# Quest Love: A First Look at Blockchain LoyaltyPrograms

Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.18810
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Quest-Love-A-First-Look-at-Blockchain-LoyaltyPrograms?index=0x67f76a529c7d55e84515cc64586b6c2c4f849429ca4f103dc3b2601ec3ec108d5dd98020
Submitted by misha on 2025-04-10 UTC, 1 upvote, 2 comments

## Summary

Joseph Al-Chami and Jeremy Clark analyze a proprietary dataset from one deployed blockchain quest system, which offers small rewarded tasks that ecosystems use to engage users. The dataset covers 43 unique quests offered over 10 months, with 80M completions. The authors identify amount of reward, monetary value of reward, difficulty, and cost as factors that correlate with task completion, and they also discuss farming and bots and the difficulty of distinguishing real users from automated scripts.

## Article

Quest Love: A First Look at Blockchain Loyalty Programs

Authors: Joseph Al-Chami, Jeremy Clark

Blockchain ecosystems -- such as those built around chains, layers, and services -- try to engage users for a variety of reasons: user education, growing and protecting their market share, climbing metric-measuring leaderboards with competing systems, demonstrating usage to investors, and identifying worthy recipients for newly created tokens (airdrops). A popular approach is offering user quests: small tasks that can be completed by a user, exposing them to a common task they might want to do in the future, and rewarding them for completion. In this paper, we analyze a proprietary dataset from one deployed quest system that offered 43 unique quests over 10 months with 80M completions. We offer insights about the factors that correlate with task completion: amount of reward, monetary value of reward, difficulty, and cost. We also discuss the role of farming and bots, and the factors that complicate distinguishing real users from automated scripts.

## Comments

**misha**: > In early 2024, a new blockchain launched their quest system. 1.2M users showed up. 80M quests were completed. It looked successful... Until 93.5% of users vanished after the airdrop with a negative retention rate: -0.183% But after adding token rewards, RR rose slightly to 0.59% (still very low). What’s behind this user behaviour?

TLDR version of the research paper here: https://xcancel.com/JosephALChami/status/1904558501378048248#m


**macbudkowski.eth**: There's literally a whole Quest Industrial Complex where you raise money, build a product, pay quest platform for some fake traffic to raise another bigger round, and you can keep going to sleep in 5 star hotels in Cannes and give talks on being an Ethereum builder.