I don’t think people will massively abuse the program because there’s enough limitations in place. Also, any abuse detected isn’t going to get rewards so that’s quite relevant.
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Well depends on what you call abuse. For example if someone just makes a new address and refers it to an address he already has I would call that abuse because the program is build to get new users aboard and more volume, not the same volume on another address.
Also its no fun to have a highly gameable program because there will be too much discussion around addresses and people for abuse
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I tend to agree, that example is some sort of abuse but if it adds legit volume it’s probably a positive abuse (we can ignore or not assuming we find out, if each trade is legit and there’s not a single transaction between this accounts we may never find out).
I’m fine with this, just like it was said before…
If people just do meaningless trades between accounts they own, routed on CowSwap (e.g setting a trade in one account and doing a counter trade in another account, it will create a CoW but a meaningless CoW) that’s a negative abuse and should be “banned” from the rewards. That kind of negative abuse is easily detected but this is just the most obvious example, some aren’t that obvious and not that easy to spot but we can all try to find them.
Btw, I don’t think the program is highly gameable. It is gameable to the extent that we can’t avoid all sorts of abuse, no matter what we do. There’s not a perfect solution for this kind of problem but the manual Mitigation system in place should be good enough to avoid massive abuse.
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Yeah we will have to see how it goes, thats why I said that I am curious 
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Just an update here, I’m having some discussions with Solidus Labs, they specialize in analyzing exchange trading data for spoofing, front running, wash trading and other negative trading behaviours including potential on chain account analysis.
I hope we can get them to propose their services for this proposal.
If this materializes, it’ll reduce the overhead of evaluating submissions of “freelancers data analytics”
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Hey there,
It’s been quite a while since the last discussion on the Affiliate program incentives proposal.
I have been evaluating the specifics of few reward models for participants in the program, comparing a volume-based approach to a per-user based approach.
There are some learnings and I hope to publish them in writing.
Those past two months were quite harsh on the crypto market as a whole. I came to realize there probably will be much better times for launching such a program with more optimism and momentum in the market and crypto participants.
For this reason and the lack of discussion recently, it feels we should hold on with pushing this proposal to the voting and executions phase.
Would love to still get any feedback, positive or negative, to spark the discussion and push the affiliate program forward when the time feels ripe.
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I think this is wise.
Perhaps revisit this discussion in 6 months or so, to see if market sentiment has improved.
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I am writing a grant to showcase CoWswap and protocol during an upcoming conference that I am speaking at, Web3summit in Miami. https://www.web3summits.io/team would that work with the incentive piece? working to teach defi and dex in a workshop as well as talk in diversity in web3.
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Hey @Player1Taco.eth
Happy to consider your grant if you outline in more detail what are you planning to do and what in your opinion the impact will be.
It is not related to the incentive program but to the grant program so the appropriate channel is CoW Grants Program - CoW Protocol
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Hey there! I put it in grants
Will also put my opinion in there of outcome impact.
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It’s a pity the program was discontinued. It should be a priority for the protocol to turn this program back on.
My suggestions:
Turn on a revenue switch.
Share a portion of revenue with affiliates.
There’s also the option to use a whitelist of affiliates similar to what Lido has done with an extremely successful referral program of their own.
I’m part of the ShareMint.xyz team and would be happy to move things forward on this front.
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I think it’ll require a bit more than a tiny comment to outline your concrete suggestion.
Turning on a revenue switch means the DAO might be able to pay to affiliates but also means prices for users will be slightly worse.
So it’d require a clear argument for why an affiliate program is more effective than just offering better prices.
One other argument that was raised in the past against starting a paid affiliate program - is the current market sentiment and potential virality of such program (arguably better to wait for the market to start recovering and picking up more retail interest and new users)
If you can share concrete numbers about Lido’s program success, that’d be useful
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The effectiveness of the Lido program:
Some highlights but check the link for full context:
- TVL growth: +50% total staked amount growth.
(633K ETH staked on 19.07, 314K ETH staked via referral program) - boost new stakers/addresses growth: +100% unique addresses growth.
