Why everyone is launching points programs

Transcript

why is everyone launching points in the last few months we've seen blur conclude season 2 of their airdrop Campaign Will simultaneously announcing a new points program with blast we've seen portal coins Madness filling the timeline of our crypto Twitter with at portal coin tags we've seen apps like rainbow wallet and rabby wallet announce Point programs just this week we saw magic Eden announced a new points program now for all the these Brands a points program means users taking action could be on or offchain they get points and then these points turn into an airdrop but there's a lot of challenges with an airdrop

which will break down today along with Frameworks on how Founders investors and onchain doers can take advantage of the points Mania that is really just getting started today we're joined by Zach from snag Solutions who has worked with world of women proof rolling loud and many more on their points programs gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet I'm jird and I believe that points to airdrop programs are going to change the world that's why I'm carving a path for doers to confidently build and invest in web 3 GM Zack welcome back to web3 Academy gmj thanks for having me back it's been a

minute since we had you on the show today we're talking about a different topic than last time I feel like you're might go-to guy in the space every time there's a new meta or a new trend you're just on top of it and this time I resar it to you to talk about points because I just wanted your your thoughts and your opinions as a a leader in the space and it turned out that you were working on a couple projects that were very relevant to this conversation so we said hey let's get you on the show okay before we dive into today's topic I I just want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners give your a little intro please yeah so I'm Zach I've been on a couple times than thanks for having me back and Lead snag Solutions we're a

early leader in nft infrastructure but really white labeling highquality consumer applications and experiences for top brands and creators building in the kind of ethereum and evm ecosystem and relevant to Today's Show we work on points program is very much in the meta and probably when I say it I don't mean it quite the way that that we'll be talking about it today but we've done versions of points programs for top creators like World of women proof and rolling loud and and their loud punks nft which we'll get into a little bit more today awesome so just the perfect guest to have on the show when we talk

about why why are points better than tokens why are they taking over and why are we seeing them so much I want to just start by setting a little bit of context so I think it's important to recognize that for everybody that's not in crypto you can understand points pretty easily by just thinking about your typical Airline program or credit card program you in the casement airline you fly as a result of flying you gain points and then you can use those points to redeem future flights certain access to lounges whatever okay the case of a credit card you spend money you get points you can then use those points to

redeem purchase other things get cash back and whatnot okay now here's the big difference and why points is so different in web 3 versus web two is in web 3 and crypto points equals money whereas in web 2 points equals in kind stuff basically so you're getting an opportunity to get something but it's not a direct correlation to money whereas in crypto we can do projects can directly give you money usually through an airdrop as a result of you gaining points that's where we're at right now

and so as a result of that everybody knows that air drops are super effective at driving user growth and at the same time there's some issues around airdrops we're going to talk about those in a second but points have become sort of the ressor to an airdrop as a way to drive engagement to get your users involved to get a lot of attention and a lot of hype on your project and we've seen it over and over again uh with multiple projects most recently seen it I mean blur we've seen doing it for the past few years with their three seasons we're in season three now recently we saw rainbow wall launch launcher Point program and rabby wallet launcher points program to basically vampire attack

metamask uh we saw fch do a points program they haven't even done their air drop yet but they've teased it and talked about it so we're seeing this over and over again throughout crypto Zach let's start with what's the problem with airdrops that has led in your view to this Rising meta like points media basically is the best way I think I can put it where right now yeah it's hard to choose just one but two of the biggest drivers are one the ability to directly influence the consumer user behaviors that align with business impact growth Revenue what whatever those metrics are

that the the business is uh optimizing for and super relevant quote with that in mind is the the Unis swap CEO paid in after the Unis swap air drop said there will never be another airdrop like this again and what he meant is every airdrop from then outw was going to be farmed to some degree and by publishing these points programs businesses are helping users understand exactly what they need to do to access points and you know associated with this kind of moving to to number two they're able to adjust those CR criteria and figure out what actually drives business impact prior to

giving away all the token or publishing immutable tokenomics on chain that then can't be modified to make sure that the token is driving growth in the future yeah yeah so the issue that we have with airdrops are one you need to know tokenomics you said it yourself you do an airdrop you now are creating a mutable framework for your tokenomics that I mean I guess you could change it through governance and voting and whatnot but we can't underestimate the challenge in developing tokenomics it's very hard to do I wouldn't even say every time I ask somebody like tell me about a project

