Hello everyone; this is the first post of the Affi Network dev team. For the past few months, we've been on stealth mod building around a crazy idea of decentralized, trustless, automated, performance-based affiliate marketing. The main idea was to use public ledger (Blockchain) transactions to prove a sale happened, pay the publisher fairly and squarely, and use all advertisement budgets based on performance, not guesswork.
At the time of writing this, after two rounds of private community testing took place and thousands of extraordinary people helping us find nasty bugs and squish them.
Today, our product is very close to coming out of alpha.We are hoping for a public beta release on the polygon PoS mainnet.
We can finally reveal what's going on behind the sense. We'll start with a bit of background, and then we'll jump into our ecosystem.
To make it easier to grasp, we combine real-world circumstances, blockchain, AI-generated art, and magical school story to re-introduce Affi Network to those who have never heard of us.
Chapter I: So dead yet so alive
Last year wasn't the best for the crypto league, with NFTs in the front community taking many hits, criticism, and even pure hatred! Unfortunately, many got scammed, projects rug-pulled, and games were never released, so they got all the rights to be furious.
The mess caused by NFT going mainstream too early, followed by various crypto crises, namely FTX, Celsius, and Three arrow ... People started focusing only on its finical aspect and buying a bunch of stuff without any primary research. The wild west of buying millions of dollars in uncertain assets is pushed away, and it's for the best as it allows the NFT community to focus on innovation and tech growth rather than promoting unrealistic values. one lousy dispatch leads to another, and we ended up here.
If we put the investment side away and keep an unbiased look at NFT offers, art, games, innovation, and potential are authentic.
Art, you say?
You might hear this one.NFT is not art, and it's just an image I can right-click and download, period.If that's what you think, you should check out works by artists like Pak , Beeple, and XCopy. They all have a unique style and art, people love their works, and their work may be praised years from now. But this time, there is a significant difference from traditional art. Verifying the authenticity of a specific author when it comes to NFT arts is a different story because the creator and author will stay on-chain forever.
Arguably there was no easier way for artists to sell their art globally, and get paid, allowing transferring ownership with ease, all verifiable on-chain. The reality is there is a new medium for artists welcoming everyone; many more will use it in upcoming years. If you search around, Jose Delbo, 89 years old DC and Marvel comic artist is also using NFT to share his art.
Community
Send and receive GMs every morning might not be your cup of tea, yet some people enjoy chatting with their friends daily. Some of these communities are hardcore fans. Azuki, BAYC, and y00ts, to name some. They support other members and feel they belong; arguably, they have stronger communities than IRC and old forum days, but they mostly live on discord, X, and telegram nowadays nowadays and call each other degen here and there.
Potential
Gaming and eSport companies like Ubisoft and GameStop are incorporating NFTs in their in-game purchases, where players can buy unique features like skins. NFTs are being used in various industries, such as automotive, fashion, luxury, retail, food and beverage, sports, entertainment, and music. NFTs create additional revenue for creators by tokenizing merchandise.
With the increasing popularity and adoption of blockchain technology, NFTs could revolutionize how we own and trade digital assets. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges to overcome, such as scalability, accessibility, and regulatory issues, before NFTs can fully realize their potential.
Chapter II: The problem
Now we talked about use cases and potential. Let's inspect the gap between the creation and publication of NFTs in the most straightforward form. Many artists and builders need help sharing their work with the community as they might need more audience or digital marketing skills. At the same time, advertisers and advertisement agencies have limited capacity to help creators.
To feel this gap, web2 companies like Upfluence, GRIN, Creator, and Impact have created excellent products to use a more recent variation of digital marketing called influencer marketing and work with people with influence in the required niche as an advertiser.
As crypto and NFT communities grow, the influencer marketing model makes more and more sense as we have so many cryptos and NFT influencers across different social media. However, the gap between them and the project still exists.
And that's where Affi Network Protocol comes in.
Chapter III: Affi network
Not only do we bring a solution for web3 equivalent, but also we improve previous models by so many innovations.Let's hear a story to understand how the Affi Network works, shall we? Our story is about a magical school headmaster who uses the NFT collection as a student id for each new-year student. Students require the NFT or can not pass the school gate guided by the school guardian dragon DGON. Let's start by introducing Ocarus school and main characters.
