Eric Siu breaks down how Avalanche's $180M incentive program attracted major DeFi projects like Curve and Aave by paying them to build on the network. He compares the strategy to Uber and Lyft subsidizing rides to create word-of-mouth growth and network effects.
It's, A, you create a great product, you create a great user experience. And the other thing is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Right. From that, I think we got a huge flywheel of marketing and word-of-mouth marketing. Right. You know, really helped build the community there. I think this is not really much of a secret, but the Avalanche Rush incentive program, that was a $180 million incentive program that brought over the likes of Curve and Aave and all these DeFi blue chips. Right. And, you know, I think that the parallel there is, you know, if you look at companies like Uber and Lyft, right, in the early days, they kind of subsidized ride to capture market share. And, you know, in DeFi and crypto, it's actually not that different, right? You need to give people an incentive to come over. And once they're over onto the Avalanche network, then there's a whole host of other things native to Avalanche that they can explore. So just 2, I think, really sort of good examples. Yeah, very, very effective for us. That's slightly different from conventional marketing, but also had a really big effect on the Avalanche network and its growth.
