Minswap Cardano DeFi Onboarding: Marketing Program

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Jastej Singh - Minswap Volunteer

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

Long Nguyen - long@minswap.org - Tech Lead Minswap Labs

[GENERAL] Requested funds in ada

100000

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

3

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

To deploy a marketing campaign to market Cardano and its DeFi ecosystem (through Minswap) in a manner that incentivises user onboarding causing for adoption of the chain.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Whilst the marketing campaign design and ideation process will be done internally, the various milestones to completion and steps being taken will be fully transparent.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Cardano is considerably behind other blockchains in terms of its usage assessed using standard industry metrics such as Daily Active Addresses, DEX Volume and Holder count of DeFi tokens. It is difficult to determine exactly why that is, but some reasons might be that ICO Participants don't use the chain or, there is a perception that Cardano’s offerings and opportunities aren't good enough. You can read a full Report for the Background here.

Cardano has always made design and go-to-market decisions which prioritize first principles of blockchains, organic growth and decentralization versus quick growth and catering to the industry’s hottest metrics. In addition, some factors leading to this problem, such as Japanese tax/crypto laws (which is why most ADA ICO participants are hesitant to interact with DeFi), are unaddressable by the community. However, it is clear Cardano can and should do better to increase the usage of the blockchain. Ultimately, Cardano's security model depends upon transaction fees in the long term. 

This is why we propose a Catalyst-funded “Cardano DeFi Onboarding by Minswap” campaign. The aim is to create a framework for a program that is designed to onboard more users to Cardano and its DeFi. We are starting with a focus on Minswap first, but if successful, the program could in the future be applied to the whole Cardano DeFi ecosystem, with bigger and more attractive incentives. 

Such a program will be designed in a way that targets both: 

1. Current ADA holders who are not interacting with Cardano’s DeFi
2. Wider crypto users familiar with other chains but who do not interact with Cardano’s DeFi

For such a program to be successful, it should be accompanied by its strong Education and an Incentive campaign. However, this proposal focuses exclusively on the program's Marketing campaign. 

Using an appropriate platform backed with a good rewards pool and motivating content is crucial. To be successful, a marketing campaign that aims to incentivise adoption and increase onboarding of a Layer 1 blockchain (in this case, Cardano) should ideally leverage a series of marketing platforms. However, given the restrictions of the funds we can acquire in one proposal, we propose to use only one marketing platform - 𝕏 (previously Twitter).

Why 𝕏 (previously Twitter) for this Marketing Campaign:

𝕏 is a crucial platform in the social landscape of Web3/cryptocurrencies to inform its users of activities in Web3. Its user base is composed primarily of those already in crypto and engaging with its various offerings.

Often on 𝕏, silos and “echo chambers” exist as a result of the way the algorithm works. This causes those who interact with “Blockchain A” to miss news on activities from “Blockchain B” and so on. 

Thus, there will be two avenues through which 𝕏 will be leveraged to fulfil this campaign:

1: Partnering with creators and other influential people on 𝕏 inside Cardano

The first hurdle to overcome via this campaign is to bring onboard holders of ADA who do not interact with Cardano’s DeFi layer into Cardano’s DeFi. Solving this would help increase the statistics presented in the report here.

To keep this focused and maximize our impact, we wish to tailor this to only work with “influential people on 𝕏 inside Cardano” from the Japanese Cardano Community. The motivation for this is due to the research-backed deductions that give reason to believe that many of Cardano’s ICO sale participants who still hold ADA (most of whom are in Japan) do not interact with Cardano’s DeFi layer. The research for this can be viewed here. Thus, by focusing this partnership only on working with members from Japan’s Cardano Community, we will ensure we are targeting the largest demographic of holders of ADA who do not interact with Cardano’s DeFi thus solving the first hurdle.

We are currently in the process of building relationships with multiple Japan Cardano Community members and already have good relations with members from the Socious DAO. Additionally, we also have the existent relationships of Minswap Labs with the Japan Cardano Community to rely upon that has been built, through their presence and networking at multiple Cardano Events in Japan [1,2,3].

An announcement of which members are chosen to work with us will be made available to the public via the Minswap Labs’ Twitter account.

2: Partnering with creators and other influential people on 𝕏 outside of Cardano

Communicating via 𝕏 becomes more effective when one gains social proof. To do this to the scale necessary to attract members from outside of Cardano into Cardano and interact with its DeFi layer, partnerships with creators and key opinion leaders (KOLs) of other chains are necessary.

This will be done by partnering with well-established creator networks such as Creators Nexus o,r other such networks as Bricktopians, which are great for accessing many creators from different blockchains. Partnering with such networks will prove useful to ensure our campaign is visible to members of other chains.

About Creators Nexus:

Creators Nexus is “a collective of 500+ established Web3 creators who are engaged to scale your brand’s presence and maximise organic growth”.

