Auctus Options Airdrop: Wins, Mistakes and the Road Ahead
Being first always comes with risk. Being first means you enter an unmarked road, unknowing of what’s ahead. Last week, Auctus was the first project, to likely ever in history, airdrop call options of its token. Since the majority of call options were out the money and Auctus is a smaller market size project, we decided to structure the claim processes in a competitive way. Our biggest concern was that due to high gas fees, the airdrop would be a small event with not all options being claimed. We were shocked to find when the airdrop rolled around, that our event was not just in demand, but stormed by the thousands. At last our servers could no longer handle it and what was planned to be a fun way to give back to the community and decentralize Auctus ownership, turned quite messy. In this write up we want to highlight what worked, what did not work, and what’s next for Auctus, as we are not letting this hiccup slow us down from the big vision we have of making on-chain options for every digital asset work.
What Went Wrong
Our biggest mistake was underestimating the demand for the airdrop. The servers could not handle the amount of users storming to the website and refreshing on multiple screens and tabs, causing a massive overload of the UI.
While we increased capacity from the first few minutes, this took much longer than we needed it too in this moment. As a result the ones trying to claim were stuck in front of their screens for hours trying to claim. We get no joy out of wasting your time, so we genuinely want to apologize to those that tried to claim and were unable to do so because of our miscalculations.
Some suggested this would not have happened if we only offered a fixed amount per user with equal strike prices. While hindsight is 20/20, we believe that in an alternate universe where we structured it this way, many options would remain unclaimed as the amount per airdrop would have been significantly smaller, not making it worth it for many to claim with current gas fees. As a result fewer would have found out about Auctus and on-chain options. However we are open to test our assumptions in future airdrops where we will model it after popular airdrops like UNI and MIR.
A further criticism was that the team failed to communicate sufficiently during the technical difficulties. As our Telegram ballooned from 1,900 members to 2,600 with at some point perhaps 10 messages a second, there was not much our team of 5 could do other than focus on getting the servers fixed and get the most important questions answered. To all the criticism we have more in depth solutions and ways to improve in a few minutes.
Successes from the Airdrop
While it’s easy to focus on the unhappy voices of those that were unable to claim their options, many Auctus investors have looked towards this Airdrop as a big success for the following reasons:
- Auctus TVL has grown massively
2. More crypto natives than ever have learned about on-chain options
3. More people than ever have learned about Auctus
4. More people than ever have engaged with Auctus’ actual platform, from OTC, to the DEX, to the Pools
5. Our communities grew tremendously. Twitter grew from 9,200 followers to over 10,400. Telegram grew from 1,900 to 2,600.
6. Auctus searches were trending on both coingecko and coinmarketcap
Lesson learned and the Road ahead
Our biggest lesson from the past week is that we can’t do this alone, and we don’t need to. Many community members came forward with ideas and suggestions to help grow Auctus, and ways to do better next time. Instead of being another project that works in a silo when the goal is decentralization, we decided that one of our next key steps on the roadmap is to decentralize Auctus governance and move governance into a DAO. Now that Auctus’ token ownership is widely distributed because of the airdrop, and no longer concentrated in the hands of the team, a token based voting structure will enable fair decision making.
While we would love to do a second airdrop to reward those who missed out, the reality is that every airdrop has to come from somewhere. So we will leave it to the community to decide once we restructure into a DAO if they really want to use treasury funds for further airdrops. Our assumption is that once we decentralize governance, there will be more ownership and responsibility in the requests being made to the project.
Regarding the difficulty faced by us to scale our servers, we will increase our API’s capacity and start doing load tests to make sure they can continue working under high load. It is important to mention that the only reason for relying on API’s for the airdrop distribution was to avoid bots claiming the airdrop on-chain automatically.
Furthermore, while a small team was the only responsible choice during the bear market when the team kept building despite a 6 figure market cap, the growth of the project to the 8 figures now requires an expanded team. As the community is growing, the team will be looking to promote committed community members to moderators, to improve how we can address all new entrants questions and concerns. In the coming weeks we will be hiring community members who understand both Auctus and options for the role of moderators/community managers.
Remediation for Auctus holders:
After much internal discussion, and discussion with token holders we do not believe a second airdrop is necessary at this stage, as it would remove resources from treasury that should be aimed at opportunities such as hiring community managers, liquidity incentives, and partnership campaigns with other protocols.
However, as we move to a DAO structure, this decision will no longer be up to the team, but rather the community, and we trust the community knows best what is needed to see Auctus succeed in the long run.
Everybody wins to some degree if Auctus wins. Nobody wins if Auctus does not win. Therefore we encourage our community to focus on blazing the path ahead and staying focused on building. Whoever wishes to earn more AUC can currently earn significant amounts of AUC options by adding liquidity. This is the best way for you to both earn AUC and support Auctus in becoming the number one options protocol.
Come join us on Telegram and share your thoughts, once the community finds a common ground, we can launch a vote on Snapshot governance.
Small update since Friday
We added metrics to show how many options you get for the value of the liquidity you add on our current liquidity incentives and also now it’s possible to trade Auctus options using our advanced mode. Some may ask why it’s not possible to trade them using AMM, it’s because our AMM uses Chainlink oracles and Auctus’ price feed is not available on Chainlink yet. We are currently also adding WalletConnect since many users are asking for more mobile support, while also improving our server capacities as mentioned above.
Future: DAO and the Road to V2
After all those problems, we are actually more optimistic than ever about the potential for Auctus, as there is a high interest for options and what we are building in the DeFi community. We believe now is time to move governance into a DAO structure which will let Auctus holders decide how reserve treasury will be used and how incentives will be structured, this way we make sure the community is both heard, represented and responsible and can think about the pros and cons of different incentives structure. To achieve this goal, we will move towards full transparency regarding treasury holdings and operational costs. We invite everyone interested in collaborating setting up the Auctus DAO structures to engage in our conversations on Telegram and also to join our Community call this Friday, where we will share more details about our V2 plans and the DAO structure.
