We announced a few days before the NYC Blockchain Week that we were launching an awareness campaign to get more people to know about Particl. While we expected the campaign to reach a few hundred people, it blew up and went viral overnight, reaching the hidden payouts cap that had been set up for the campaign in just a few hours.

With the first payouts being initially scheduled for today, we’d like to thank everybody that has participated in the campaign so for and keep you updated on the status of the campaign and let you know what comes next!

The Campaign Goes Viral

This awareness campaign was initially designed to be a grassroots initiative to get friends to know about Particl and its Open Marketplace. Little did we know, the campaign became viral in a matter of mere hours and was shared within many massive airdrop and signup groups, creating a rapid influx of participants overnight.

Awareness Campaign Stats

Number of registered participants: 16,944

Number of participants automatically detected as fraudulent: 6,657

Number of Particl Desktop downloads during campaign: ~2,000

Hidden payouts cap reached after: ~16 hours

Number of participants that qualify for staking shares: 105

Circumventing Fraud

Because we did not expect this campaign to get as viral as it did, and so rapidly, we’ve been surprised by the huge amount of fraudulent participation we’ve received. Luckily, the platform we’re using to run the campaign was set up to automatically flag fraudulent emails based on various criteria. In total, the system flagged 6,657 fake emails based on a wide variety of criteria, excluding these participants from the campaign.

Additionally, we’ve been running our own script to find any other fraudulent email that would bypass the platform’s filter. In the end, it turns out that only ~1,800 participants have properly followed all the steps required by the campaign, a figure that matches closely the approximate number of unique Particl Desktop downloads.

Campaign Status

The fraud attempts have required more time to sort out than expected. We also wanted to take off as many fake participants as possible in order to keep the contest fair for the honest participants.

To make that process easier, we temporarily paused the campaign until we could build scripts that would be able to automatically filter large amounts of emails and private addresses and get them sorted on a database so that we could process payouts more effectively.

As such, we still need a bit of time before processing payment, a process that will probably extend over the next few days.

When Will I Receive my Payout?

If you qualify for the signup payouts, don’t worry, it is normal that you haven’t received anything yet. You should be receiving your payment within the next few hours/days. You won’t need to do anything special to claim your PART, it will simply eventually show up on your Overview page as an incoming transaction!

As a reminder, here are the criteria to qualify for payouts:

Sign up on https://friends.particl.community/

Verify your email after signing up

Send your stealth address to friends@particl.io

Complete the steps above before the hidden payout cap is reached (within the first 16 hours of the campaign)

If you also qualify for staking shares, meaning that you at least got 10 of your friends to sign up with Particl, you should also receive your first payment shortly.

As a reminder, here are the criteria to qualify for staking shares:

Sign up on https://friends.particl.community/

Verify your email after signing up

Send your stealth address to friends@particl.io

Get more than 10 friends to sign up with Particl

What We’ve Learned From this Campaign

This campaign has had good results — Particl Desktop has been downloaded around 2,000 times during this campaign. After all, the goal was to get users playing around with crypto’s best-looking wallet!

But it is also very clear that the system has been abused to a bigger extent than we expected it to be. Nearly 17,000 people participated, but there were only around 2,000 unique downloads of Particl Desktop and around 1,800 participants that went through the campaign’s steps properly. That means that, right out of the bat, around 15,000 (~88%) participants haven’t properly gone through the process of qualifying for payouts.

This has been a good experiment that has brought valuable insight as to how to improve future awareness campaigns and how to sustain larger degrees of participation. We look forward to initiating similar campaigns in the future by using the goods, without the bads, of this awareness campaign.

What Now?

Once the first payouts will be paid, we will resume the Awareness Campaign as planned. Remember, now that the hidden payouts cap has been reached after only 16 hours into the campaign, the only reward for signing up with Particl will be the staking shares earned once you get more than 10 of your friends to sign up as well.

Keep your eyes close to your Particl Desktop wallet. Once you receive your payment, the Awareness Campaign will resume and you’ll be able to start earning points again by getting your friends to sign up on https://friends.particl.community/.