Since the $BLUR season 1 airdrop on February 14, the NFT marketplace Blur has outperformed OpenSea’s trading volume every day.
The 30-day trading volume of Blur stands at $1.25 billion, which is almost five times that of OpenSea’s volume in the same duration.
It’s a testament to the fact that airdrops have evolved from free money giveaways to a refined and goal-oriented tactic to bootstrap growth.
Blur went live on October 19, 2022, announcing that it will be airdropping Care Packages with a secret number of $BLUR tokens. Any crypto degen who stuck around through the bear market and participated in NFT trading was eligible to claim this drop.
Now, using airdrops to incentivize specific behaviors is not new to web3.
What’s unique about Blur’s airdrop season 1 is that it distributed the overall rewards across a variety of activities. Blur gamified the experience by making the activities known to the community, driving these specific actions in a behavioral loop around Blur’s NFT marketplace.
To be specific, the S1 airdrop perfectly implemented the four stages of the habit loop that games and social media platforms often use: triggers, actions, variable rewards, and investments.
It’s no secret that the original idea must have taken months of careful planning and execution. But today, you can easily reverse engineer Blur’s airdrop mechanism and use our data-driven marketing platform, Raleon, to single-handedly set up a similar growth and loyalty campaign in about 30 minutes.
Understanding 3 Phases of Blur’s Airdrop
Blur’s airdrop is a case study for every web3 project planning an airdrop or other incentive-based campaigns to drive growth. In its nitty-gritty lies the secret to why it was so well-received by the NFT community.
So, before we jump into how you can set up an airdrop like Blur, let’s quickly break down the three phases of the airdrop and see why they worked.
Phase 1
Blur announced the first phase of Airdrop S1 right at its launch.
The criteria for Phase 1 was pretty simple:
Every NFT trader who bought or sold NFTs six months before Blur’s launch was eligible for the Care Packages. To claim the package, all they had to do was list any NFT for sale on Blur within 14 days of the announcement.
Initially, the Care Packages were supposed to be revealed at a later date in January. However, the reveal date was later postponed to February 14, 2023.
Phase 1 seemed like yet another airdrop, where a project set a vague parameter and whitelisted a huge crowd of crypto users. It was closer to the Uniswap drop than the more refined airdrops we see today.
However, it was the perfect trigger to build short-term hype and raise near-instant awareness about Blur among NFT traders. Besides, Blur announced the drop during the peak of the bear market, when no one expected to be gifted free money.
Let’s now move on to Phase 2.
Phase 2
At the launch itself, Blur also announced Phase 2 of airdrop S1. Unlike Phase 1, this phase had a less generalistic approach but was open for anyone to participate in, irrespective of NFT trading history.
To win Care Packages from Blur in this phase, NFT owners had to list their NFTs through Blur in November 2022. As Blur is an NFT aggregator, users could list their NFTs on any aggregated marketplace and still be eligible for the packages, as long as they used Blur for the listings.
The number of Care Packages a user received was based on how many NFTs they listed (variable rewards from the habit loop). Listing NFTs from more active or blue-chip collections maximized the airdrop potential.
Note: Blur had systems in place to resist sybil attacks and blacklist users from airdrops if they relisted the same NFTs or listed NFTs at unrealistic prices.
As you can tell, Phase 2 was more action-driven, and it gamified the airdrop experience. Users knew exactly what they had to do to increase their chances of winning a bigger airdrop.
This also built the much-needed supply of NFT listings on Blur’s marketplace.
Now, the only remaining job for Blur was to attract bidders to the NFT listings to close the loop. And that’s precisely what Phase 3 did.
Phase 3
Phase 3 was the last and the most rewarding phase of Blur airdrop S1. It focused on bringing demand to supply created during Phase 2.
NFT traders had to place bids on NFTs listed for sale on Blur (investments) to be eligible for Care Packages in this phase.
Taking higher risks with the bids could earn traders more points. That is, traders who bid prices higher than the floor price of an NFT collection would earn more points than those who bid equal to or less than the floor price. And the longer the bids remained active, the more points a trader would collect.
There were also more complex filters such as the 100 most active bidders every 24 hours getting a 2.5x boost.
All conditions combined together formed the perfect recipe to increase genuine trading activity on Blur.
Even better was that Blur’s long-term approach to rewarding these gamified activities ensured sustainable growth for the platform.
With all three phases covered, let’s now dive into how you can set up a similar growth campaign using Raleon.
Set Up Your Web3 Growth & Loyalty Campaign
Data is the most crucial part of setting up an airdrop strategy like Blur. Unless you know the exact activities users are participating in, you cannot come up with an airdrop.
Few airdrops ever went into such depths with filtering and sorting user data and segregating different levels of engagement. That’s because so far, it required significant engineering prowess to do that.
