Direct Gold Incentive for $BAG

Background

In Blast Phase 1, we had $BAG Tiers apply to Gold earned from gameplay in addition to cashback, referral bonus, and rakeback reward. Then, this was removed Blast asked projects to remove incentives for native assets for Phase 2.

However, on August 7th, Blast said “now, projects can allocate gold towards assets (pending review from the blast foundation).” Then, on August 12th, we passed the Tiers Multiplier Update to add these back. The proposal passed on August 16th and we asked the Blast Foundation to review.

As a part of that conversation over the last few days, their recommendation is to testing using a “direct incentive” instead. Their feedback was that directly incentivizing the holding of $BAG would achieve the same objective and be more efficient.

Proposal

For September distributions onwards, allocate a % of our total Blast Gold allocation to $BAG holders based on the following:

-- Take 10% of current month Gold allocation (e.g. 228,000 → 22,800) -- Distribute 3.33% at a time in the last 3 full weeks of the month on Fridays (e.g. 9/13, 9/20, 9/27) -- To qualify for a given weekly distribution, one must have played T7 days (e.g. 9/6 - 9/12 for 9/13 distro) -- Snapshot each player's Blast $BAG holdings for 9/XX distribution on 9/XX.

This is simpler than it sounds... For example, if those people that played 9/6 - 9/12 had 100M $BAG on Blast in total and we were distributing 7,600 Gold (⅓ of 22,800) on 9/13, an individual qualifying player with 1M $BAG would get 76 Gold that week. They have 1% of the qualifying $BAG on Blast, so they get 1% of that week's Gold allocated to this initiative.

Additionally, on August 31st distribute our remaining August Gold balance (if any) to $BAG holders based on the exact same mechanism outlined above for future months. For the avoidance of doubt, to qualify, one must have played 8/24 - 8/30.

Rationale

As outlined in the Background section, Blast made the case for a direct incentive. It’s not something we had thought would be an option, but it’s certainly interesting. It’s also reasonable for us, as a DAO, to defer to the Blast Foundation’s judgment here and conduct an experiment to see how this performs. If it’s not successful, we can go back to Blast to make the case for a different approach.

We’re starting small and still prioritizing gameplay with ~90%. There is a trade-off between using Gold to incentivize new player onboarding, total player volume, and the holding of $BAG, but 10% of our current Gold allocation would be ~22.8K Gold which is comparable to the 25K Gold that projects in the new Culture Category received (e.g. Goldmilio, Wolves, New Blast City).