On June 20th, 2022, we introduced a governance discussion about the possibility of featuring banner ads on our UI to increase QuickSwap’s revenue. The community immediately responded with concerns. When dragons roar, QuickSwap listens. That’s why we’re modifying our proposed discussion. Rather than talk about featuring banner ads and sharing the revenue with QUICK stakers, we’d like to discuss the possibility of QuickSwap’s Foundation keeping 100% of the revenue from banner ads and establishing a separation between the QuickSwap Foundation and the QuickSwap Protocol, as well as address some of the other concerns that you brought to our attention.
Dragons grow up so fast!
As those who follow our social channels closely will remember, we’ve been rapidly expanding our core team and introducing many new products and integrations. In the last three months, we’ve:
- Published our conversion contract so that Old QUICK holders can convert to New QUICK
- Voted for and launched a predictions market built by PRDT Finance
- Voted to acquire an exclusive license to operate Algebra’s superb V3 ‘concentrated liquidity’ model on Polygon and begun the process of having the code audited
- Released our roadmap and announced our intent to build out QuickSwap’s DragonFi ecosystem
- Voted to introduce an isolated lending and borrowing market
- Voted to add a Build-a-Farm feature, powered by Cryption Network
- Launched our new UI on our main webpage
- Continued working with CEXs to get New QUICK listed
- And much more!
We’ve been happy to cover the costs for all of these integrations and our increased development and operations so far without asking for additional funds from the treasury. However, if you want us to continue building at this pace, we either need to increase our revenue substantially so that we have a longer runway, or we need to ask the community for funds from the treasury.
From our perspective, featuring banner ads and using the revenue that comes from their sales is the most straightforward way of achieving our shared goals. That said, we understand that some of you have concerns, so we’d like to address them.
Addressing community concerns
Tom vs The Mother of Dragons
Tom’s concern is quite a bit different than many of the others we saw, which is why we’ve chosen to address his points first.
Tom doesn’t mind if we want to feature banner ads (though he does think they’ll be “distasteful and ugly”). He just wants us to distinguish the boundary between the QuickSwap protocol and the QuickSwap Foundation. Further, he thinks that if we feature ads, QuickSwap’s Foundation should keep 100% of the revenue from ad sales, and after thinking about it, we agree!
We believe that QuickSwap development having an ample war chest to help us survive tough times and continue to expand our team will benefit all of QuickSwap’s users in the long-term more than having a bit more revenue in the short term.
Further, while the QuickSwap Foundation already shares revenue with QUICK stakers via trading fees, the Dragon’s Lair, the predictions market, and soon our lending and borrowing market, one might argue that sharing revenue generated from QuickSwap’s protocol is different from sharing revenue from ad sales. Tom did argue this point, and we agree that the QuickSwap Foundation should have sources of revenue for use at the team’s discretion. A well-funded foundation will be better for everyone.
Despite appearances, QuickSwap appreciates the passion and vigor that Tom — and all of our enthusiastic community members — have been bringing to QuickSwap since the beginning. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you!
Will the banner ads be intrusive or distracting?
AggresiveWafer29 expressed concern that ads might be intrusive on mobile or detract from the user experience. We really don’t think that’s the case, but have a look at the examples below and decide for yourselves.
Desktop
Mobile
As we hope you can see, these banner ads are not “distasteful” or “ugly”. We think they look very nice and blend in well with our UI. While other DEXs aren’t featuring banner ads yet, we believe that’s a good thing. QuickSwap can lead the charge.
What minimum requirements would a project need to qualify for banner ads?
This is a great point, and we agree that we should set some requirements that projects wishing to advertise on our platform must meet to qualify. At a bare minimum, we would require that a project meets all of our whitelisting criteria. This includes:
- An audit
- A minimum of $100k in liquidity on QuickSwap
- A minimum of $10k in daily trading volume on QuickSwap
That’s all well and good for projects that advertise liquidity mining and/or Syrup Pools, but we need to come up with some objective criteria for other potential advertisers. Should we allow CEXs to advertise on QuickSwap? How about lending and borrowing platforms? Should only Polygon-focused protocols be permitted to advertise? Or should we let projects from all EVM chains utilise the now-empty space on our DEX? How about IDOs/ILOs? These are all questions that we can consider together. The beauty of a governance discussion forum is that we can all converse and reach a consensus before we move to vote. Please let us know what you think about these topics and any other criteria you think we should consider.
Won’t projects all choose to pay with their ? coins?
Geniusboy91 pointed out that all projects will choose to pay with “the shitcoin they just created. If it’s a project that can’t afford $10k, maybe it’s not a project we’d want to be advertising anyway.” He went on to say that he would consider voting yes if we were to require payment in ETH or stablecoins.
We took that into account when revising this proposal. With these factors in mind, our new proposal is that we would require projects that want to advertise to pay in ETH, MATIC, or stables; however, it goes further than that because if approved, the QuickSwap Foundation would also be keeping 100% of the revenue generated from ad sales for development, marketing, and expansion costs.
The Foundation has been able to operate with trading fee revenue alone thus far, but with lower volume, dismal market conditions, and having held our treasury fully in QUICK — which has dropped in value, the Foundation will need more revenue to continue to expand. Ads would be a huge boost towards that so that we don’t need to ask the community for QUICK from our treasury to cover costs.
Healthy foundation; happy community
We realise that revising this discussion means that we’re now asking you for even more. We not only want your permission to show you banner ads, but we also want you to give the foundation control over 100% of the revenue generated from their sale. This is different from what we originally proposed, but we know from experience that a healthy foundation leads to a happy community.
If the community approves this proposal and we succeed in growing the foundation’s reserves, it will be better for everyone in the long term because a well-funded foundation will enable the team to pay for upgrades without needing to ask the community for funds from the treasury.
For instance, if the foundation had been well-funded when the GoDaddy domain hijacking occurred, we could have simply covered the endowment from our end. Because it wasn’t, we had to ask the community for funds from the treasury, which also led many nervous endowment candidates to spread FUD about QuickSwap on social platforms. Moreover, when the vote passed, we had to use QUICK to distribute the endowment, which could have caused QUICK’s price to drop depending on how many of the endowment recipients cashed out. A well-funded foundation could resolve many of the issues we now face.
Lastly, we want to assure the community that if our banner ads are as successful as we think they could be and they generate a healthy reserve for the QuickSwap Foundation, we will pass that on to the community as we have in the past. You are the most important element of QuickSwap, and we value your inputs.
We hope that after reading this revised proposal, you’ll agree that a healthy foundation is more beneficial for the QuickSwap and Polygon communities than a slight increase in yields would be for individual stakers. We are strongly encouraging all QUICK holders to vote in favor of this proposal so that we can strengthen the foundation and continue to build the DragonFi ecosystem at a rapid pace.
Please visit our Reddit discussion forum to talk through all of the elements of this proposal with us and your fellow Dragonite community members. In a few days, if the community seems to be on board, we’ll release a formal governance vote. If that vote passes, we expect that you’ll start seeing banner ads on our UI shortly thereafter.