Quest Love: A First Look at Blockchain Loyalty Programs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a blockchain loyalty quest system with 80 million completions, providing insights into factors influencing user engagement, the impact of rewards, and challenges posed by farming and bots.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed analysis of a real-world blockchain quest system, highlighting key factors affecting task completion and user behavior.

Findings

Reward amount and value increase completion rates

Difficulty and cost influence user engagement

Farming and bots complicate user authenticity detection

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.