Basic Details
Project name: Tide Protocol
Author name and contact info (please provide a reliable point of contact for the project.):
Noam Moyal, Email: social@fiveelementslabs.com, TG: https://t.me/NoamADV
L2 recipient address: 0x7aA72c9A58eDDc8dF8aEE9990BAa44037B179d2c
Which Voting Cycle are you applying for?: Cycle 11
I confirm that I have read the landing pages for the Builders 18 and Growth Experiments 18 Sub-Committees and that I have determined my proposal is best suited to be reviewed by the Growth Experiments Sub-Committee: [Yes/No]: Yes
I understand that Growth Experiments grants are subject to a āno sale rule,ā as explained in this post, and I have read the terms of the rule: [Yes/No]: Yes
Project Details
What are you building?:
Tide is the web3 marketing platform allowing communities to create engagement programs leveraging on-chain credentials to acquire, engage and retain users.
We pioneered a permissionless, no-code campaign builder to launch web3 marketing campaigns with a few clicks.
Basically, any project can launch marketing campaigns requiring users to perform off-chain and on-chain actions to unlock a Badge (NFT/SBT) to which it is possible to associate benefits such as token-gated utilities, airdrops, and more.
Moreover, we leverage our Audience System to target relevant wallets and mitigate Sybil attacks. In practice, an audience is a set of wallets with specific on-chain characteristics allowed to participate in a campaign. For example, a DeFi-focused campaign could be made accessible only to users who have deposited 1 ETH on lending protocols for at least 3 months.
Furthermore, it is possible to access a quest analytics dashboard to run data-driven marketing activities. This enables projects to analyze insights about participants, such as wallet balance, dApps interacted, and tokens holded to better understand their personas. Without analytics, it is impossible for projects to determine the success of their initiatives.
Finally, through Tide, it is possible to associate token-gated utilities or distribute ERC-20 tokens based on the issued campaign badges.
Why do you believe what you are building is going to succeed?:
We have seen many incentive programs like airdrops fail, as they attracted many profit seekers and rewarded users who brought no long-term value to the projects.
In web3, the main problems involving marketing are:
-
Lack of tools enabling projects to launch web3 engagement programs, which lead to long and expensive set-up times for marketing activities
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Inability to filter out Sybil attacks and difficulty in targeting specific users/āuser personasā
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Lack of analytics tools to analyze the outcome of marketing activities and understand campaign participants
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The rewards distribution should be addressed only to valuable users (there is a need for data-driven tools for airdrops and token-gated utilities)
Projects often struggle to launch successful marketing campaigns and end up misallocating incentives due to previously mentioned issues.
To address this problem, there is a need for a platform that enables projects to design and launch engagement programs easily. The platform should also allow for targeting specific wallet segments, mitigating Sybil attacks, and incorporating analytics to run data-driven campaigns. For this reason, we created Tide.
How many users does your project have currently? Please include how you arrived at this estimate:
We achieved 26000+ mints on Tide and 16800+ unique users; you can find all the metrics on our analytics dashboard, which tracks Tide smart contracts: https://analytics.tideprotocol.xyz/. Notice that thanks to our audience system, which gates the participation to relevant wallets only, users interacting with Tide have a 10x better wallet average balance and number of transactions with respect to wallets interacting with campaigns from other competitors (You can read more about it here: Tide āAudiencesā: key to Targeted, Sybil-Resistant web3 marketing Campaigns | by Tide Protocol | Medium). At Tide, we focus more on authentic users and the quality of their wallets rather than the number of mints.
How will receiving a grant enable you to further the mission of maximizing the number of users interacting with Optimism? Please include a step-by-step flow of how you imagine this grant can lead to a greater number of user interactions with Optimism:
Our program can help different phases of the OP marketing process, from awareness to protocol usage and retention.
The program includes a series of data driven quests with different objectives and various levels of difficulty. Each quest will make users mint a soulbound NFT, which can be used to claim utilities such as ERC20s (OP tokens in this case) and other token-gated utilities. An attestation from the Attestation Station will be associated with each quest.
Tide quests are different to what has been tried so far in the OP ecosystem:
- Composable allowlists. Tide labels wallets based on their on-chain history (e.g. active users, advanced dex users, lending protocol users).