Having already led campaigns for over 7 projects including the likes of Seedify, BloodLoop and Matr1x Fire with over 1 Million impressions across 750 posts, Creators Nexus has proven they are a creator network that can deliver meaningful views for projects they partner with.

About Bricktopians:

Bricktopians is a content creator incubator, helping Web3 brands find long-term brand ambassadors that live and breathe their project, protocol or product. Led by the Web3 content creator Alex is Building, Bricktopian creators have already worked with some of the biggest brands in Web3, including Polygon, Pixelmon & Seedify.

Bricktopians has a ‘quality over quantity’ focus, ensuring that brands get the best value and highest quality content out the creators in their network that they work with.

Example creators include Nathn, Dipo, Conan, Flow, Lady, Leon & CaptainScarlet.

From the above two creator networks, we must disclose that we do have a stronger interest in partnering with Bricktopians as this would give us the ability to work with creators from other chains over a long-term period which would be beneficial for this project, Cardano's Defi and subsequently, Cadano itself. However, both options have been provided for completeness's sake and, a thorough assessment will be made closer to the time of which creator network would be best to partner with should this proposal get approved. A public announcement of which network we are partnering with will be made.

The rewards pool

Rewards and financial incentives play a big part in motivating users in crypto to engage with a campaign. To facilitate this, we will be using Zealy as the platform to execute this. Zealy is one of the top community-building platforms in all of crypto. It uses gamification as a tool to engage and grow the community. A Project can set “Quests” ranging from anything to pressing “Like” on a certain tweet, to answering basic questions. For an overview of how Web3 projects can leverage Zealy to keep a community engaged, please see this article.

For the marketing segment of Minswap’s “Cardano DeFi Onboarding by Minswap” campaign, Zealy will be leveraged to boost the engagement of posts published on 𝕏 in direct relation to the campaign. This means pushing the posts on 𝕏 that stem from the partners we work with as well as the posts from the Minswap Labs’ 𝕏 account. Not all posts will be boosted via this program, only the good-quality ones. 

Apart from being used to boost existent tweets about Cardano and its DeFi, this platform will also be used to incentivise content creation, activities to engage with Cardano’s DeFi and, even provide a platform whereby projects within Cardano seeking exposure may come to us to list promotional activities upon to market their dapps/services.

Examples would include cases such as FluidTokens, Liquid Labs, Levvy Finance or any other Lending & Borrowing protocol wishing to use the Zealy created here to introduce newcomers to their platforms, they could do that too.

The process for this will be finalised should the proposal pass and be made public.

The reward for users who complete these tasks will be in the form of points that will accumulate. These points will ‘rank’ users in a leaderboard which they will compete in for a better position to stand a chance to receive more rewards from the rewards pool.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

The positive impact on the wider Cardano community will be the onboarding of new users to the Cardano ecosystem and its DeFi ecosystem.

The positive impact will be showcased in a few ways.

1. Increase in awareness about the Cardano DeFi ecosystem: by leveraging 𝕏 (previously Twitter) to create content about Minswap, its features and the ongoing campaigns, we aim to increase awareness for Cardano DeFi within the Cardano community and the wider crypto community as well. 
2. Increase in the number of participants in Cardano’s DeFi: tools such as Zealy are specifically designed to enable projects to control what types of actions they want users to do. The increased awareness coupled with targeted Quests on Zealy can be leveraged to increase some adoption metrics where Cardano currently lags.
3. Evaluation and Open source contribution: The campaign's results will be reported via the Minswap social media accounts and its related forums. Other projects may learn from this Marketing campaign and be inspired to craft a similar one.

Such an endeavour has further benefits such as increasing the number of fundraising participants pool for new projects on Cardano. Many projects starting in Cardano are reliant upon the community for funding. By increasing the number of members in the community, the likelihood of new projects coming to Cardano getting funded goes up. This increases the overall future viability of Cardano.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

The mechanism outlined above, in partnership with an Education and Incentive campaign, is a standard procedure that has been observed to work well amongst other such campaigns on chains such as Solana and Ethereum (and its Layer 2’s such as Taiko, Kroma, Linea, Scroll etc).

For example, Wormhole (an interoperability protocol for cross-chain bridging) has over 280,000 members as a part of their Zealy community which had an impact on them amassing over 90,000 holders for their token (many such examples can be drawn). Even Orcfax, an oracle service provider on Cardano, has ~2,500 members as a part of their Zealy community despite having only ~2,400 members in their discord - the difference indicates that more people are interested in joining a Zealy community for the potential monetary upside they stand to gain from it. In the past, Zealy campaigns have been leveraged on Cardano by other projects such as MELD. You can see the ongoing MELD campaign on Zealy here.

