Quest Love: A First Look at Blockchain Loyalty Programs

Abstract

Blockchain ecosystems -- such as those built around chains, layers, and services -- try to engage users for a variety of reasons: user education, growing and protecting their market share, climbing metric-measuring leaderboards with competing systems, demonstrating usage to investors, and identifying worthy recipients for newly created tokens (airdrops). A popular approach is offering user quests: small tasks that can be completed by a user, exposing them to a common task they might want to do in the future, and rewarding them for completion. In this paper, we analyze a proprietary dataset from one deployed quest system that offered 43 unique quests over 10 months with 80M completions. We offer insights about the factors that correlate with task completion: amount of reward, monetary value of reward, difficulty, and cost. We also discuss the role of farming and bots, and the factors that complicate distinguishing real users from automated scripts.