[Exodus] GCGP-Bridge Grant Bi-weekly Report [17-09-2024]

  1. Executive Summary
  • Overview of roadmap progress

Since the last update, the trading competition has concluded. In its final week, the Exodus and gTrade teams continued to communicate with one another and market the competition as shown below:

  • KPI achievements or impactful highlights

As mentioned in the prior report, one of the expressed goals of the campaign was to give Exodus mobile users, particularly those who are yet to connect to dApps, an incentive to do so.

The data below provides an overview of the campaign and highlights participation from first-time users. Note that while many first-time users did launch gtrade (17k+), a much lower percentage went on to make trades. Commentary on this can be found later in the report.

That said, those that did were mostly new users and collectively powered a sizeable amount of volume ($97,523,995.97).

KPI Figure
Campaign impressions stats* 43.5k
# of new dApp browser user to launch gTrade 17k
# of new users (first-time gTrade users through Exodus)* 39
% of new users (first-time gTrade users through Exodus)* 73%
No. of participants (unique wallet addresses) 53
Trade volume $97,523,995.97
# of trades 816

*NB This is the no. of impressions across Exodus’ Twitter, Instagram and Reddit posts.

  • Analytics such as Dune Dashboards

See above.

  1. Grant Objectives & Goals
  • List of specific objectives and goals

Grow activity on Arbitrum for Exodus Mobile Wallet and gTrade users.

  1. Strategies
  • Describe strategies employed to achieve the objectives
  • Details of collaborations or partnerships involved

As explained in the prior report (found here), Exodus leveraged most of its marketing tools, including in-app notifications and banners, its social media channels and its newsletter. Partnering with the Gains team on marketing also helped to amplify the campaign’s reach.

  1. Challenges
  • Identification of encountered obstacles
  • Discussion on how these challenges were addressed

There were some technical challenges regarding attribution and front-end display which were resolved before launch.

During the competition, however, the gains team found a bug affecting one of the in-app banners. It meant that the ‘exclusive offer’ tab was visible when searched - but not when initially opening the dApp browser. It was something that could only be resolved in the next fortnightly update, which was unfortunately the same day the competition ended.

This doesn’t appear to have impeded the competition’s success, however. As mentioned above, while conversion was low, awareness was high with many users still launching gtrade. As shown in the previous report, the in-app banner and push notifications helped to market the competition to existing users despite this bug affecting the flow.

  1. Impact
  • Summary of major accomplishments
  • Quantitative and qualitative results achieved
  • Community engagement

Social Metrics and Commentary

On Twitter in particular the Exodus team received a lot of replies about this competition. These were unanimously hyping up the event and praising the partnership, etc. Yet, there were none asking how the promo worked which makes it difficult to unpick what was driving the low conversion rate. That said, posts were also linking gTrade’s Medium article on how the competition worked which was fairly comprehensive.

Twitter 21k impressions 510 engagements
Facebook / Instagram 1.5k impressions 32 engagements.
Reddit 21k 1 engagement

Participation Metrics and Commentary

Overall, awareness of the competition was high amongst existing users with around 112k+ viewing in-app banners and 17k+ launching gTrade as a result. However as mentioned in prior sections, conversion was relatively low with fewer users going on to trade.

Still, those that did participate were relatively active generating $97,523,995.97 in volume from 816 trades.

More on this below:

Trade count: 816
Trade volume: 97,523,995.97
Trader PnL: -59,304.63
Median trades: 3

Reflecting on why the conversion rate was not higher, confusion around how the competition worked seems unlikely since neither the Exodus support team nor its social media channels received many questions. This is unusual compared with other features and similar marketing. The prizes were also significant enough to generate a fair amount of participation amongst those who did trade.

Anecdotally, from speaking to new users who attempted the competition, some of the conversion issues may be due to more long-standing issues new or novice crypto users face when attempting to either use crypto assets or dApps for the first time. These include, for example, issues getting gas on particular networks, needing to swap into specific tokens at low minimums (in this case to be used as collateral) - or, for complete newbies (one of which we spoke to) figuring out how to get a wallet and begin using a specific dApp. For this user, the idea of making leveraged trades on different assets was exciting but they had no idea how to get a wallet let alone the other steps that come along with this.

  1. Financial Summary
  • Overview of funds received

None. Gains Network has distributed $ARB to winning participants.

  • Detailed expenditure breakdown

The entire budget of 20,000 ARB was utilized for distribution among the top 20 profitable traders on Exodus Mobile Wallet.

All other expenses were covered by both teams internally as the tools to prepare the technicals and marketing were available in-house.

  1. Lessons Learned & Takeaways

Design is at the heart of what Exodus does as a company. A key takeaway from the competition, we feel, is investigating what could improve the user experience for those wanting to use dApps for the first time and thereby improve conversion rates.

On this, we’ve recently launched a passkeys wallet which allows prospective dApp users to create a new wallet in one click (https://passkeys.foundation/).

We’re also scoping out other design ideas to grow the DeFi ecosystem and bring in new users. Another that could have a positive impact is detailed walkthrough videos to ensure any confusion around how to take action can be eliminated. We’ve seen a lot of success with this content on our YouTube Channel for example (https://www.youtube.com/c/exodus).