From the above, we can deduce that Zealy communities provide a platform that attracts users interested in standing a chance to gain monetary value. Thus, with an appropriate design of the Zealy campaign’s quests which would ensure users interact with Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem and support the 𝕏 marketing campaign, engagement with Cardano and its DeFi will increase - achieving the goal of this proposal.

Our team is composed of Minswap volunteers, among whom are programmers, blockchain experts, marketing experts, and well-known Educators within Cardano. All of them bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to this project. 

The Project Lead “Smurfy” has spent over 3 years in Cardano’s ecosystem working at different levels in the Cardano Community and some of its projects. From having helped an NFT project amass over 500,000 ADA as their community manager & marketing strategist to recently, helping Dropspot acquire ~2000 users within 4 months of their marketplace relaunch as their SMM & Marketing Lead, he has demonstrated the skills necessary to acquire users to a platform. Furthermore, Smurfy is a member of the various creator networks mentioned above (and more) and is thus a great candidate to execute such a proposal as he is already in contact with their networks.

The Proposal also has the backing of the Minswap Labs team, which is composed of several highly experienced Plutus engineers who have been working on developing Plutus-based Smart Contracts for more than 3 years. As such, Minswap Labs has established itself as a highly experienced and capable company specialising in developing DeFi tools in the Cardano Ecosystem.

The Minswap DEX is the Cardano dApp with the most Daily Active Users and transactions. Data available at: https://dappsoncardano.com/

It is also currently the Cardano DeFi dApp with the highest Total Value Locked and handling the majority of Trading Volume on Cardano DEXs. Data available here: https://defillama.com/chain/Cardano?currency=USD

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

 𝕏 (previously Twitter) Marketing Campaign with partners inside Cardano

Milestone outputs - Promotion on 𝕏 via partnerships with Japan Cardano Community members about Cardano’s DeFi offerings and the incentives program offered by Minswap.

Acceptance criteria

We will strive to partner with prominent Japan Cardano Community members who have a large audience, signs of good engagement and an interest in pushing Cardano forward. 

Evidence of milestone completion

Posts on 𝕏 from members of the Japanese Cardano Community promoting Cardano’s DeFi and Minswap’s incentives program - motivating and pushing the incentives for why their members should get involved.

 Zealy Campaign: Zealy enables projects to utilize Quests to drive users towards actions that will benefit the platform and engage the community. For example, the Zealy campaign will have Onboarding Quests (related to the content from Milestone 1), Kitty Quests (more complex quests that require more time and effort, but provide greater value to the project such as writing threads or long-form content) and Daily Quests (designed to keep the community engaged).

Milestone outputs

Availability of a series of Quests and a Quest program to incentivize users to try the Minswap platform and become familiar with Cardano DeFi. 

Acceptance criteria

Quests on Zealy are related to Minswap V2 and incentivize learning about how to interact with Cardano DeFi

Evidence of milestone completion

A "Cardano onboarding by Minswap" campaign with Quests on Zealy

𝕏 (previously Twitter) Marketing Campaign in partnerships with creator networks(s)

Milestone outputs - Promotion on 𝕏 via partnerships with creator networks from outside Cardano.

Acceptance criteria

The creator network must be willing to reflect the positives of Cardano in a good light. Additionally, the creator network must be large enough to offset the cost of investment to cover a handful of ‘poor content’ with a greater number of ‘great content’. Whist Creator’s Nexus provides exactly this, should the cost requested be too high, other creator networks such as Bricktopians, which offer a smaller but more ‘quality controlled’ creator group, will be turned to.

Evidence of milestone completion

Mass campaigns from users not native to Cardano or its DeFi ecosystem will occur on 𝕏.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Documentation, outreach, and coordination led by Minswap DAO

Jastej ("Smurfy") - Project Lead - Smurfy is an expert marketer in Cardano/crypto. Previously a Social Media Manager & Marketing Lead at Dropspot (Cardano NFT Platform) and a Content Creator in Web3 affiliated with multiple creator networks. His content library can be viewed here.

Paolo Pezzarossa (“RedPa”) - Project Member - Paolo is a Full Stack developer at Kiwui, familiar with eutxo and chain indexers. Portfolio can be found here.

Peter Bui (“Astroboysoup”) - Project Member - Pete is one of the most renowned educators in Cardano. His YouTube channel has 20k subscribers and he posts almost daily updates about anything happening in the Cardano ecosystem. He has also worked extensively on a library of educational material such as the following. 

Sean Davies - (“seanworkingdead”) - Project Member - Sean is the founder of the working courses platform, a cross-chain support learning platform leveraging Cardano under the hood with a wide array of courses ranging from how to Create a cardano node from zero in less than 90 minutes to DeFi basics and crypto knowledge courses. Previous experience as a developer at the prominent Cardano NFT project Ape Society.

