[Proposal] TrueFi and Coinbase Earn Program

Proposals
1

Hey TrueFi Community,

My name is Brenna Barker and I am the sales and business development lead for Coinbase’s Earn product. We are proposing that the TrueFi community use some of its incentive allocation on a Coinbase Earn campaign to drive attention and awareness of the project within the Coinbase user community.

If there is support, after a period of discussion, we will make a further post with a Snapshot vote.

Summary

  • TrueFi community to use $3M USD worth of TRU from the TRU incentives that are earmarked towards community incentives to fund this campaign.
  • The campaign will award roughly 750k Coinbase users approximately $3-4 of TRU each for completing the full set of specially-made TrueFi educational content and quizzes, made for the TrueFi community by the Coinbase team.
  • The go-live date for any Earn campaign is difficult to pin down, but the TrueFi & Coinbase teams will work together with deliberate urgency, targeting the first half of 2022 to launch.

Background

Following TRU’s August 2021 listing on Coinbase, we’ve been speaking with Ryan and Michael about additional areas of collaboration. As a first step, we would like to run an Earn campaign to highlight TrueFi to our user base. This campaign type is oriented around educating Coinbase users on what TrueFi is, how it works, and how to use it. Find similar campaigns here.

At Coinbase Earn, we have two types of campaigns:

  1. Education-oriented: Composed of educational video and written content, paired with quizzes that pay out rewards for successful completion, designed in partnership between the project (TrueFi) and Coinbase. This is the campaign we’re proposing at this time.
  2. Action-oriented: A more fleshed out “bounty” campaign which involves users actually downloading the Coinbase non-custodial wallet and interacting with the protocol directly. We’ve done these with MakerDAO and Compound. We would like to do one of these with TrueFi, but given the prohibitive costs of gas, we need to wait until TrueFi is on an L2 or sidechain.

Assuming the quiz goes well, we may be back to work on a scaled up campaign which will also have Coinbase users lending directly to TrueFi or staking.

Considerations

  • Budget: $3m is on the more conservative side of Coinbase’s Earn campaigns, letting the TrueFi community experience the benefits of the collaboration before ramping up its commitment. To effectively hit the proposed deliverables, Coinbase is not able to negotiate this engagement lower.
  • Award Total per User: Most Earn campaigns award users $3-10 for completing all content modules. We suggest allocating $3-12 per user (or $1-4 per content module, of which we aim to deliver 3) to be most effective.
  • Target Audience: Coinbase has a userbase of 73 million verified users, 10,000 institutions, and 185,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries. This campaign will be available across all our markets, with a retail focus, and reach approximately 750k users before the allotted TRU budget is depleted.

Proposal

If approved, this proposal will progress as follows:

  1. TrueFi community allocates $3m TRU (priced at 30 day trailing average) into the custody of Coinbase.
  2. Coinbase and select TrustToken/TrueFi contributors begin the design of a TrueFi curriculum, to be turned into educational story posts and quizzes posted to Coinbase Earn, once completed. We find the co-creation process most effective with fewer, experienced “cooks in the kitchen,” so we’ll target 2-3 TrueFi collaborators as part of our working group.
  3. At launch, TrueFi & Coinbase to co-market the Learn campaign at their own discretion. Coinbase will support the launch with an email to our community.
  4. The campaign will award each user who successfully completes all 3-4 content modules $3-4 of TRU, or $1 of TRU per module.
  5. The campaign will live on Coinbase Earn until the budgeted TRU is fully expended. The Earn campaign can be topped up at any time by the TrueFi DAO, at the behest of TRU voters.

If rejected, we will not move forward with a Coinbase Earn campaign.

7 Likes
2

@BrennaB, I’m glad to see Coinbase connecting with TrueFi at the DAO level! I wonder if this is one of the first CB engagements of its kind.

Overall, I support this proposal, for the following reasons:

Firstly, the branding value of showcasing TrueFi to Coinbase’s vast pool of users, with the added benefit of brand association, is, in my opinion, valuable. Doesn’t hurt that it’d make TrueFi the first uncollateralized lending protocol with such a CB collab!

Secondly, I like that the campaign is not pure advertising, but includes the creation of custom, evergreen educational content, which will live on Coinbase alongside many of the most popular protocols around, maybe even after the campaign concludes.

Finally, while the cost is substantial, the most important element of this proposal to me is that the TRU is largely passed on directly to users, vs consumed as profit by CB. This aligns our incentives more closely and helps create new holders, new contributors, and new evangelists.

6 Likes
3

I support this and agree with @MG-TT .

However, I think it’s critical that TrueFi is supported on cheap-to-transact chains before the campaign goes live. Planning for success, users will learn about TrueFi and some will visit the app to deposit their own funds. We don’t want to turn away retail users because of high gas costs because then it’ll be harder to re-capture them if they believe TrueFi is too expensive to use - some may even think it’s a scam.

4

Brenna, thanks for the detailed and thoughtful proposal. I would LOVE to execute a program like this with Coinbase, it seems like a great way to drive user education with an amazing partner. That said, I think it’s too early - we’re just not quite ready yet. We don’t have a low-cost solution for smaller investors, and we don’t have our KYC process streamlined yet. My worry is we’d end up with a lot of frustrated users, and actually harm our reputation more than enhance our visibility. My request would be to put this proposal on the shelf for a few months while the team works out some of the kinks, and then we can execute this with vigor. This is not a vote no, this is just a not yet!

-ts-