Welcome to the Ocarus Magic School
Ocarus Magic School
Outside school is more like a castle, which might give you the creep, but if you look carefully, you'll see nothing but beauty. The location is said to be somewhere in the land of blockchains.
Inside the school, it is warmer. The architecture of libraries, of course, is as magical.
Let us introduce you to the headmaster of the Ocarus, DGON the guardian dragon, Jill the student and Alen the publisher.
Headmaster, the Advertiser
Advertiser (agency, artist, builder): He is the magical school headmaster. Nobody knows his real name. People say he is hundreds of years old. This role can be a single artist, an advertisement agency, or a major gaming studio.
DGON, the Guardian
DGON, toasting anyone who comes around the gate without a valid NFT. DGON will read and validate the data from blockchain, cheating will lead to instant death. this role is equivalent to NFT gate protected apps in the real world.
Jill, the Consummer
Consumer (buyer): she is a highly talented magician. She wants to enroll in magic but needs to know the best. She trusts Alen's instincts. this role is equivalent to the consumers in the real world.
Alen, the Publisher
Publisher (influencer): His job is to research and find the best magical schools and share them with their followers. This role is equivalent to a person active on social media platforms, X, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. they talk about NFTs and crypto
All the students require to have an NFT card.
The Ocarus school uses blockchain-grade cryptography to ensure students don't use fake ids.
Besides magic, the headmaster (advertiser) enjoys blockchain time when he decides on the new year registration using an NFT gate guarded by DGON and dark blood magic.
As a magical school headmaster, he knows his best bet is Affi Network, he magically creates an ERC-1155 smart contract with a collection of student ids for the number of students you are willing to register this year. So you create a campaign. As soon as the contract was ready, he created a campaign on Affi Network.
What's going on here?
To simplify this, you have to think of it as creating a google or Facebook ad, but because Affi Network is dApp, it requires different inputs.
What happens behind the scenes is that you fulfill your campaign details, giving us your contact address, we keep a copy of your campaign off-chain, and you do three transactions.
- First, to deploy your smart contract, the Affi Network factory deploys a smart campaign contract and sets you as an owner.
- Second, to approve as much as you want to put on the pool, there is no max approval but the exact selected number.
- Last transaction is to deposit your campaign budget to the pool.
Our testnet has a cool feature allowing you to use a USDC or DAI faucet for your campaign. It's just a click. Unlike the traditional model, you have to deposit your whole campaign budget before your campaign is active and lock it for a period giving publishers (Alen) enough time to promote it. There is a reason for depositing the whole campaign budget because Affi Network uses a real-time, performance-based model, which will be discussed shortly.
Now there is Alen (publisher), whose job is to research and find the best magical schools; he talks about his finding on his social networks and is loved by all new upcoming students because he always told the truth in the past. Alen visits Affi Network time by time and finds out there is a new school to promote. After background research Alen finds out this school is one of the best opportunities for students, so he goes to the school campaign and mints a link as a publisher.
Behind the sense, Alen submits his wallet address to the headmaster campaign and registers himself as a publisher.
And finally, there is Jill (consumer). She wants to enroll in magic but needs to know which one is the best, but she trusts Alen's research because of his successful school finding history. She is excited to join the school and use Alen's link to enroll for the upcoming semester. Because Jill used Affi Network links and received a sweet cashback(discount). as soon as Jill purchases the Id cart NFT Alen gets paid, the headmaster enrollment list is updated, and Jill is officially registered. She doesn't have to be worried about getting toasted by DGON.
Jill can use her purchased NFT to pass DGON without getting toasted and start a new semester happily.
What was the difference between these and the traditional model? as magical as our magic school story.
What did we solve?
for all parties involved
- You, headmaster, did not pay a single more dollar to Alen than his enrolled student, pay-per-sale model
- Alen and Jail get paid automatically and instantly
- A successful zero-trust relationship between parties is shapen
from advertiser side
- Exaggerating their budget
- Not being satisfied with the result and not having enough conversion
from publisher side
- Not getting paid on time
- Exaggerating their influence and power
And about the element in the room? Bots, if you are watching this on X, you know how big of an issue bots are. Even though machine learning has advanced a lot in eliminating their damage, in terms of digital marketing, bots are more harmful and dangerous than ever.
