At RabbitHole, our mission has always been to help networks decentralize by turning speculators into participants. Today, we are thrilled to take the next step in the journey, by making it possible for decentralized networks to distribute their tokens and grow by deploying their own quests with Quest Terminal.
Before we tell you more about Quest Terminal, let’s talk about why the current playbook for distributing tokens is broken:
Retroactive one-time airdrops lead to unsustainable growth and protocols with a CAC over $2,000
Sybil resistance is a cat and mouse game with 30% of airdrop recipients being sybil addresses
The majority of tokens end up in the hands of insiders rather than the community, with treasuries accumulating billions of dollars and no good way to spend them.
Last year, we started building the stack for a new playbook, one that embraced participants of networks being the token distributor, rather than the protocol creator itself. Our core insight is that if networks want to be decentralized, then we need decentralized ways of distributing tokens and growing networks - akin to a cryptonative ad network.
We decided on the following:
A decentralized protocol that makes it easy to distribute ERC20s for the completion of onchain actions in the form of “Quests” (Quest Protocol)
An aggregator of “Quests” that makes it easy to discover earning opportunities based on your wallet address (RabbitHole V2)
An interface for building eligibility criteria, deploying quests to the Quest Protocol, and monitoring results (Quest Terminal)
An SDK that makes it easy to integrate Quests from the protocol into any interface (Quest SDK) coming soon!
The Quest Terminal is a key part to the plan, because it’s the first time that quest deployment is open to anyone. With Quest Terminal, quests will be deployed directly to RabbitHole, and eventually any interface that has the SDK, representing the Quest Network.
We made a number of design decisions with Quest Terminal, which is entrenched in our philosophy of token distributions.
Anyone can deploy a quest, no permission necessary. If protocols want to truly be decentralized, anyone should be able to incentivize any onchain action, rather than just the core team itself.
Allowlist strategies must evolve. For protocols to get high quality users, they need to strategically target users and price distributions based on who will add value to the protocol moving forward.
Token distributions are iterative, experimental games. Similar to ads, token distribution opportunities require constant experimentation on what incentives will drive certain behaviors. We believe that protocols should deploy micro experiments and iterate based on results, rather than do a one time airdrop.
We’ve decided to do a guarded launch for the rollout of Quest Terminal to ensure that users on RabbitHole have an enjoyable user experience. To deploy quests and create Allowlists in the Quest Terminal, you’ll need an NFT of what we call a Terminal Access Key. You can obtain a key by filling out this form on why you’d like to deploy a quest, or you can buy one here on OpenSea. We plan on rolling out access to everyone by the end of the year.
We’re excited about the future of decentralized token distributions, and we think onchain Quests will be a necessary primitive if decentralized protocols want to evolve in its next stage of growth while finding new ways to bring continuous participants into the network.