that's done tokenomics well they can point to a project but then they're also like and here's the issues right so it's I'm stealing this quote from you you said it you told me I think last time we talked that tokenomics are social science and so it's so malleable that that makes it very difficult especially early on in a project so that's an issue with with airdrops so also big regulatory concerns with airdrops right so and only growing regulatory concerns now hopefully within the next few years those regulatory concerns are finally addressed and we don't have to worry about it anymore but right now with so many regulatory concerns there's been a lot of projects particularly projects in the US which

where I know EUR located that have shied away from an airdrop and as a result they might look to a points program instead because they don't have the regulatory issues so I think what what we're saying here is a points program will allow you to delay tokenomics not to say you can delay it forever and to get around any regulatory issues and I guess the other thing is that you can sort of avoid a lot of the onchain complexities like gas that 100% right what in your mind has led to this like all of a sudden it feels like feels like

the classic crypto saying was it gradually and then suddenly like that's where it feels like we are like points was so gradual and then all of a sudden it's everywhere 100% I I I think we have to keep talking about both the issues in tandem at this point in the conversation the on the regulatory front we could talk about apoin for a second where they attempted to both reward AP Community participation historically with their airdrop and they endeavored to create a mechanism to create ongoing value for apes and mutants through staking But ultimately the math wasn't done right with with an eye towards social science

and stake rates such that the unstaked ape pool acrise roughly the same return as the board ape and the muttin ape State tools and so there's effectively no incentive relative to the Token at least for someone to stay in the community after they've received their airdrop and that's a good example of something that that exact mechanism would have been a little bit challenging but but points enables them to test that learn what stake rates actually look like collects data from the community to improve the uh the model and then it's important to note that they're also a great example because on the regulatory side they've been under major scrutiny

just due to their level of brand in the space and have to be extra careful about not touching or adjusting tokenomics are really contributing to the Dow in any way postwatch and so you know that we'll talk about other say like a blur that are operating in a much less regulated way it's not pervasive it's not like regulator is the thing it's Regulatory and it's Point token model Walkin that is prevented yeah let's talk about almost like a history lesson I think and you brought up apoin and we we'll touch on them in this history lesson of if we go back to the beginning we sort of had

Unis swap as the first air drop right and you said yourself that hidden Adam said there will never be another one like this because he knew that everybody was going to farm and gamify the out of it right and then we sort of moved along this trajectory from the starting point to basically experimentation of different projects to figure out what was the best way to do an airdrop and I don't know if you want to walk us through maybe the different phases that we went through from like it being based on Holdings in the beginning with something like a coin to arbitrum doing it based upon activity on chain

and a little bit of a points program there although it wasn't like a published points program or maybe it was published but it wasn't the focal point to a blur a frame that is more so doing a ecosystem based airdrop or points program to a portal coin that did it you know not on chain at all and just said hey we're going to give you re awards for Twitter activity le le let's go through that history lesson together one thing I'd say before we go through that is the more intelligent programs whether it's blur that's not Point spaced or portal that is points spaced they're really intelligent around what are the

activities that are going to drive business grow let let me actually take a half step back and talk about rolling loud for a second just so I can talk about one of our partners and how they're thinking about things from p&l perspective profit and loss and then this all applies back to any of these businesses that are being intelligent in program setup so for Rolling loud they have a uh loud punks Festival pass nft and rolling loud will earn more from this kind of membership and loyalty program if they get marketing benefit from it similar to a portal coin this isn't the biggest thing for them but Twitter tweets hashtags Instagram post post really thinking about social

content creation and augmentation there's holding the asset and not listing it which drives up floor price and then there's paying royalties on sales or else the floor price doesn't actually generate any value for ring so kind of core token sale driven revenue and then the third category that I think we'll get to with them in the future is people purchasing stuff at festivals of course right you little different for IRL business like themselves and so if you apply that to blur they've done this maybe better than anyone else in terms of really thinking about sequentially what are the behaviors within the nft trading ecosystem in particular that