However, The bot situation improved heavily after Elon musk took over X.
Because Affi Network monitors mints and traffic and pays per sale, traditional ad fraud and bots does not affect it. With community support, we are on the right track to changing the game.
Here is a list of features that makes Affi Network different.
Fully automated zero-trust relationship: Affi Network is a fully automated, pay-per-sale model, everything is transparent on the chain, and all payments are in real-time. Payment attribution is done using our protected bot wallet, and transaction proof are on-chain.
Stablecoin real-time pools: Moving influencer marketing to the blockchain, one of the most significant issues is the various blockchain platforms. They use the volatile asset, or they force using their native ERC-X token; Affi Network uses two of most historically stable coins, fiat-backed token USDC, decentralized backed by crypto over-collateralization DAI.
Mobile ready: Affi Network support mobile wallets, and it's optimized to work on mobile, meaning advertiser, publisher, and buyers can promote and earn using nothing but their phone.
Advanced privacy: our dApp platform does not log anything related to personal identity but your wallet address; we do not use google analytics or another logger in our dApp. Unless you are a project and want to get verified on our platform, you can be an anonymous marketing ninja.
Mindful craft: after two rounds of testing, one private testnet round, and one public round, we battle-tested our ecosystem on Mumbai to simulate our mainnet scaling and issues as much as possible we do our best to release a stable beta.
Modern tech stack: we are using a modern tech stack at affi network, allowing us to build and break stuff in short sprints; the complete underlying technology stack is detailed in our documentation.
Comprehensive documentation: we created a white paper and comprehensive platform docs guiding users with text and videos. Check it out here. It should be the place to get you started.
Simple, transparent revenue model and sharing: Affi network revenue model is designed to help the platform evolve and reward our early and upcoming backers fairly. All Affi Network Protocol fees are sent to our multi-sig treasury wallet. As soon as our token is released to the public, 50% of stablecoin revenue will be converted (purchased from the market to create natural volume) and shared with our holders. The complete details of our revenue model and sharing are available in our tokenomics page.
Chapter IV: At last
We are incredibly proud and grateful for the opportunity we have had building Affi Network so far, but we are just at the beginning. We did make a big move; now, we require the community to start taking over and guiding the forward direction.
Here is our current to-do list:
Mainnet launch: Soon, we will close our third and last round of public testing, get our critical contracts audited, and will launch on Polygon PoS mainnet, as our platform, by its nature, requires so many transactions we are carefully looking at zkEVM to be early migrators. We also work with legal teams to protect you and us while engaging with Affi Network.
Open-source: At the affi network, we believe open-source will lead the community to build mutual trust; we will start open-sourcing our ecosystem components with our mainnet launch. stay tuned and check our github and X.
Going beyond NFT: Affi Network's core idea was a generic decentralized web3 dApp. We scoped down our work to NFT to release an early version faster, allowing our early investors and community to see what we are cooking. Still, the core idea of Affi Network is far more generic, and we want to move towards it.
Towards DAO: Currently, the platform's revenue is controlled by a multi-sig wallet. We would love to allow all involved communities to take control, so we will move to snapshot sooner than later for big decisions (e.g., treasury withdraws).
Token and Staking: We will release a new set of contracts after a successful mainnet launch. The token will come first.
More decentralization: We are researching and looking for ways to cut down as many as centralized components possible, moving toward a total decentralized platform.
Community growth and partnerships: We have already talked to and gathered many NFT influencers and advertisers; getting closer to the mainnet launch, we need exponential community growth. We plan to release so many upcoming media talking to influencers and advertisers.
Conclusion
We build a fully automated crypto native, web3, dApp that builds jobs for influencers, a platform that doesn't evade privacy, pays in real-time, and pays only per conversation. Our platform is free-to-use globally and welcomes any tokenized assets. The system is trustless, meaning no party can play dirty. Still a big road ahead of us, but we hope this post gives you a heads-up on what's going on behind Affi Network. We would love to thank our early investors and the rest of the Affi Network team and community for their unconditional love and support so far, and we will try our best to keep building and releasing utopian stuff.