- Web3 actions with a time component. It is possible to incentivize usage over time, rather than a single action (e.g. deposit in a pool for 90 days)
- Social media integrations. Discord, Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube are some examples of platforms Tide integrates
- Data driven. Each quest has its own analytics dashboard with wallet behavioral data and insights. This allows projects to iterate faster and compare results between campaigns
- Soulbound and Tokens: Tide quest builder allows to distribute badges (credentials) forming user persona over time. Tide utility builder allows to distribute ERC20s based on credential holdings
The program has three purposes:
- Awareness building and awareness attestation
- Incentivize usage of optimism network by authentic and relevant users
- Create user persona and OP station attestation for future programs, pushing forward the identity and reputation data sources
Awareness quests
The awareness component will include an impression mining campaign, where KOLs and popular twitter profiles will be incentivized to share threads and contents about OP.
The quest will require social profiles with more than 10k followers to perform social actions on Twitter, and get paid by number of impressions generated (minimum 10k impressions). The awareness campaign will be focused on promoting the efforts on the identity space and the marketing experiments done in the OP ecosystem.
Profiles successfully taking part in the campaign will receive:
- 0.0001 OP per impression
- āInfluencerā OP attestation, to be leveraged by OP ecosystem and other projects
Usage
Regarding usage, several data driven experiments will be conducted in partnership with projects (currently working with 1Inch, Alchemix, Saddle, Across, Bytemasons and more are about to sign in) while few others will be focused on OP holders behavior such as holding or delegate voting (with the goal to increase loyalty towards Optimism network).
The idea is to attract wallets with relevant behavior through Tide allowlist.
- Dex users on polygon and arbitrum (2 mln wallets)
- Bridgers to polygon and arbitrum (1.5 mln wallets)
- Derivatives users and lending protocols users
- Yield protocols users
- OP NFT holders
These audiences allow to attract wallet with 10x balance than the former OP programs ran with other platforms (see the analysis here Tide āAudiencesā: key to Targeted, Sybil-Resistant web3 marketing Campaigns | by Tide Protocol | Medium).
The reach-out mechanism will be based on two pillars:
- Awareness campaign (see point 1)
- Referral mechanism embedded in some quests. Example: a user in the āadvanced traderā allowlist can refer to other users in the same allowlist
The tasks in the quests will be variable and decided iteratively with projects. Things we are willing to explore:
- Are social only campaigns effective?
- Is a single web3 action with no time requirement enough to attract authentic and valuable users?
- What is the tradeoff between greater action difficulty and number of actions generated / retention?
Example:
- Require wallets that bridged at least 100$ to arbitrum and polygon to bridge 100$ to optimism
- Require yield protocols users to perform lending and borrowing on Optimism
- Require OP holders to hold and delegate their OP for at least 3 months
Each project working with us will do a minimum of 10 quests over the five month period.
Each quest will have OP rewards, redeemable through Tide. The idea is to iterate on the combination of allowlist, actions (social and web3), and rewards to find the right balance.
These quests will both bring activity to the Optimism ecosystem and will find out the best engagement strategies to adopt for dApps looking to grow their brand and community.
Moreover, the recent Arbitrum airdrop criteria confirm the importance of filtering out Sybil attacks while distributing rewards to different user clusters based on the value they create for a project. As mentioned, with Tide, any project can leverage our analytics dashboard to target different types of user personas and reward them accordingly.
Attestation and identity
At the end of the program, a leaderboard based on soulbound tokens will be available. Based on the different combinations of SBTs held, the following clusters of users will be identified:
- Awareness spreader (about 50 wallets)
- Advanced dex users (about 3k wallets)
- Advanced lending users (about 3k wallets)
- Advanced bridge users (about 3k wallets)
The attestation station will be used to create specific attestations for these users.
Measuring results
At Tide, we strongly believe that quests should be data-driven. At the end of the quest period, weāll publish a 30 page report about all the experiments run in the program, where all the findings about wallet behavior will be highlighted.
Moreover, the full report will be simplified in a dashboard related to the quest program. It will be public and will present the following insights:
- Wallet behavioral data differences existing between users interacting with quests
- Common ERC20 holdings and dApps interacted with
- Common labels as defined by our audience and labeling engines
At the end of the period, weāll present findings and ideas to create new quests.
Tell us about the users you plan to target with this grant. Include any defining characteristics that will help you identify and target them:
In general, all Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon users. The ultimate goal is to onboard authentic users from other networks on Optimism and to maximize the retention mechanisms for those already using Optimism.
Some quests will have an awareness component, where also popular Twitter profiles will be incentivized to spread the word about the campaigns.
Moreover, the goal is to filter bots, making the campaigns accessible only to wallets that would be relevant for the Optimism ecosystem and avoid Sybil attacks. Therefore, we will create custom Audiences based on on-chain activity, allowing only wallets included to participate in the campaigns.