would ACR liquidity to drive volume eyeballs and attention towards their platform yeah you know and we all know what happened with blur but I think they started with incentivizing I think it was listings first so that they built sell-side liquidity and then they incentivized offers to build demand side liquidity and when they had both of those things in place it created almost Unis swap equivalent order book density that that made you know nft trading quite fungible for and and so I think that's really what folks are doing with portal coin obviously that was a marketing value prop early and we'll see where they go with that in subsequent

versions of the the points program right how that changes over time as they figure out what's driving value for their launch yeah it's interesting that you keep bringing it back to this perspective of what is the business objective here right when most people look at airdrops they just think free money they're just so focused on from a user standpoint right great there's an airdrop I get free money but you have to remember that as the business they're not sitting there being like hey let's just give a whole bunch of free money to our users like that's not the way that they approach this they approach this from a particular business objective

often what we have seen multiple times is I mean there's a few different business objectives we could break down but often and most of most of the time the objective is user growth whether be in the case of an arbitrum you want onchain user growth and you also want developer user growth right or in the case of a blur you want buyers and sellers as you said demand side and sell side so depending upon what your product is you focus on that growth and building that growth and that has been the primary reason for these airdrops is to attract this user growth now obviously I think we all philosophically like to

believe that there's also this objective around governance in the long term but no Project's really proven that yet that we can really get there I often just see people posting that they're like imagine everybody who got a point also was told that they had to show up to a zoom call and vote on governance forther in order to claim their point like nobody would ever do it but it does come back to this business business objective and in a very short period of time only a few years we have seen a bunch of projects experiment with going straight to an airdrop and we've seen that there is a lot of challenges there because what if you're not incentivizing the

right Behavior because you don't know what consumer Behavior actually matters to your product and to the consumer right so it's l us to this point where it's like let's use a points program to learn and to test and then we'll find out oh that's what people care about that's what leads to action and then okay we can reward that within an airdrop is that bot on what one thing I don't think we've talked about yet but you kind of triggered for me is you mentioned Airline programs earlier there there's a merging of the airline points program and the tokenomics model happening here this is somewhat decent

driven on my end there there hasn't been enough time for it to play out but I suspect blur will not be successful long term because they have a fouryear token allocation schedule I've said this from the beginning and so I think they are set up to be successful for up to four years because at that point all of the token will have been distributed and they'll be very susceptible from a vampire attack from the next blurt yeah and so what needs to happen for a business to be sustainable is for them to find equilibrium on tokenomics whether that's driven by syncs in the token model or driven by ongoing token

allocation where there's kind of uncapped Supply and it's intelligently constructed but you know we'll we'll we'll see how that all plays out I I completely agree with blur to be honest I'm impressed with their ability to continually push it back a season I thought season two was going to be the you know I was like how on Earth are they gonna have anybody interested after season two like it's G to be it's done what more can you do and then they launched blast they had a whole points program like that they pushed the points casino to the limit in my mind and they're incredible at that and now it's actually in the short term made me I'd

say a little bit bullish on blur like I really really do believe but I think there's an end to that as you said now the one caveat I would say is what if they turn on some sort of value acrel to Holders the way we all expect that Unis swap might do that someday that could change the model but anyways we don't need to go down that path okay so in this sort of spectrum of of where we started with apoin and ens being sort of early on they said okay going to air drop based upon based on Holdings basically right didn't really work and you're an AP holder you participate actively in AO Dow so you can really speak to that then we had ARB do a

little bit of a airdrop based upon activity so you took activity in within ARB and you actually got points assigned you now they didn't use they wouldn't have called it a points program they would have focused on an air drop because we didn't really talk about points back then and then more recently I want to talk about portal coin more recently because they're a more recent example of okay now you're saying we're not going to talk at all about tokenomics we're not going to talk at all about the air drop other than to say it's going to come as a result of a points program and we're instead just going to focus on how do we drive the business objectives that we have so maybe can you walk us through what happened with portal coin and I don't

know if you want to start with what you think their business objectives are and way why they made the decisions they made or I'll let you yeah and I I've not deeply researched this so so this is you know off the cuff a bit but it's very clear to anyone on Twitter that they were trying to get their message out on Twitter it's clear they were exceptionally successful in creating a density of tweets and through creating the density of tweets they learn two things so initial goal was was create I'm sure positive noise around who we are and what we're doing and what they initially achieved was a density of tweets but no actual back back to kind of augmentation of

