Discontinue the ACX Referral Program

Author(s): Risk Labs Status: Proposed Related Discussions: https://forum.across.to/t/discontinue-the-acx-referral-program/1886/3?u=britt

Summary:

The ACX Referral program was a useful tool in building up a loyal user base in the early days of Across. At this point, we believe the program has run its course and is no longer necessary to encourage bridge use. We propose ending the program and returning the remaining ACX dedicated to it to the Across DAO Treasury.

Motivation:

The referral reward program started out as a way to reward our loyal bridge users and turn that community into a sales force for the protocol. The more users and volume that accrued to your referral link, the more ACX rewards you earned as a result. This program has been live since July of 2022 (before the token had even launched) and is well beyond the expected lifespan of a user activation campaign. It was considered to be quite successful early on, and we now have accumulated over 427,000 unique users to Across. The program was originally allocated 25M ACX, and two years later it still has ~4M unearned tokens remaining. Reference this Dune dashboard 3 for exact numbers on the remaining ACX. The cost to maintain this system outweighs the benefits of keeping it around, which is a good indicator that we should end the program. We have demonstrated to the bridging community that Across is an excellent choice, as shown by our consistent presence in the top 5 bridges on Defi Llama 1. At this point in the protocol’s journey, it makes more sense for us to dedicate our resources to creating the best product in the competitive landscape rather than on supporting an incentives program such as this one. Some of the upcoming initiatives of the engineering team include:

adding support for native and bridged USDC utilizing CCTP for rebalancing for capital efficiency optimization Improving on the Risk Labs relayer as a backstop to all 3rd party relayers Improving our RPC resiliency to prevent bridge down time Automating the new-chain deployment flow to allow for faster and smoother integrations to new chains. Deploying to audited new chains with audited adapters like zkEVM and Scroll.

Specification & Implementation:

If the community is receptive to this proposal, we’ll select a cutoff date for the program to end and use that in this vote as it goes to Snapshot. At that point, if that vote passes, the referral rewards will be disabled and referral reawrds will no longer be earned by new transactions. All existing referral rewards will remain available to claim until/unless a future proposal is made to claw back any unclaimed rewards. We don’t have any plans for such a proposal at this time. After the program has been disabled, we’ll propose a transaction to send the remaining unearned ACX from the program back to the Across DAO Treasury address. At the time of this draft, it’s unclear if that will be initiated in an oSnap txn or if it will be handled manually by the Treasury.

Voting:

A “YES” vote would result in the decision to end the Referral Program, followed by having any unearned ACX returned to the Across DAO Treasury.

A “NO” vote would result in no changes to the Referral Program as it exists today. Should this happen, the program will not continue beyond the remaining allocated amount without an additional proposal.