I made a suggestion long time ago that 5% of block reward should be going to a dedicated faucet that gives free Zen to everyone(reduce block reward to miners).
Of course it would need proper protection so that people dont faucet it from multiple addresses / accounts. What this would do is enable lots of non-crypto people entering into crypto, cost free. While receiving some free ZEN they would also take the time and learn about ZEN maybe invest more. Maybe add in some challenge to test their knowledge, have them install wallets, do transfers to teach them about Horizen, and every week they could claim the reward from faucet when they get the answer right (and they would have to visit Horizen academy for that).
Another benefit from this is that these people would advertise Horizen to all their friends and on social networks, which would add to the Horizen brand. It would also increase social engagement. These people might decide to invest in Horizen and maybe not.
So how this would work is during the 7 day week, rewards are allocated to an address and depending on how many people finished challenges during that week, all the funds allocated would be split on those participants. This would account for 1260 ZEN / week.
@TurtleBear has put a ton of thought into how to use block rewards for incentivizing community growth, which I think could add a lot of context and some mods to this idea. I’m a big fan of having some portion of inflation go to community growth, I’m just a believer that it should go towards productive activities, like incentivizing dApp or protocol usage, for instance.
Faucets are cool and I think necessary in small amounts as a no-risk onboarding tool so that people can jump into Web3 without thinking too much about it, but I wouldn’t program this into our consensus as part of the block reward. We already have a small dev faucet and we’ve had the getzen.cash faucet for years without it having much of a real impact on our community growth.
I’m very much in favor of exploring ways to reward constructive behavior in the ecosystem, but probably not via a faucet of this magnitude. It’s a start to a much needed conversation, though.
I agree with some comments on discord that it would be hard to distinguish real users vs bots, so it could be abused. But also getzen.cash faucet was really low rewards so no real person would bother each day to earn 0.0001 zen
We looked at the token movement from wallets using getzen.cash over the years, more than 75% of the funds leaving the wallet was being botted. It’s also important we make sure we’re forward thinking, something that I think is hard for the current community to understand because massive $zen adoption and growth hasn’t been realistic in recent years. A free $zen faucet isn’t scalable.
For the first time in Horizen’s history, we have a playground for developers. We can support projects and other communities on EON. We can support actual use cases. And we don’t plan on stopping with EON. If we get into appchains our sidechain to sidechain communication is far ahead of others in the space. Everyone relies on LayerZero or Axelars endpoints to connect their ecosystem, we can do this within our ecosystem ourselves. And with EON having a LayerZero endpoint, that means any chain(or appchain) that launches on Horizen will be able to communicate not only internally within the Horizen ecosystem but also to ANY chain with a LayerZero endpoint(90%+ of useable chains) by leveraging EON. I urge everyone to think about scalability when making proposals / decisions, because we’re in a position to grow quickly.
With that all said, might a $zen faucet be something we add temporarily to help onboard users while we run on-chain campaigns? Absolutely. Is it someone we end up building into rewards, I doubt it. We’re more interested in creating long term and scalable solutions for users to get $zen on EON. Direct fiat onboarding, cross chain swaps, exchange withdrawals > Eon.
Lastly, speaking to @finpunk’s comment, there’s going to be plenty of opportunities to incentivize community growth. We tried the free faucet approach, and to be blunt, I’m not happy with the results at all. But I’m not speaking for everyone, if it were up to me all “tasks” resulting in micro amounts of $zen would be gone. It incentivizes the wrong time of user and community growth.
All right, I understand that bots would mostly hog the faucet now. But what about allocating the 5% for DAO allocated funds, projects/engagements so it wouldnt use development team resources.
Now that DAO is available, we could vote on who gets awarded some of the funds from the 5% allocated to this. Imagine people submit a DAO, and holders vote if they get access to some of the ZEN that has been gathering on the address specially prepared for this.
I’m looking forward to seeing what this grant program will look like. It’s such a core function for the DAO IMO. So, yeah, @Trololino I’m fully with you in spirit in that we need to open up this type of program.
Also worth noting that 5% of the block reward is half of the amount proposed to be directed to EON to incentivize forgers to secure the network; so that’s a huge number to devote to faucet challenges IMO.