messaging on social there is no actual augmentation of what is Portal coin I still only rudimentarily understand what what it is and what it's supposed to be like it's like it's it's a web three gaming platform right I mean actually to some degree they're going after exactly what apoin is which is being a currency you know apoin calls it the metaverse they calling it maybe more web 3 gaming but they're they're probably going after pretty similar kind of categories to some degree and coming back to it initially the portal coin points program created a bunch of tweet volume with portal but no content and it pissed a lot of people

off you remember all the like I blocked portal coin tweets go going on at the same time and so then what they were able to do to recalibrate and seems like this is gotten them moving in the right direction is points being driven by augmenting the portal coin handle content via quote tweet right and and this is all Twitter API based and really just one category if you think about kind of like marketing versus usage versus direct Revenue contribution being three components of of growth that can be driven through tokenomics they've been really focused only on visibility at this point but you could imagine as

they get ready for that launch that program extending to anything from from weightless signups to claiming purchasing and actual usage of the coin in in their ecosystem so again extending back towards those usage and revenue metrics as they go towards launch this makes a ton of sense if from a business perspective what comes up for me is I just think I run a digital marketing agency that's my primary revenue driver although I hope web 3 Academy grows to bank list size someday but what we do is we do growth marketing for businesses that want to reach new audiences and the one of the number one tactics to do that

is paid advertising right and so what we what would you rather do if you're a business and this is ironic because I'm sort of slamming my own agency in a way is would you rather pay for a bunch of ads on Twitter right and you know cold get in front of a whole bunch of people that are yeah they're targeted by Twitter's algorithm and those algorithms are incredible at targeting no doubt about that or would you rather not pay Twitter for the ads and instead put the money directly in the hands of your user by just telling them hey these are the activities that if you do it'll help us achieve success and so go do these

activities and we'll we'll give you money in the it's not that black and white obviously no I mean I like this is very much a detour but I'm shocked as you frame it that way we talk about decentralized social decentralized everything it talks about decentralized advertising how about a business model to be disrupted here so totally totally and we don't need to go down that path but the reason I bring that up is just there is a an underlying Trend here that connects back to sort of like the ethos of web 3 from the beginning which was that cut out the middleman go peer-to-peer go direct and make sure that we reward the actual

users now in the beginning that was very simplistic but now it it keeps on getting more and more complex as an example like portal coin not to say portal coin was crazy complex like you basically as you said you posted a tweet and all you had to do is put app portal coin in it then you have to Via tweet about portal coin it could literally be anything pretty buny tweets like yeah which is ridiculous but it's pulling out the middle man it's putting it's peer-to-peer it's getting direct to your consumer which is really one of the things that we all one of the reasons that we all love web 3 it kind of it connects back to the ethos okay I want

to talk about how our listeners can think about points whether you're like the whether you're a project founder or an onchain user who just wants to participate in more points programs and airdrops uh because I think there's a few different buckets here you want me to to break down these buckets and walk through them or do you want to take the first shot at it I I I take a crack we talked about this ahead of time yeah so but before pulling in a third more web two bucket today there's tokens SL air drops right we've talked about several of those ens apoin Unis swap arbitrum Etc and those historically start as tokens the first time that they're

announced by the business and so there's no period during which users can intelligently change their behavior in the way that's desired by the business right to obtain more token allocation right what we're seeing a ton of today is points programs that are entirely geared around a typically like six to 12 month Max earnings period prior to an initial airdrop and so if you think about the fact that a lot of these airdrops are 20% of token Supply 30% of token Supply whatever initial allocation it's really baking that forward to some

degree to to Kickstart the tokenomics prior to the launch of the token but then there's a third category and ruling loud who I mentioned earlier probably is a good example in this bucket of folks American Airlines could could maybe bit of a stretch fall in that bucket as well where they're pre token and whether there are internal plans on a token or not they're creating the infrastructure where if they want to bring that thing on chain in the future they're already building towards the right kind of loyalty pnl figuring out what behaviors they want to incentivize whether holding the nft and going to festivals or

getting on flights and upgrading to first class and they're able to kind of intelligently design those programs to have the right profitability objectives and what I think is pretty interesting I I know we weren't planning to talk too much about American Airlines today and obviously just using them as one points example but if you know if the world moves on chain like like we all think it's going to and if their objective is to have the strongest frequent flyer program then moving that program on chain where points are sellable tradable redeemable even in in other you know competitor or partner experiences that improves the that that that's what we're

