The proposed onchain affiliate program definitely works but I’d be concerned about privacy. It’s relatively easy to scrape the web for the referral links, match those to onchain transactions, and track buyer addresses to marketing channels. Obviously that’s the whole point but in aggregate it exposes a lot of offchain information and behavior patterns about DPI users who participate and could put them at risk.
Synthetix Volume Program is another example. I think this achieves both because it takes a considerable amount of investment to integrate our contracts, it sustainably brings users over time, and likely creates open source code that other people can use to integrate Index Coop into other apps faster. Sponsoring a long term hackathon (1 month?) also achieves the same thing I think but is a riskier investment. Gitcoin bounties is another option but we are kinda already doing that via Treasury Committee and I think the committee forces people to actually get involved in the community vs interacting through Github and a command line.
Ponzinomic affiliate program would do seasons of 3 or 6 months. Works almost the same except there is a single pool of INDEX for a season that is shared to affiliates pro-rata to their sales. Mandate that X amount of DPI have to be sold and time-locked for rewards to be distributed. If there are already a lot of sales in a season people would either have to make even more sales this season to maximize the sales they already made (sunk cost) or want to wait to sell in later rounds. Since INDEX holders decide how many rewards goes into the next season affiliates would want to sell in the current season to gain INDEX governance power and prevent risk from next season incase program discontinues, rewards reduced, or competition increases and dilutes them more because the program is more well known. We should do a lot of marketing before hand to make sure the first season is very competitive which sets the pace for the rest.
Make dope ass swag from MetaFactory which always gets people hype and makes people walking billboards. The YFI hoodie just sold out and I’ve seen it on a bunch of social media posts and zoom calls doing free promo. This would likely attract more artists to the Coop as well. We always hold the tokens we receive (YFI, MEME, DAI, ETH, etc.) to diversify our treasury and show community support. (obviously im biased here)