But Raleon is a data-driven web3 marketing tool where you can understand and aggregate all kinds of web3 and web2 data without the need to code.
So, let’s see how you can use Raleon to set up an airdrop like Blur.
First, you drop the Raleon snippet on your app to start monitoring activity. Once you have the snippet in place and you’re logged in to Raleon, the platform will automatically start to track your users on-chain behavior like holdings, dapps interacted with, and so on. It will also be able to track and highlight off-chain user journeys across all your digital channels - all done in a privacy preserving way.
With that out of the way, let’s see how you can set up each of the three phases of the Blur airdrop.
Setting Up Phase 1
As we saw above, Phase 1 rewarded Care Packages to all crypto wallets that had traded NFTs in the 6 months prior to launch.
That means, to find these wallets you need to be able to read the activity of all crypto wallets.
You can do this in the Audiences section of Raleon, which allows you to select multiple filters to find the kind of wallets you’re looking for.
Once inside, click on Add Audience, and it will lead you to a page where you can build your audience. In this section, set the conditions so that you only keep those crypto wallets that have traded NFTs in the last 180 days.
The conditions would look something like this:
If you notice, you can actually go even more granular with your audience using Raleon. If you wanted to, you could filter further to keep only those users who had spent more than a specified amount on an NFT in the last 180 days.
Or, you can click on “And wallets who” to set more filters.
When you’re done, you have your audience ready for Phase 1 of the airdrop. You can head to Campaign Builder on Raleon to start setting up the airdrop.
Setting Up Phase 2
Phase 2 of the airdrop rewarded users for listing their NFTs for sale on Blur. What’s noticeable here is that listing NFTs is not an on-chain event. So, you need to be able to track off-chain activity while being able to attribute it to the on-chain wallets.
Thankfully, Raleon sees users as a combination of their web2 and web3 data. Hence, it is simple to track off-chain app-specific actions and connect them to on-chain actions.
So, to set up this phase, we need to use Raleon’s Off-Chain Event API, which automatically runs all events through our identity resolver and ties web2 and web3 behavioral activity together. Again, preserving privacy so as to protect anonymity.
Once that’s done, you can come back to the Audience Builder and specify the conditions you’re filtering your audience for. That means, you’ll need to find wallets that have participated in an Off-Chain Event, which is specifically listing an NFT (listed-nft option as seen in the image below).
Then you can set the duration as the month or days within which listing NFTs was eligible for an airdrop. The setup would look something like this:
Blur also had more specific criteria, such as the number of NFTs a user listed, if an NFT was blue-chip or a highly active collection, and so on.
You can follow the same steps as above to set all of these criteria by adding more filters to the same audience or building new audiences for each criterion.
From the total worth of all listed NFTs to the total traded volume of an NFT collection, your limit to what kind of audience you can build depends on how far you want to go with filtering.
These audiences are dynamic, as well, meaning they automatically track all wallets that currently meet the criteria. Within Raleon, you could build additional charts from these audiences, or launch new campaigns to these wallets (which we’ll get to later).
Additionally, the number of times any of these actions are occurring is also being tracked making any sort of leaderboard quite simple.
Setting Up Phase 3
The last phase of Blur airdrop S1 rewarded users who placed bids on NFTs listed for sale.
Given this activity is running off of a smart contract, the simple way to build the right audience is by looking at the activity on the bidding contract itself.
As you can see in the below image, we’re targeting the Blur bidding contract and setting our required conditions. This will create a list of all crypto wallets that have transacted with this contract in the last 30 days.
If you don’t have a contract, you could use the Off-Chain Event condition the same way we did with our Phase 2 audience.
And similar to Phase 2, you can further drill down on the kinds of wallets you want to reward based on different parameters such as the total number of bids, bid value, bid values above or below floor price, etc.
One thing that Blur missed was further gamifying their season 1 experience. A step-by-step process for that would need another article. But for example, you could use Raleon Action Prompts to send in-app messages to users who are in the top 20% and prompt them to take more action so they can get in the top 10%.
All without code!
You're Now Set to Launch
Once you’ve set up your audiences, Raleon will automatically keep them up to date by tracking all wallets that meet the criteria.
You can then use our Campaign Builder to airdrop to them, or you could set up the ability to claim based on being a part of the audience. Furthermore, if you’re running our web3 growth analytics or web3 attribution, you could even see what marketing efforts bring them to your website.
That said, there’s a wide variety of possibilities that you can explore when you use Raleon to study on-chain and off-chain data. And you can then implement the most accurate data to drive a range of marketing campaigns across web3 and web2.
Need help?
If you need help with building your audiences, using the dashboard, connecting your off-chain activities with on-chain transactions, or simply want to talk about best practices in Web3 marketing, we’d love to have a chat with you. Click here to connect with an expert at Raleon and get your queries resolved.