all here for it improves the utility of the point or the mile and you know with regular Clarity improved would would leave all the current mechanics of of their mileage business available to so I think over the long run here whether that's two or five or 10 years a lot of these themes will Converge on loyalty and and I gotta say just to jump in here two things one is I do think people need to understand that there's a few different category business categories that you could points put points within here when we talk about like there's the Loyalty category where it then fits under the marketing engagement part of a business and then there's the growth

category which also could fit under marketing but it's more user growth getting new users on board and I guess the big difference there really is that is it for existing users or is it to attract new users a loyalty program can obviously do both but I do think that distinction is important because I think right now at least in most of the points programs that we're all talking about and hearing about they are you could almost say airdrop synonymous with points and the focus is on getting users right very I I also think there is I I wish I had more good examples than this of this than just blur and blur is one of the best

tokenomics examples we've ever seen they they you know absolutely crushed the game as you said earlier but the points program is really around the launch of the toonomic versus the buy sell size sell side liquidity we just talked about in seasons one and two of blur those are much more correlated with what a traditional loyalty program is trying to Ace achieve which is transaction volume really right and so I think there there's a pre-launch marketing Focus stage of these token launches versus probably a more status quo Revenue generation focused stage that that we haven't gotten into quite as much yet yeah yeah yeah I also just got to say

who is going to be the first major Enterprise to turn their loyalty program into points you you're basically directly asking that question I don't know the answer to that the ones that pop up to me are Starbucks because Starbucks has Starbucks Odyssey so they are already trying to build out their Odyssey points program which is their onchain program now that actually it does not use onchain it doesn't use a fungible token it uses NF te's so and then we also have up trip which is by Lanza so one of the biggest airlines in the world and they have a program as well but there's also us nfts like there isn't an existing none of the existing

Enterprises are using fungible tokens yet like in there in any capacity because I don't know if it's regulatory or if it's just that as you said this tokenomics is very complex and there's huge risk in the way they might rule that out that they could get it wrong anyways I'm just gonna I don't know if you have a take on who you think would be the first one and we could play this clip like four years from now when we're like American Airlines did it no I I I think all I would say is that you're thinking about it the same way I am in that the businesses that are really experimenting in web 3 today and we could add Nike and Adidas to that category right those are likely to be the ones that lead with some type of

real token offering and I will come back again to the core thing that any intelligent business loyalty program Etc does is they iterate based on changes in social behavior purchasing Behavior Etc and that is explicitly what any Western regulatory regime the US anywhere in Europe Australia for sure I'm not great at naming all the countries but lza American Airlines Etc they are firmly boxed out from this category where at least digital Collectibles are a little bit grayer today yeah so trying to stay away from that Securities territory yeah

yeah exactly yeah let's talk a little bit about rolling them out because you brought it up at the beginning in order to to add some context but I want to dive deeper into a little bit about what they're doing because what I find very interesting about them and where I think that we've landed so far is that points programs make a lot lot of sense because it allows you to delay tokenomics and to experiment and test and to learn like portal coin did that just telling everybody to use ad portal coin is not really the greatest tactic although In fairness I think they got the press and the coverage and the virality that they were looking for but now what what is very interesting to me about what the

projects are you are working on is you're less focused on this we're focused on an airdrop in order to get like massive user growth you're more focused on working with projects that already have a community and I guess they're trying to figure out a few things one they're trying to get more engagement from their users and two they're trying to figure out how to make this damn thing actually profitable because royalties are gone and that was probably their biggest Revenue generator and they're like oh what do we do now especially when the case of rolling loud it's a lifetime pass to every one of their music festivals right 100% I'm going to talk a lot about rolling loud today but one thing I'll say up front is

there are at least a half B dozen of these web 2 businesses that we're working with or talking to and not yet live who launch digital collectible programs of some sort are still generally the ones we're talking to very excited about the future of web 3 and are all gravitating towards how do we P what we're doing with digital collectibles together with our core loyalty program that could be just an email list they have today it could be you know something a little bit more engaged like a Starbucks point system but what they're really trying to figure out is how do we Bridge these two things such that we're able to drive positive

contributions from our our community or fan base while pre preserving some kind of level of increased access VIP membership Etc for their nft holders can you tell us some of the specifics of the points program because it's a for the rooll L it's a points program right it's not a token program yes I I don't know like points program is uh a a web three term they they may call it a loyalty program but but that that's semantics what they're doing at the core right now and can talk about this one because it's all you know pretty much live you can check this out at market. loud punk.com but right now every loud punks nft Acres

