Proposal - Community Activity Rewards

Hi Rally Community,

The Rally team has been hard at work to support the next steps in the proposed community roadmap. One of the most important things on that roadmap is the distribution of rewards for driving real usage and activity of Creator Coins, Brand Coins, and any other social token on Rally.

The team is close to completing the blockchain infrastructure and rally.io website components needed to kick off the first aspect of what we’re calling the Community Activity Rewards.

Voting and Rollout Timeline
As a quick note, we are very eager to involve the community, and have them poke at the system, including looking for opportunities for improvement. If there is nothing major identified, we’d like to push this out as soon as we can, to help drive value to creator communities and encourage people to stay in Creators’ networks. While there may be some great suggestions on alternative systems or configuration changes, our current plan is to put this system, as designed, up for a vote on Sunday at 12pm PT. If this passes, we are targeting Thursday 11/12 for release.

If you are comfortable with the current plan and the proposed design, let’s continue the improvement or change discussions after the initial release. If you are NOT comfortable with it, you can absolutely vote NO on the proposal. As a community project, we will respect the wishes of the community, work towards making the appropriate system adjustments, and bring back the improved system for a new vote.

System Design
Community Activity Rewards will be calculated hourly, per Creator community and allocated proportional to each community based on their contribution to the overall net gain of $RLY backing all creator coins. When calculating hourly, the system will look back at each community’s 4 week hourly average $RLY, and compare it to the current hour’s $RLY, at the end of each hour.

Currently we are starting with proposing emitting 1,000 $RLY for each creator per day into a pool that gets distributed to only the active communities. Meaning at this point, we have 33 creators live, so there would be 33,000 $RLY per day, or 210,000 $RLY per week allocated to Community Activity Rewards. As a reference point, we’ve emitted roughly 350,000 $RLY tokens per day since our Oct 15 launch between YDV and Liquidity Mining rewards, so this would be a conservative setting at launch that the community can evolve.

As each incremental creator launches, we will add the appropriate 1,000 $RLY per day to the overall emission. After we reach 100 total creators, the 101st creator will add 900 $RLY per day to the total emission pool. This pattern will continue until we reach 1,000 creators, where the incrementally added emission is 100 $RLY, and the 1001st creator added will add 90 $RLY. This pattern will also continue until we reach a cumulative 1,000,000 $RLY per day when the network is at 10,000 creators. After that, we will no longer add $RLY to the Community Activity Rewards for each incremental Creator who launches.

Reward Distribution
When rewards are earned by a community, $RLY will be rewarded to the community and used to add additional backing to that community’s Creator Coins. As the number of $RLY backing that Creator Coin increases due to the rewards provided to that community, the Creator and their entire community of fans will benefit, as the value of the Creator Coin as a whole will increase. All Creator Coin holders will need to wait until the weekly distribution to participate in the rewards. Any user that exits from the Creators’ economy will forfeit their proportion of the Community Activity Rewards.

Calculation
For the calculation, we decided to look back 4 weeks to protect against any significant spikes or dips in a creator economy. For example, If a creator has a large spike in a 1 week period, but some declines for the following couple of weeks, using a 4 week average as compared to a lifetime average will make it easier for them to get back to reward eligibility.

In addition, the calculation specifically will take the incremental amount of $RLY per community, and then take the square root of that $RLY. This is intended to skew the rewards slightly in favor of smaller communities. Larger communities who have the capability to generate lots of creator coin purchases, conversions and activities should still receive very sizable rewards.

User Interface
In order to help users understand where their community’s rewards stand, we are planning to calculate the rewards and display them on the creator’s coin page on rally.io each hour. The displayed rewards are at that point owned by that community and won’t go down during that week.

The actual distribution of the rewards will happen weekly. After the $RLY is added to the community, the $Creator Coin to RLY exchange rate of each reward earning community will change accordingly, and the $RLY rewards will reset.

I am sure there will be lots of good questions and comments, so let us know what you think.

-smallz

5 Likes

Interesting! Will the disbursements fall on Thursdays with the first one a week from the launch?

If I understand it correctly, this proposal rewards a specific subset of community activity: purchasing and to a maybe lesser extent conversions of RLY to CC. While “holding” can be a type of usage if the creator has it enabled (ex: permission chat), I might consider donations to be a stronger indicator of real usage.

Put another way, what communities have seen a greater usage of donations than redemptions and how can we reward those communities?

If this proposal rewards communities for net inflows, which is important!, are you looking at any Community activity rewards for Creator communities that demonstrate coin utility through some measurement of donations? I’m sure the team has thought about this in designing the network and these Community activity rewards so I’d love to hear more.

Just a few thoughts!

Cheers,
Grand

100% on the same page here. I see the “kickstart of the flywheel” for all of the important network behaviors being to incentivize creators and their fans to acquire and hold on to Creator Coins. Starting with net inflow and passive holding will allow us to build and launch the necessary tooling quickly.

Shortly after, we want to move on to more of the core activities and behaviors like Donate, Transfer/Send, (redeem/convert down to RLY to some extent) and even # of accounts holding any amount of a single Creator Coin. The goal with that version would be to help incentivize Creators and their Communities to bring more users to the network, and to come up with exciting utility use cases to drive behaviors that are valuable to their community and the network as a whole.

An alternative next step could be to push into individual “staking” rewards. This could be in addition to passive holding rewards, but could have time locks or simply UI confirmations that would help signal increased stability in the creator’s economy for the creator and all Creator Coin holders. Creators could then provide specific benefits or access to those stakers, and the staking user could earn Creator Coin or RLY for their stake.

Definitely eager to have the first version of Community Activity Rewards go live, and see if the distribution or behaviors associated suggest we should go one way or the other, or if something we haven’t considered pops up.

Great question about the logistics of the first week’s distribution. I will follow up and get an answer on that.

2 Likes

Good thought on the donations and real usage. Usage by token Creators and their communities is ultimately what will drive long term success of the network, so it’s important to figure out. But it’s also much more susceptible to sybil attack and gaming of the rewards system, so it needs to be designed carefully and evolve as the network grows more sophisticated.

What smalldogg is proposing is a Net Deposits reward system. It’s 100% aligned with the network health and growth, and far easier to design and monitor for gaming of the system. So I think it’s a good one to start with! But need to continue working on the complete reward system.

The cool thing is that Creators can now start to earn more than 100% of a transaction.

As an example, let’s take a Creator that has $10,000/month in donations and spend on merchandise. Let’s assume the Creator pays 5% fees all in (that’s being generous, but it’ll help make this example more compelling). So the Creator is making $9,500/month net. Rally comes along and says you pay no fees, but that $500/month difference isn’t enough to make a Creator take what’s working and switch. However, with Rally Community Activity Rewards, the $10,000/month could now be generating $11,000 a month if that Creator captures 15% of all the rewards (assuming the current market price and the 33,000 $RLY emission to make it a $1,500/month dif.

The more fees the Creator pays on the other side, the more compelling Rally should become.

We’ll obviously have to see how the numbers play out, but it should be a good message to take to token creators as a starting point.

Growing net deposits is clearly so critical, and thank you for showing the math with the example. Once you also consider the revenue that creators never even get to see, like the 30-50% a platform like twitch might take from subs and bit purchases then creator coins are looking pretty damn good for the community and creators alike. Good stuff!