Audiences should be large enough to enable a substantial number of authentic users to participate while at the same time mitigating Sybil attacks.
Stricter audiences can be applied for certain quests. For example, a DeFi quest could be made accessible only to wallets with a history of using DeFi dApps.
How would these users interact with Optimism? For how long?:
By completing the various quests, users will interact with Optimism by using various DeFi protocols and other dApps. The actions will range from bridging, providing liquidity, obtaining Optimism Attestations and more. Moreover, social quests will help increase awareness about the ecosystem and attract new authentic users.
The program will last for 5 months. We believe that long-term programs are the best way to guarantee constant engagement through time and create an authentic community.
Provide us with links to any of the following for the project:
- Demo: - YouTube
- Website: https://www.tideprotocol.xyz
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tide_web3
- Discord/Discourse/Community:Tide
- Github: GitHub - FiveElementsLabs/tide-core-v1: Tide is the web3 marketing application for projects, brands, and businesses to effectively acquire, engage and retain users.
- Technical/Economic Documentation: https://fiveelementslabs.gitbook.io/tide/about-tide/web3-marketing-protocol
- Blog: https://medium.com/@Tide_web3
Do you have any metrics on the project currently? (TVL, transactions, volume, unique addresses, etc. Optimism metrics preferred; please link to public sources such as Dune Analytics, etc.):
You can find all the metrics on our analytics dashboard tracking Tide smart contracts and users: https://analytics.tideprotocol.xyz/
Who are your competitors, and are they on Optimism?:
-Galxe: https://galxe.com/
-Layer3: https://layer3.xyz/
-RabbitHole: https://rabbithole.gg/
Galaxy and Rabbithole are on Optimism
Please link to code audits (if any):
Codes here: soulbound and NFT campaigns (not audited yet) GitHub - FiveElementsLabs/tide-core-v1: Tide is the web3 marketing application for projects, brands, and businesses to effectively acquire, engage and retain users.
Team
Who are your founders?:
-Vincenzo Manzon (Co-founder, Executive Chairman): Manages marketing and business operations. Previously worked for EY and heās a Bocconi University Graduate.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincenzo-manzon/
-Silvio Busonero (Co-Founder, CEO): Oversees product and business. Previously worked in the data analytics fields for the US defense industry and financial services (central banks in EU and central Asia)
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silvio-busonero/
-Paolo Rossi (CTO): During his professional experience, he has been CTO for many thriving startups and gained knowledge in growing & scaling businesses.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paoloantoniorossi/
What makes your team well-suited to carry out the project described in this proposal?
Tide has already been used by top-notch or fast-growing projects and content creators, like Premia, Saddle, nftperp, Rodeo Finance, RociFi, LandX, Subli (KOL), DeFi Riddler (KOL), and more.
Tide is one of the few web3 projects with paying customers and non-incentivized traffic.
The team has great experience in the web3 space and won multiple grants at various ETH Global events (see more here: https://fiveelementslabs.com/). Moreover, we have developed Tide since September 2022 and already pioneered a permissionless campaign builder while taking care of Sybil attacks through our Audience system. We already got 26000+ mints and 16800+ unique users. We are looking forward to accelerating our growth with new features in the coming months.
Is this your first Web3 project?: No
If not, what else have you built? (Share links, Github repository, or any other useful information.):
We previously built Orbit (https://orbitdefi.finance/), a liquidity automation platform to optimize UniV3 LPing positions. Orbit was a finalist at the Unicode hackathon back in 2020 and got a grant from Uniswap.
The team behind Tide has a solid web3 experience, winning several awards and grants over the course of last year.
Grant Request
What is the size of the grant request? (250k OP max): 150k
How do you justify the size of the grant?:
The grant will all be used in incentives for participation in the quests as they are a great way to attract new and recurrent wallets that can become loyal Optimism users.
Up to now, the biggest problem was the distribution of incentives; above, we described how we would ensure to reward authentic and engaged users only.
Roadmap and Distribution Plan
Describe in discrete steps how you will successfully implement your grant plan:
Month 1: 14 Quests (1 awareness, 1 bridging, 12 protocol quests) | 30k OP
Month 2: 14 Quests (1 awareness, 1 bridging, 12 protocol quests) | 30k OP
Month 3: 14 Quests (1 awareness, 1 bridging, 12 protocol quests) | 30k OP
Month 4: 14 Quests (1 awareness, 1 bridging, 12 protocol quests) | 30k OP
Month 5: 14 Quests (1 awareness, 1 bridging, 12 protocol quests) | 30k OP
The number of quests is to be understood as a minimum commitment, we may add quests, projects, and experiments over time.
