Aki Network

Campaign Engine - Airdrop Listing & Referral Link
Campaign Engine - Airdrop Task Page
Campaign Engine - Airdrop Campaign Management
Campaign Engine - Airdrop Referral Data

Inspiration

We are a diversified group of 7 people with background and experience in marketing, advertising, community management, software engineering, data science and crypto investment.

The idea of building a consumer network (aka, Aki Network) comes out of struggles in real-world practices by our team members and captures the thoughtful insights (sometimes complaints) from many community managers, project teams, and actual users in the crypto space.

One of the major problems that web3 needs to solve is mass adoption. And user and contributor retention is a critical challenge for all web3 communities. For a project, the million-dollar question has always been how to attract, retain, and engage contributors by leveraging social and financial incentives.

After interviewing some of the most successful web3 projects, we found out it is most often the core contributors, namely the key opinion consumers (KOCs), who are the best and most effective promoters when it comes to project go-to-market.

What we want to achieve is that we provide the right on-chain and off-chain analytics. And you can identify the voices of the industry.

What it does

Aki is a data-powered consumer network for web3 scaling. The network is dedicated to incubating the voices of web3, and empowering the industry with quantifiable information flow.

There are three things that make AKI Network stand out:

Actionable and informative data insights;
Aki native data criteria to measure things like web3 impact, marketing performance, credibility, specialty, capability, etc.;
A campaign engine to facilitate web3-native marketing and provide performance measurement.

Here in this Hackathon, we highlight an airdrop marketing engine for projects, promotors, and consumers, with a built-in referral system and a vault system supporting automated token distribution.

How we built it

As to the airdrop platform, we started with building a decentralized gleam with three modules:

A project and task setup module for campaign creators;
A random draw module based on task completeness;
A campaign management module with a deposit channel, an automated token distribution function , and campaign data.

Then we added a referral system to the airdrop campaign engine which can be used to generate referral link and keep a ledger of the referred visits and conversion data. In the mean time, we also developed a more sophisticated referral sdk with more customization. We stored a small portion of the reference connection and performance data on ceramic network. However, considering the privacy protection of our community, we temporarily stopped feeding data to ceramic and have been working on solutions with the team.

We added Chainlink to the system earlier this month. VRF is used to support the random draw process; and Keepers is used as an essential part of the automated distribution process to achieve a fairer and more decentralized result.

Challenges we ran into

The development went well. Most of our challenges come out of product market fit and adoption.

Initially, Aki was positioned as a social graph protocol through gathering data from web3 communities.

We started with building a telegram community bot and a distribution contract on Ethereum and BSC to help community managers distribute rewards and help community members giving tips. We actually reached a few hundreds of people within 3 days and accumulated identity data which helped us figure out sybil accounts and which we used to set up DID associated with multiple web2 and web3 accounts.

But we found that we still could not distinguish ourselves from other community bots or DAO tools projects.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We rebranded as AKI Network and had our new logo and landing page designed in April

We developed AKI Native Data, including marketing performance, credibility, specialty tags, and AKI InScore, to measure impacts and partnership.

We worked hard to get the dirty work done. We defined actionable data for web3 KOL marketing and we finished building a database based on the hand-picked KOLs recognized by the industry. The list is growing and we are working on automating the process.

What we learned

What we are doing is directly connected to the actual users and builders. Therefore, it is essential that we listen to them constantly, understand the needs, and measure the performance of our platform in order to better serve them.

What's next for Aki Network

We currently have four products under development supporting the consumer network we envision.

The next step has two folds. On the business development side, we will reach out to web3 communities and projects for potential users and test out our products for future iteration. From technical innovation side, we will work on automation and algorithm.