How Rubic got a superpower to identify target users and better engage with them

TL;DR:

• Rubic integrates over 70 blockchains and supports more than 15,500 assets for easy swaps across 220+ DEXs and bridges. To celebrate its 3rd Birthday, Rubic’s marketing team planned a campaign to attract loyal users.
• Rubic faced concerns about protecting the campaign from Sybil attacks and low-LTV users.
• To address this, Rubic partnered with Nomis to implement Cross-Chain DeFi Score, which helps identify genuine campaign participants.
• With Score’s ability to assess wallet activity across multiple blockchains and identify engaged users, Rubic achieved impressive campaign results and distributed tokens to the target users.

Partner

Rubic is a Cross-Chain Tech Aggregator for users and dApps that aggregates 70+ blockchains and testnets, while it enables swaps of 15,500+ assets with the best rates, highest liquidity, and transaction speeds — in one click, thanks to the integration of 220+ DEXs and bridges. They focus on adding new emerging chains, like zkSync Era, Polygon zkEVM, Mantle, Linea, and Base. Rubic’s marketing team strives to manage all campaigns in the best way to increase ROI, attract only loyal and sticky users, keep them active and bring profit and benefits to both users and partner projects.

In September 2023, Rubic conducted a campaign dedicated to their 3rd anniversary. The campaign consisted of 4 week events involving Rubic’s key partners’ participation: zkSync Era, Mantle, Linea, and Base. Rubic offered users the opportunity to earn an airdrop together with a share of a 1.8M+ RBC reward pool by using each blockchain per week: swapping to/from/on Base, Linea, Mantle, and zkSync Era. Users had to accumulate points and activate their wallet with an ‘all-in-one’ experience across leading blockchains, their bridges, & DEXs — enabling seamless token swaps while bridging. The campaign was available on Galxe, Intract, and QuestN and Rubic’s website.

The main goal of the campaign was to bring high value to partners and rewarding experiences to participants — in general, demonstrate the strong product traction, which always depends only on user activity, and which is very easy to fake. As the Rubic campaign had been conducted multiple times, the marketing team has extensively observed the effectiveness and fairness of each campaign. They identified the presence of numerous bots and irrelevant users, which led to a decrease in the return on marketing budget compared to campaigns run before the Sybil era. By the way, we have already described the affect of Sybil attacks on the projects: How to make your ecosystem Sybil resistant.

Problem

That’s why Rubic faced a challenging question:

How can they safeguard their marketing campaign from Sybils and low-LTV users in order to enhance ROMI and incentivize only genuine contributors and target users?

The team has implemented several mandatory actions for participants. Once these conditions are completed, participants become eligible for the promised rewards.

• Complete cross-chain and onchain swaps via partners’ products
• Like and retweet the Rubic’s campaign announcement post on Twitter
• Follow Rubic’s Twitter account and join Rubic’s Discord server
• Follow partners’ Twitter accounts

These actions could have provided Rubic with excellent campaign results, if the risk of being attacked by Sybils wasn’t too high. Sybils takes the first step by creating numerous accounts and wallet addresses to maximize their gains from campaigns and quests. It’s a familiar tale, yet not everyone is committed to combating this issue.

Meanwhile, Rubic had 3 additional mandatory conditions for participants to be eligible for rewards:

• Read Rubic’s Medium article to get a unique commemorative NFT
• Hold RBC to get an additional reward multiplier

And last but not least was built by Nomis.

Solution

Nomis has teamed up with Rubic to develop a wallet scoring solution for their 3rd Birthday marketing campaign – Cross-chain DeFi Score, in order to protect the initiative from Sybils and identify target users of cross-chain swaps and bridges.

The Cross-chain DeFi Score is designed to analyze wallet activity across multiple blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Optimism, BSC, Polygon, Fantom, zkSync, zkEVM, Kava, Mantle, Base, Arbitrum One, Avalanche and Linea. As a result, the Score enables determining the number of relevant projects — Rubic’s partners and competitors — that users have interacted with. The higher the number and value of interactions, the higher the user’s Cross-Chain DeFi Score.

How the solution works

1. Nomis scans a user’s wallet for fraudulent activity, collects the wallet’s age, its transaction history, and other related onchain data from more than 50 sources, including explorers and third parties. Nomis’ AI-powered mathematical model scores wallets based on more than 30 parameters and assigns a reputation score from 0 to 100. All calculations are 100% offchain.
2. Rubic compiled a list of projects they were interested in tracking user interaction with. This allowed us to identify and highlight target users, specifically those who are more engaged with cross-chain swaps and bridges. Such users receive a higher score on a scale of 0 to 100.
3. We also created a table of projects and found their smart contract addresses to scan wallet interactions with. This ensured accurate data collection.
4. To receive a higher airdrop allocation, every user needed to have a Cross-chain DeFi Score of 30 or more. By meeting this requirement, these users sent a strong signal to Rubic that their contribution and potential deserved recognition and reward.

Nomis leverages wallet onchain footprints and AI-powered mathematical modeling technologies to enable web3 projects and communities to make data-driven decisions while fostering crypto communities. That is exactly what Rubic needed.

• The procedure involves gathering a comprehensive dataset pertaining to blockchain addresses. This dataset is then enriched by incorporating insights from external sources like Lens, Snapshot, CyberConnect, and Greysafe. To analyze this primary data, statistical techniques, informed by specialist expertise, are employed. At this juncture, it becomes feasible to identify addresses that exhibit either dubious activities or minimal value.
• Furthermore, the Nomis Score algorithm integrates advanced deep learning networks to decipher intricate, non-linear data interconnections. Additionally, statistical strategies are utilized to regulate fluctuations in time-sensitive data. These modifications help in normalizing the data’s fluctuation, enhancing its suitability for in-depth analysis. This methodology is strategically applied to refine the precision of user score estimations.

Results

Rubic’s marketing team was able to identify sticky users with higher LTVs and encourage them to use the product by providing higher rewards.

• The campaign resulted in 1.5K users successfully minted their Cross-chain DeFi Scores. Rubic’s initiative attracted a remarkable 13,420 unique addresses, all actively participating in various transactions. In total, there were 65,591 transactions, with 37,521 being onchain swaps and 28,070 being cross-chain swaps.
• The main goal of Nomis’ Cross-chain DeFi Score was to safeguard Rubic’s campaign from Sybil attacks, which often represent as much as 80% of the activity on well-known blockchains. According to the findings, about 11% of users have created their Scores, demonstrating the efficacy of Nomis’ approach.

Feedback

*I’m thrilled with our 3rd Birthday marketing campaign’s success, leveraging Cross-chain DeFi Score for reward distribution to boost our base of loyal users. The integration of Sybil protection was pivotal, ensuring fair token distribution and focusing rewards on genuine contributors, thus enhancing our ecosystem’s integrity and value. This strategic approach has proven highly effective, setting a strong precedent for future campaigns.

Elena Nova, CMO at Rubic*

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