Other Minswap DAO members are involved with track record and experience on Cardano who have contributed in the past to the Minswap DAO such as CWSchub or Chicken.

Technical Support from Minswap Labs 

Adrian (“PurritoGeneral”) - Product lead, previous experience at Optim Labs. 

Long Nguyen (“longng”) - Tech lead, previous experience at AWS Cloud, Anduin Transactions (specialists in smart deal tech solutions for the alternative investment market) and Jenkins (extensible automation engine)

Website: https://minswap.org/

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Bidget and costs has been worked out at the rate of $0.50 per 1 ADA.

𝕏 (prev Twitter) partnerships inside Cardano: 36,000 ADA

Funds to offer ambassadorial positions: 

1. 4000 ADA x 5 persons = 20,000 ADA
2. 2000 ADA x 10 persons= 20,000 ADA

Funds to offer Cardano Japan YouTube Coverage

1. 1 x Japan YouTube channel: 16,000 ADA  
2. 2 x Japan YouTube channel: 8000 ADA x 2

*subject to change dependent on quotations received from entities

𝕏 (prev Twitter) partnerships outside Cardano: 40,000 ADA 

Partnership cost: 40,000 ADA

This will be done by partnering with an established creator network such as Creators Nexus or Bricktopians. 

Cost structure for Creators Nexus

Simple tweet campaign:

A simple tweet which includes a CTA with a fast turnaround time which can span 3-5 days

Cost: $20,000 - $40,000

Mass User Generated Content (UGC) campaign:

A fully customisable campaign on 𝕏 spanning 7-10 days whereby projects are able to customise the request of what type of content it is they wish to see posted via the creators.

Cost: $50,000 - $80,000

Full rates and service offerings can be found on their official form available here.

Cost structure for Bricktopians

Blitz Campaigns:

Targeted event campaigns that dominate the conversation for a defined period. A large number of posts from multiple content creators all at once.

Entry level Package: 25 posts = $8,500 [$340 per post]

Ongoing Ambassadors:

This is where we drive a consistent stream of content around the protocol throughout the period. Content creators spread their content over the month, keeping Cardano in the conversation.

Entry level Package: 25 posts per month = $7,500 [$300 per post] per month

*Minimum 3 month commitment, costs per post reduce with scale.

Rates have been acquired directly from Alex is Building

Whilst we have a strong bias towards partnering with Bricktopians for such a campaign, both potential options have been provided for transparency. A decision will be made closer to the time depending on both networks' capabilities at the time.

Labour costs: 12,000

Project manager: 9000 ADA - 3000 ADA monthly. 25 hours work week

Zealy manager: 3000 ADA - 1000 ADA monthly.

Rewards pool: 22,000 ADA

Zealy activities rewards pool: 22,000 ADA

Distribution mechanics will be made public closer to the time of reward distribution should the proposal pass.

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Investing in this proposal offers exceptional value for the Cardano ecosystem. By crafting an this marketing campaign focused on Cardano’s DeFi, we aim to not only increase user adoption for Cardano (and all the positive things it brings) but also, empower positive perspectives towards Cardano's innovative DeFi capabilities. These new users can become pivotal in enhancing the ecosystem's dynamism and reputation, leading to increased overall engagement and investment.

In the short term, the Proposal aims to value to Cardano by attracting regular crypto users from other chains and Cardano users who do not interact with DeFi. This is especially true when assessing the value in the cost of working with creators from other chains and going through an entity such as Creators Nexus. Whilst the cost seems high upfront, the exposure it would create for Cardano not only for its creators but, as a ripple-effect to those creators’ audiences (which can amass to over 100,000 followers) is large and valuable. Additionally, partnering with them allows us to partner with most of the creators in all of Web3 in a time-efficient and impact-maximising manner. This should help improve metrics where Cardano is lagging, such as DEX Volumes or Active Addresses and enhance the liquidity and overall health of the Cardano ecosystem, making it more attractive to new users and investors.

In the long term, the cost of funding this Marketing Program as part of a Cardano DeFi Onboarding by Minswap campaign would be a strategic investment in Increased Awareness of Cardano DeFi that could have a significant impact on Cardano. By allocating resources to this initiative, the Cardano ecosystem will have a competent team dealing and coordinating content with influenctial individuals on Twitter and leveraging Zealy to attract more users. We will be able to assess the results and discuss as a community if it's worth exploring more types of similar marketing programs in the future and on a bigger scale.

The wider Cardano DeFi Onboarding by Minswap campaign aims to foster a sense of community among users that will be drawn to Cardano by encouraging participation in DeFi Education and Learn to earn activities, the Incentives for activity in various forms of Cardano DeFi platforms such as Minswap, and a Marketing campaign to highlight the advantages of Cardano and the ongoing activities in the ecosystem.