10 points per day for every day that it's not listed on any platform true and so that that's kind of the basis of the system and as they improve the utility of the loud punks nft by releasing different experiences benefits Etc onto the marketplace platform that are redeemable for points they'll be able to hopefully grow asset price and at some point in the future here that this has been communicated they'll stop providing that 10 points per day for assets that are purchased without royalty moving forward and and they're

trying to get the this kind of utility in place where there's clear benefits associated with that decision they're being very intelligent about making sure current holders are all taking care of and that this is clearly message to any F future holders as they're purchasing their assets but in order to access the points which will give you access to things like plus once to festivals ability to loan your ticket to a buddy for a festival you can't attend VIP experiences limited release merge etc etc they'll layer in royalties and so now at at the core of the system and I'll kind of keep layering on here you'll have incentives for people to hold their nft a not list which should increase floor price we've seen a lot of staking program soft staking does the same thing and then you'll have

incentives to sell or purchase with royalty so you can ACR those those points and on top of all of that similar to a portal coin there are points available for retweets reposts on Instagram and and uses of I think it's the at rolling loud mention in those points posts and so next steps for this program will include and and I'm probably talking like 6 to 12 month road map now opening this up to their broader rolling loud ecosystem where anyone can engage on social just like portal coin and and start to earn those points I I should cop it could be sooner than six

months but my my goal here is not to communicate the rolling lab timeline but the point is that they have kind of thought about all of the various ways that both loud punks folders and their broader Community can drive value to their Festival PN out really at the end of the day and I I think over time we'll ingest more data sources like app kind of cash downloads and investable purchasing and merch store I items purchased recurring recurring Festival attendance for non- loud FKS holders all of those are data sources that we can bake into this and provide points for all while starting to build this kind of

decentralized and onchain membership base as things move towards a more decentralized version of these programs I'm describing to that is the objective when you are working with a client like roolling loud I don't want to necessarily say this is their objective but in general and you might not even be to answer this question directly but in your view is the objective that a eventually these points programs will become tokens what I'll say to to not and I I want to like fir firmly disconnect this from loing Mod but these businesses generally are trying to preserve optionality at the very least right so so they want the ability to

move this onchain if they so choose in the future right right where that leaves us is that launching an a funable token it would not necessarily have much benefit for a lot of these businesses right now because most of their users are not on chain right and b i it would just get you a whole bunch of like Bots and Farmers which like I don't think get IRL Festival like rolling and that's exactly it that that's like the core thing I heard from from my core web three lead contact Ronald it rolling loud is we want to move away from speculative right participation and towards making the thing work really well for our core audience and having it

have inherent value to them that is greater than the value of this thing to a Trader right right so what I'm hearing here just to sort of like summarize the perspective and you can jump in here too on if a business came to you and said hey Zach I'm I'm trying to think about how to you know achieve user growth achieve more user loyalty more engagement and you were advising them that your advice would be okay if you're in the camp uh you're early and you're just trying to attract users in order to prepare for your launch then use a points program in order to and

experiment a ton with that points program test plan to fail basically like in some ways right like really push the limits of your test so that you basically create a whole bunch of data that can be used to write your Tok develop your tokenomics right the other state here is if you're an existing web 2 brand I wonder if you would say develop a points program whether or not regardless of the long-term goal develop a points program to start to it almost doesn't make sense to me why actually as I say this like why are web two companies not doing this already like they don't need onchain these points aren't onchain am I missing something

here I'm just I feel like I'm having a moment of aha M show I I think that the reason again this term points program it really means something to us all that we haven't defied yet yes it means that it today it's a loyalty program and tomorrow it's an airdrop that's what it mean the way the way we're describing that that term right and so for a web two business they're not ready for that yet is kind of the short version and I think if regulatory Clarity improved at a rapid rate we would see more of this right right right and I guess if you're a web three program or web 3 company or project what we're saying is start with

