I had the opportunity to ask Amanda B. Johnson of Dash what her thoughts were about the overwhelming success of Dash’s very first big social media campaign called #FirstDashWallet. I followed this campaign very closely and I too, was surprised by how viral it became in such a short amount of time. Here are her answers to my questions:

Stellabelle:

What was the most surprising thing about your recent #FirstDashWallet social media campaign?

Amanda:

My answer is two-fold. First, I was surprised by the sheer number of people who entered — about 3,000 at the close of the 10-day campaign. Because each photo featured two people, that’s actually 6,000 participants. And the second surprise was the diversity of their locales — we counted 55 different countries!

image from Twitter

S:

Was this the very first social media campaign of its kind in the crypto-sphere?

A:

It’s the first of its kind that I’m aware of. Which makes sense, because Dash is uniquely positioned to offer these kinds of things. Allocating our block reward to more than just mining means we have funds to do this kind of outreach — and not to have to cap it. For example, I was expecting to pay out no more than ~$2,000 in Dash with this campaign. But we ended up paying out well over $50,000 in Dash! Our treasury can afford that amount, though, so we didn’t have to disappoint anyone.

S:

I heard there were entire villages in Nigeria that created an organized system for the wallet campaign. Is this true? Can you share a story about that?

A:

It appears that there were some highly-organized groups, yes. One appeared to be in Nigeria (via Twitter), and the other appeared to be in Bangladesh (via Facebook). It would be obvious to anyone who viewed all the entries, because the pictures — though always featuring different people — used the same locale, sign, and even some of the same phones over and over again. We took many hours to comb through these photos to determine the correct payouts, if they were merited.

We saw this as a good problem to have — it just shows how incredibly motivated these individuals are to get their hands on Dash. It shows how high the demand is. That’s a good thing.

Twitter

S:

Does any photo stand out as your favorite from the campaign?

A:

No particular photo stands out to me, but rather, a category of photos — that is, the ones where people were really smiling! My second-favorite photos were a handful that came out of Russia and surrounding areas that featured very fashionable, lovely women striking candid- looking poses on urban streets.

Twitter

S:

What is the most important thing you learned from this campaign?

A:

I learned that social media is an effective way to get Dash in the hands of people who’ve probably never even owned cryptocurrency before. And in retrospect, it’s so obvious. The method we employed removed almost all the barriers to the standard ways of getting cryptocurrency today: bank accounts, registration on online exchanges, identity proof, fees and limits, blah blah blah. The #FirstDashWallet social media campaign cut through all of that.

Facebook

S:

What countries stand out as the most active from this campaign?

A:

Aside from Nigeria and Bangladesh, we saw the third-most entries from Venezuela. After that, it was Taiwan and the Philippines.

Twitter

Due to the overwhelming success of this campaign, I would guess that Amanda is planning more like it in the future. I don’t have the inside scoop (Amanda is a tough cookie and doesn’t release info easily), but I have a hunch that really cool campaigns like this are around the corner.

As a photo nerd, I found a lot of amazing pictures on Twitter and Facebook that were submitted for this campaign. One of the coolest ones was created by Dash Nation member Joshua who wrote a script to pull all the hashtagged photos and compile them.

Check it out:

#FirstDashWallet winners from around the world

Here are some of my favorite photos from the campaign, all from Twitter: