
How do we make sure it’s net new stake and not just the same SOL washed around new and different LSTs?
I don’t think you need to onboard anyone at this stage.
The first goal would be to get some eyes on the many LSTs you do have outside of the most well known ones.
Building out a solid wiki on them would be a win. A big win.
That could be done via a content program where you have people submit documentation to be ultimately approved and rewarded by the LST providers themselves (thus taking the pressure off Sanctum) but Sanctum just greases the wheels of that process via CLOUD.
Now probably you only end up with only a handful of good writers being rewarded so in conjunction with this you could run a secondary LST promotion promo which you could run like the ALEX Surge campaign over on Stacks (least the previous ones and it’s worth checking out the Discord as to how they changed it between rounds due to behaviour sBTC Cap-2 and What’s New in Surge 3 | by alexGo.btc | ALEX | Medium)
Using that as a model you could incentivise people pick a selection of LSTs to hold and promote to earn points.
I think you need to break the referral stuff out into a separate topic. It’s not that well aligned to this topic but you’ve brought up a lot of good stuff I would like to see given a lot more focus.
So many referral schemes start out as complete trash and fraud farms target them for abuse knowing that they’ll pick up a chunk of rewards before the protocol realises the loopholes they left open and either shut down referrals or re-vamp them.
A solid referral scheme is a quiet achiever for any project as it can sit in the background and bring in a steady stream of new business. If you set it up in a way that legit actors can be rewarded for their efforts you only need a handful of them to be active for it to be a big success.
However a scheme will take a while to get right.
Any that are rev-share have proved long term successful and mostly that’s affiliate programs.
The most successful I’ve ever seen in my career are gambling referrals. That is traditional gambling. I don’t know why people haven’t copied these more. Perp DEX trading referrals often function similarly.
The basic functions are:
rewards kick in for each referral only after X amount of revenue is generated
there’s a lifetime cap on rewards that keeps you needing to fill the funnel but isn’t stingy i.e., you still get a big upside from referring whale accounts
Then you just tweak the percentages and thresholds from there till you get an optimal result.
The key is patience from the program owners. These things are a marathon not a sprint. You’re essentially creating a contractor program and that takes time to find suitable candidates. Nearly all of the crypto content creators aren’t skilled or motivated enough to succeed here. But you’ll eventually get people who are skilled operators, and who appreciate the flexibility of these types of arrangements, if you stick at it.