Awareness quests will not exceed 10k OP budget.
How will the OP tokens be distributed? Please include % allocated to different initiatives such as user rewards/marketing/liquidity mining. Please also include a justification as to why each of these initiatives align with the problem statement this proposal is solving. Distribution should not include the sale of any tokens by the grantee or the use of tokens for compensation, protocol expenses, etc. See the no sale rule here):
All the incentives will go directly to users interacting with the several protocols on Optimism collaborating with us and to KOLs spreading the message of the different campaigns across Twitter and other social media. You can always check above the quests structure and the OP percentage allocated for each one.
Over what period of time will the tokens be distributed for each initiative?:
The distribution will happen gradually, some of it during the quests program and some at the end of the period - see table above for details.
Please provide benchmark milestones for this project. These milestones should guide the Optimism community on the progress of your project throughout your work on the project. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:
The quests program above outlines the plan.
Please define critical milestones for this project. Critical milestones are meant to show good-faith efforts to accomplish the project. Non-completion of these milestones could lead to revocation of remaining grant rewards. Do not use distribution of the grant itself as a milestone:
The milestones can regard quest creation and user acquisition. See the quests program above for the execution.
Target metrics:
Given that Optimism has currently 600k active wallets in the last 30 days, according to Nansen, we aim to increase the network usage by 5-10% and stick to a monthly plan of quests launch.
*Launch 14 quests a month for the whole duration of the program (5 months)
*Reach 10k monthly active users using Tide on Optimism in the first month
*Reach 18k MAU within the second month of the program
*Reach 40k MAU using Tide by the fourth month of the program
We propose to set up monthly updates (calls or reports) where the Tide team will provide an overview of such deliverables.
If the OP tokens are for direct distribution to users, why will incentivized users and liquidity on Optimism remain after incentives dry up?:
Some elements of our programs are the best for retention:
- Time requirements on the web3 actions. Example: deposit in a pool for at least 3 weeks.
- Gamification and leaderboard. The soulbound leaderboard and the OP token related quests (Hold and delegate) can be a boost for retention
- Our Audience System will help filter out irrelevant wallets and sybil activity
- Demanding quest requirements, making them attractive to users that are genuinely interested in the various protocols
Please provide any additional information that will facilitate accountability (smart contracts addresses relevant to the proposal, relevant organizational wallet addresses, etc.):
Campaigns are on-chain.
All the relevant smart contract addresses can be found here: Smart contracts overview - Tide
At the end of the campaign, a 30-page report will highlight:
- Quest effectiveness and metrics
- Wallets behavioral data and holdings
- Net increase in TVL brought to Optimism from other Layer 2s
- CAC, retention, and social engagement metrics
Optimism Relationship
Does your project solve a problem for the Optimism ecosystem? If so how?
Tide can help Optimism projects acquire, engage and retain authentic, relevant users, allowing them to launch data-driven quests.
Tide analytics will help projects acquire precious data about wallets interacting with the different quests, allowing them to make data-driven decisions in performing future marketing activities and airdrops.
Moreover, as we care about authentic users only, our Audience system will help projects filter bots and Sybil activity trying to exploit the incentives. Combined with the attestations made through Tide, it will help others grow awareness and adoption of Sybil-protected identities.
Finally, Tide will allow an increase in awareness of protocols based on Optimism, incentivizing authentic users to interact with the marketing campaigns and with the different dApps.
Why will this solution be a source of growth for the Optimism ecosystem?:
The quest program by itself directly incentivizes the usage of Optimism. Some quests are directly targeted to users of competing L2/L1s to have them switch liquidity into Optimism.
-First, it will have a direct benefit for the dApps involved in the various quests as it will lead to more engagement and liquidity for such projects.
-Second, users will have the opportunity to join quests to increase their familiarity with the Optimism ecosystem, learn more about the projects involved, and ultimately steadily use optimism dApps.
-Third, it will raise awareness about Tide which will empower other Optimism dApps to launch successful marketing campaigns aimed at acquiring and retaining authentic users in the Optimism ecosystem.
-Fourth, it will help accelerate the registration and usage of attestations to build Sybil-protected applications.
Is your project Optimism Native?:
We are multichain
Confirmations
I understand that I will be required to provide additional KYC information to the Optimism Foundation to receive this grant: [Yes/No]: Yes
I understand that I will be expected to following the public grant reporting requirements outlined here: [Yes/No]: Yes