points because no regulatory issues then which maybe matters to you or maybe doesn't depending on your jurisdiction no gas fees which is way better ux for your users and also this is going to you just eliminate friction that you just don't need in the beginning and experimentation because you can experiment with point you can't experiment with tokenomics 100% what one I don't think we talked about it on air talked about it maybe a little bit before we jumped on with ap coin is as one example they airdrop token equivalent to the number of apes and mutant you held in your wallet and the thinking from what I can tell from a tokenomics point of view was

that because most of the token wouldn't be provided at launch it would be acrw via staking and there would be addition you know higher acral rates for folks that stake those tokens to their board ape or muttin ape the thinking there was that there would be ongoing benefit that would continue to support nft floor prices for Yuga assets and back to the social science element two things happened one because it was all of the board apes and mutant Apes who held the token those staking pools filled up quite quickly and because there was a set amount of kind of allocation coming to those pools they all hit effectively equilibrium pretty quickly and and

there's actually a technical thing but this is a great example of until you launch the thing you don't really know how people are going to react to it where in the the non bo8 mutate pool folks kind of set up uh reaking very easily where generate more yield and so in a lot of cases that pool was actually outperforming the the blood ape IM mutate pool shortterm right and that specific tokenomics setup I don't know if that really would have Co worked well with this Point's program structure but it's having the time in Market to understand and adjust that that is probably most meaningful with with this change yeah yeah it's so interesting to be in this space where everybody is

sailing the ship while they're building it like it's say daytoday you know adjust the sales adjust this adjust that in order to do that you need the flexibility and points programs give you the flexibility and at the same time the other thing I will say is on the user side points programs are also much better for users because they're way more clear right a lot of users when you talk airdrops people are like what how do I get involved in that airdrop how do I qualify I have to do oh oh I just have to guess oh you want me to just like deposit into these smart contracts interact these you know everybody's just guessing right and farming across and

that's if you think about it that's not really great for your users because they're doing a whole bunch of things that you don't really care about as a business and it's probably friction involved in doing those things and so you're not really teaching them what you want to be teaching them so I'm continually hammering on this point that starting with some form of offchain points and I I you know say this being a podcaster that believes that everything should come on chain it's better to start off chain 100% fascinating okay Zack F any final thoughts on your end and at the same time if people out there listening are thinking to themselves

damn I gotta call up Zach and get his help with launching my points program or launching my nft Marketplace because I know you guys do that too how can they reach out to you how can they find you yeah you so you can find us at snags solutions. email for me is Zack snags solutions. spelled the right way Zac and you can find me on Twitter I I I screwed up my uh my Twitter handle before I knew how important the name was but Z Haagen on Twitter so you we'll link to in the show notes because nobody's gonna know how to spell your last name 100% wa my my wife is changing hers and she she's learning the hard way just how hard it is oh man my wife's

going the opposite way because my wife's last name is schwinghammer which so hard to spell nobody knows how to spell that and so when we got married I I said you know are you going to change your last I meant to genuinely like I didn't expect her to to me like it's not an expectation anymore that's you know an old way of thinking and uh she was like yeah I'm going to change it I was like oh wow you're so decisive she's like yeah try and spell swing Hamber love it my last name is Hamilton it's way easier to spell Hamilton yeah am so sorry sorry to your wife no problem well no I mean it's great Trad today Jay if folks do want to chat points programs marketplaces Etc

I'm here for it and thanks for having me on yeah man always a pleasure to have you on but I gotta ask my favorite question before I let you go I'm sure you've been asked this on the show previously and I'm guessing you don't remember what you answered last time it's the billboard question if you remember this if you had a billboard that a billion people were going to see what would you write on it I I had a better and more humanitarian answer the first time I answered this right now I I feel like decentralization in in America and and having tolerance of decentralization is is kind of a critical thing so something better branded than like keep keep crypto from going overseas a better branding version of that right like best

American entrepreneurs crypto entrepreneurs we'll have to Circle back on the tagline okay we're not putting the billboard up in front of a billion people tomorrow it is very important to to have projects all over the world for sure Zach thanks so much for the time yeah we'll definitely you'll have to be back on the show again I'm sure in the future awesome thanks sh thanks for listening in everybody have a great day thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web

3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one