Hi. @KuyenLabs Thank you for your response.
While you’ve clarified your responsibilities within the program, you are experts in affiliate programs and user acquisition, so I think you have an opinion on the design of the affiliate program and whether attracting existing users is a bug or not. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this matter, as the community might decide to address this bug with a separate proposal.
Regarding the VIP program, the requirements for VIP affiliates should definitely be higher, and they should be checked for self-referral and other potential manipulation methods.
This particular affiliate invited three accounts: one already existing and belonging to a well-known market maker (whose logo is on the Dydx Ecosystem image), the second account used the Binance Deposit of this market maker, and the third has some indirect evidence pointing to its association with this company. To me, this seems like an obvious way to get a 10k fee discount per account per month for this company.
If your company doesn’t have the necessary expertise to identify such manipulations, I’m ready to provide it.
Of course, a feature of DEXs is that anyone can create an account, with no KYC and so on. But I believe the ability to ban affiliates or exclude accounts from their commissions for such manipulations should be implemented, at least for VIP affiliates, and your “follow-up” should include this. The costs of such expertise will definitely be covered by the money saved by the protocol and the additional savings will be directed to the MegaVault and stakers
I’m generally in favor of fully decentralizing the affiliate and rewards programs without additional intermediaries. However, if the community has decided to have such companies oversee these programs, we should leverage the capabilities of a more centralized system to address certain shortcomings of decentralized systems.
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I would like to make an important clarification: it seems this affiliate does not receive a commission for the existing account, only for the two “new” ones, which makes the situation somewhat better. Therefore, there may not be a bug in the program itself. I’ll check with other accounts since this situation isn’t isolated.
However, in that case, the @KuyenLabs dashboard incorrectly displays Referred Volume and Referred Fees since the volume and fees of the recurrent account are displayed on the dashboard, which is misleading.
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Hi @RealVovochka,
Thanks for sharing your detailed insights. We’re continuously reviewing the status of affiliates together with the dYdX team to ensure the program operates as intended. If we come across anything that doesn’t align with the program’s rules, we’ll take the appropriate steps to address it.
We’re also working to ensure the data displayed in the dashboard is accurate and transparent, allowing the community to better understand the program’s performance.
Please let us know if you have any additional feedback or suggestions.
No one from the dydx team has shown up in this thread. It’s an obvious bug that the volume of user dydx15m3lvgfwe4xad7wqyskvn6qz5w5ahue60hhemn is displayed as referred. The affiliate doesn’t receive a commission for this user (which is correct in this case), but the volume referred by affiliates shows an entirely inaccurate figure, which is then posted on social media. This isn’t the only account like this.
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Hi @RealVovochka,
Thanks for your feedback on this. To clarify, the affiliate program itself has been designed by the dYdX team and allows all addresses to be referred, regardless of their historical trading activity. We believe this is a good design choice as to reactivate returning users.
Additionally, since referral links are public and permissionless, affiliates cannot control who uses them, and it wouldn’t align with the program’s design to restrict affiliates based on who they refer.
Regarding the case you mentioned, accounts with a rolling 30-day volume above $50M, such as market makers, do not generate any affiliate fees.
Lastly, the frontends we developed read affiliate and user data available from dYdX’s indexer. Unfortunately we do not have a way to filter out just the volume that originated affiliate fees.
As always, we appreciate your input and will make sure to pass this along to the dYdX team. If there’s anything else you’d like to discuss or suggest, feel free to share.
What do you mean you can’t filter out the volume for which the affiliate receive nothing? This is an absolutely trivial task. The volume is counted from the moment of user referral, and if it’s less than the total volume on the account, the affiliate doesn’t get anything.
Or if the account has matches in any block before the referral moment, then such an account doesn’t generate commission for the affiliate. This can be done with an absolutely simple SQL query in the Numia database.
