Dether Development Transparency — Part 3

Envisioning an affiliate program on top of Ethereum

With the ICO model, we are in a way solving the chicken and the egg problem: how can we make our protocol more valuable for early adopters? Early adopters will gain more value and be incentivized to make our services more visible, but could we go one step further and add another layer of incentivization?

That’s what we want to create with Dether’s affiliate program. It’ll enable anyone to make money on top of the protocol, and at the same time, allow everyone to benefit from it.

1/ Why have an affiliate system?

In a regular company, the business model is centralized: business development is done directly for yourself, and you are rewarded proportionally. You can also create an affiliate program, where you incentivize people to help you in business development and share revenue with them.

At Dether, we are creating the same incentivization, but in the protocol layer, where a part of the fees generated could go directly to the person who brought the user onboard.

In this way, the value is equitably shared between all the token holders, and you also have another incentivization level by bringing new users onboard.

2/ How does it work?

With Dether, for every seller or shop, we will have an affiliate field and an affiliate balance.

For every fee burned on the app by this user, half of it will go directly to their affiliates. All of these mechanisms will take place on the smart contract level, where an affiliate will have the possibility to withdraw the affiliate balance from his affiliate.

Here is the smart contract function that allow the affiliate to withdraw the affiliate balance.

A user or shop can have only one affiliation, but anyone can affiliate an unlimited number of users.

3/ How can you become an affiliate?

We will also develop a front-end app to allow people to easily send a referral link.

This system could also be used by front-end applications aiming to bring new users of their own. With an application on top of the protocol and for every seller they will bring onboard, the application will make direct profit.

We can also imagine an application, which allows people to register, and also refer new users. And we plan to have different levels of referral inside the protocol, with part of the new affiliate going directly to the first affiliate.

We will create our own open source front-end application and encourage anyone to fork it or to plug it to their system, modify it and bring new users onboard on the protocol on their own and make money from it.

Everyone will benefit, as we want to create this standard for OTC trades and payments in-shop. We are conscious that it won’t be possible alone, so with this system, everyone will be directly incentivized to make it more solid.