(8.1K unique addresses/stakers on 19.07, 8.4K unique referees) - Partners integrations: integrated with Ledger proving a great potential in having more integrations with wallets and protocols.
A program running in the bear market doesn’t detract from the program running in the bull market. It can run in both markets.
At a certain point subsidies need to stop for all businesses.
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I’m curious what became of this program. I am seeing other incentives being rolled out but this seems to have been somewhat quietly swept under the rug. I’ve referred over $2MM (possibly up to $4MM or over 1% of all referrals as of April '22, the Dune dataset has been deleted or made private so can’t check for sure) in volume (under 0xBc5fBa1FEf0ba69E401Cdf97197d75a5f9d9d4C6) and was kind of hoping that would count for… something?
At the end of the day I’m not bitter, cowswap was absolutely the right solution for those trades and I am happy to have recommended it, but in the era of retroactive funding I would have expected this to have received some attention.
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Unfortunately it never gathered enough support.
Def appreciate your involvement! Hope you were swapping also in 2021 and have received the COW airdrop.
Now the COW DAO is profitable and generate fee revenue, I think it might be a good time to re discuss an affiliate program. This will still require some sort of protocol revenue split, something that was never considered I believe.
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Unfortunately I didn’t seem to qualify for the CoW airdrop, which was very confusing. I only got the COW from the GNO lock.
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Mooo 
everyone!
I have been reading this proposal, since I have been studying CoW DAO products, an Affiliate Program is something very interesting for growth, however as mentioned controlling bad actors can be a big issue.
That said; It would be simple to solve the “bad actors” issue by creating a closed Affiliate Program, a combination with an ambassador program, onboarding “super users” that truly believe in CoW DAO products, already know the products and regularly use CoW Swap for trades.
Users need to meet specific criteria to be accepted within the program, once accepted any new user onboarding via their referral link, that meets the new user criteria, would earn a specific percent from CoW DAO fee only for the first month, so they would need to continuously recruit new users.
Based on the Affiliate Score idea; This could be an extra compensation leaderboard that takes into consideration multiple factors like, total users onboarded, average total trades in first 3 months of new user, etc. I’d recommend paying rewards every 3 months, since the interest is long term.
As a closed program it protects against bad actors, since rules would be put into place to catch anyone abusing the program, also with affiliate score criteria, points can be deducted for new users that do not trade after their first month.
Please feel free to expand on the idea or if interested i could work on expanding more details for a proposal.
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Interesting
would love to see suggestion for acceptance criteria for the the closed affiliate program.
How do they prevent anyone from signing up and starting to exploit the incentives?
Who will be responsible to review applications and decide who is eligible to get accepted to the closed program?
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Sure, I’d love to share more on the idea;
Applications would need to be manually reviewed, to avoid extra workload the program can be opened or closed.
Honestly, after any initial testing, The best option would be to create an Affiliate DAO or Team formed by team and community members, for example;
Team: Community Manager, Growth
Community: 3 Active community members
Responsibilities:
- Review applications
- Monitor affiliates
- Approve payments
- Implement / Improve codes/rules/practices
(automatic payments could be abused)
Acceptance Criteria:
- Discord
- Twitter (x)
- Telegram
- Youtube (Optional)
- Tiktok (Optional)
- Wallet Address
Really, the criteria are to filter out any bad actors by verifying identity without asking for KYC. The program could accept anyone (individual or company) without the need for minimum followers, since their rewards are based on how many users they can attract.
It’s important to note, once affiliate program is opened, it would be flooded with applications, so ideally adding a question about knowledge, views and vision to assure affiliates align with CoW DAO vision and maybe requesting minimum followers for each social media platform, but take into consideration that any user/Dapp/blogger/etc could use the link.
Even the compensation could be tiered, based on A. users onboarded B. volume of transactions, their compensation from fees could range from 2% - 10%
Anyone within the Affiliate Program would need to sign/agree:
- Ethical Promotion Practices
- Code of Conduct
Would love to see others opinion, so the idea could be expanded and improved.
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