Hey Guys -
Wanted to keep everyone in the loop. We'll be temporarily disabling the referral system on Predyx due excessive frauds detected. We'll re-enable it once we make success criteria more robust and hard to game it.
-- Team Predyx
cc @grayruby @Undisciplined @BlokchainB @Coinsreporter @NEEDcreations @south_korea_ln @denlillaapan and all the users of Predyx.
I was worried that would happen. Let us know if you want to brainstorm solutions. A lot of thought was put into the SN referral system.
Thanks, yes I was worried too and had an internal benchmark that if 1 out of 10 was fraud it could have been acceptable(there will always be bad actors), but it skyrocketed over the last two weeks.
Yes let us brainstorm more on this. We were thinking as follows:
If this gets implemented. This would be a deal breaker for me.
Hopefully your team can find another option.
I agree
I hear you. Rest be assured, we're not implementing it in near future.
I'll duck the first point, because I don't know enough about those regulations. Ideally, that would be unnecessary. It should be possible for the rewards mechanism to do all the work.
The way Stacker News referrals function is that you only get a fraction of your referred stackers' rewards. Similarly, Predyx could do something like rewarding a fraction of the referred users' spend (fees + losses).
You don't want to incentivize creating a master account that just receives rewards from active accounts, though, so you may want to also cap the possible earned rewards based on the actual activity: i.e. I need to spend (fees + losses) at least x in order to receive x in referral rewards.
Shitty people everywhere... maybe even one of us here on SN...
How many resources are dedicated to dealing with the consequences of shitty people.
There's a lot of literature showing that economies function better in societies with higher moral and ethical standards, probably because less resources have to be wasted on dealing with bad actors
In two places I've worked, Korea and Europe, there is an army of people whose only job is to make sure people are not abusing public research funds. Check that people are not paying for personal holidays, home appliances, etc, with grant funds. Yet, the only thing it achieves it's making life harder for honest people, whereas dishonest people still figure out ways to be corrupt and cheat the system. Huge waste of resources overall.
Yeah totally unnecessary headache.
I have personally experienced this first hand, I've lived in highly corrupt economies like India and Mexico and also lived in less corrupt economies like USA. Huge difference especially in term of fraud.
That’s unfortunate but thanks for the heads up.
The best will be like "hey user if you refer someone, you'll earn x % of his fee paid" Make it very low like 2-20%.
For new users (referred or not), just launch a promotional offer like 'hey user you'll recieve x sats if you complete x trades + waggered x amount of Sats + after a fix period of time.
% from referred fees sounds like good idea. @Undisciplined mentioned that as well.
For the user retention, we'll have something similar to manifold's daily streak - where users gets reward for using Predyx everyday and the reward keeps doubling for every additional days of streak. If they break the streak, the reward resets to zero they have to start over again.
This is interesting. I've two suggestions though.
This is just a suggestion/idea. You can also start with 5 sat for the day 1, then increase it by 5 sat everyday, making it 500 sat reward. But for doing so Predyx has to make sure that the user they are gonna reward is creating enough business. Let's say a user's daily wager average is 50000 sats, it won't be bad idea to award him 500 sats daily.
All in all I mean that any reward must not be too fat + it should be most rewarding to those who are big and daily traders.
This has to be. This is very similar to the idea of "Cowboy Hat" on SN.
Sorry to hear. The unfortunate truth in Bitcoin people will always take advantage of something that is free and ruin it for others. Seen this over and over and over again.
Have you thought of doing something like Batch betting or something like a Pooled / Syndicate type of betting system, to me that would be the crown jewel it accomplishes everything your trying to do with referrals and then some.
Thanks for the kind words and you're right - a few bad actors ruin it for everyone. Not to discount the fact that we did get some excellent referrals mostly from top users on SN.
Sounds very interesting, can you please explain more? Like parimutuel betting?
Are the users listed in cc the fraudster? 😅
Hell no! 😂
They are our top users on Predyx. It makes sense to cc them as I see them as thought leaders who are helping Predyx in gaining more adoption. And they do it without any personal gains.
lol, jk. 🙂💪
Fraud in referral systems is unfortunately a classic problem if there’s a way to game an incentive, someone will find it. Disabling it temporarily makes sense; better to pause and protect the platform’s integrity than let abuse spiral. I’m curious to see what “more robust” success criteria will look like for Predyx. Maybe tying rewards to verifiable on-chain actions or longer-term engagement could help weed out bad actors. In the long run, a strong anti-fraud system will make the referral program more sustainable and fair for genuine users.