[TIP-002] Month-long THORSwap Trading Competition

THE PROPOSAL

This proposal requests using 1 Million $THOR from Community Incentives allocation for the purposes of a Trading Competition lasting one month.

At end of the month, top 100 ERC-20 wallet addresses via cross-chain trades will be eligible to claim their reward (using existing airdrop mechanism: https://app.thorswap.finance/airdrop)

Top 10: 500k $THOR, 50k tokens each (~$3.75k - $5k)

Next 40: 400k $THOR, 10k tokens each (~$750 - $1k)

Next 50: 100k $THOR, 2k tokens each (~$150 - $200)

Additional Rules:

1. Winners must have an ERC-20 address associated with trades to qualify. This can be done via swapping using a THORName or through Ethereum mainnet (AKA have ERC-20 address associated).

2. Only traders who have generated exchange affiliate fees qualify (vTHOR discount less than 100% is acceptable)

3. Washtrading or on-chain activity attempting to exploit the competition shall be seriously investigated during the address query and disqualified.

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Motivation:

This proposal is based on community feedback regarding more marketing and incentives to boost swap volume. While THORSwap’s Referral Programme is launching in the near future, a trading competition would be an effective way to drive volume, entice whales/new users to try THORSwap for cross-chain swaps.

Proposal Impact

History has shown the effectiveness of Trading Competitions to boost volume and engagement with protocols. I.e. Blur's claim to fame was their focus on airdrops to incentivise trading allowing it to overtake Open Sea volume in 5 months.

More swap volume benefits $vTHOR holders.This coupled with helping to reach burn target means immediate tangible benefits for the $THOR community as well as marketing results and onboarding new users.

Additionally, a simple address query coupled with using the existing airdrop UI + UX and mechanism means minimal dev work is necessary to deliver big results. The manual reward claim process ensures additional engagement of THORSwap. Winners can also learn about vTHOR and claim+stake in 1 transaction - inviting new members to join the $THOR community while lowering the potential of immediate sell-off.

Even if some of the winners were arbitrageurs, they would still need to contribute THORswap exchange fees plus interact with the Dapp to claim rewards - ensuring a high level of engagement and benefit for $vTHOR holders.

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Additional Notes

Tracking the trading competition

A query can be compiled in real-time so that the ranked list can be checked at any time - leading to increased competition.

Complimenting TIP-001 monthly volume based burn (or an extension of it):

Staking pool is emitting ~800K THOR per month, if the TIP-001 volume target is hit, roughly 2.5M THOR gets burned. Even with the additional 1 million $THOR for the trading competition, the burn (~2.5M) would still outweigh emissions + trading competition rewards (~1.8M total).

Complimenting Affiliate/Referral Programme

When run alongside future affiliate programme, a trading competition would be a great incentive for influencers/marketers to share with followers alongside their personal referral link.

This proposal is intended to be an one-off campaign to validate effectiveness of trading competitions. It is not intended to be repeated monthly. The community may bring forth future proposals that adjust the parameters of trading competitions design to further refine and improve based on results delivered by TIP-002.