Sharing is caring

Let me start from a mild joke. ‘, as everyone knows, but you really act in a caring way when you share an invite link with your friend or colleague? It really depends on the project: if one has a ‘healthy’ referral program, it’s a win-win. But how many good partner programs are there? Are there any good examples at all? Let’s look into that and find out if Nominex is to change this unpleasant tradition.

The Genesis

Our first step is not 2020 but rather some mid-2014. That is when Ethereum ICO started pulling together. The world of crypto was nearly nonexistent, driven by a bunch of crazed and extremely inspired enthusiasts who were dreaming of changing the world reasonably fast. All crypto was about community then: projects were started by group initiatives, financed from their own pockets and marketed in old-school chats and web boards, Bitcointalk and Github mostly.

Money or, to be precise, crypto. In 2014, the majority of coins and tokens was not bought, it was mined. Supporting a Bitcoin node wasn’t a business then, rather a hobby as mining cost were low, so was the complexity, and initial BTCs had a ‘production cost’ of dollars, not thousands like today. Their owner rarely intended to monetize anyway. For them, crypto on hand was a fuel to facilitate some ongoing developments, no matter if the project was ‘their’ or run by someone else — people generally aimed for the greater good.

ICOs, boiler rooms and hamster milking

It took two years to get that crypto is the new Klondike. By 2017, crypto market started skyrocketing. ICOs went nearly non-stop with as many as 30 new projects offering their precious tokens to the public every day. Token buyers expected nothing but ‘xses’, meaning two-fold or even hundred-fold increases in prices. Greed led to a massive FOMO syndrome (stands for ‘fear of missing out’), and newbies started jumping into dozens of project without actually studying them properly.

That’s when the meaning of community got seriously compromised… On multiple occasions we saw project chat rooms turning into full-scale boiling rooms with moderators pumping interest of all recently joined members. Those inexperienced and naive people were clinically called hamsters whose only purpose was to bring in more money and be cut to the bones. Pre-sale, early sale and other discounts were to speed up the process, most communities failed to create real integrity and use.

The community of a healthy person

What can a crypto community really do and what is its ultimate purpose? First, there are developers’ communities. Historically, those were mind- and idea-sharing clubs where coders exchanged opinions on particular programming solutions. With a very minor money or token incentive, those allowed to actually stress-test new products, find weak spots and eliminated possible hacking entry points.

Users’ communities are as important as they allow to actually make the product better. Real users test the service and provide feedback of the interface, help run beta  and deliver comparative analysis of peer products. Most importantly, end-users use the service for money, thus, users drive any business.

Why referral programs work better

Decent affiliate partner programs are nearly absent in the crypto world. The market is clearly in deficit for good marketing specialists who really understand the beauty of referral programs. There are several good examples, thought, that we are glad to share:

• Trezor, a hardware wallet that allows you to safely store your crypto offline. The projects affiliate program offers a 12-15% commission for referrals.
• Changelly is a popular cryptocurrency exchanger used by over 2mn people. They offer 50% commissions for all referred users.
• CryptoTrader.Tax. Tax calculators got some use ever since the IRS rolled out its official cryptocurrency tax guidance. By simply connecting exchange accounts via API keys or through CSV imports, users can generate their reports. The project offers a 25% lifetime commission affiliate programy.

How, why and how much

Why do referral programs work better than a bomb-throwing type of advertising? First of all, it is way more targeted. People listen to people, and the word gets to those who might be interested in the product per se, thus the funnel is way more effective.

On top of that, recommending something good is actually worth doing. If you find the product being of high quality, there is no reason for not passing the knowledge to your friend. So, the more user satisfaction the service creates, the higher is probability of a referral link being sent to a friend.

But at the end of the day, the most important thing is community. You want to be surrounded by decent people who share your views and can bounce back a smart comment of the market or discuss the most recent trades. So it comes quite natural that those people form solid trading communities.

For a crypto exchange, this mean a sort of feedback you can’t put a price tag on. Shall we list a new token? Let’s ask our existing clients if they are interested in this particular name! What is good or bad about our trust management program? Our clients will give their most straightforward answers in the chat.

And once you have all these benefits already, there is a way for saying ‘thank you’ to people who brought all these users onboard: paying a referral fee! So, no harm done, on the contrary, everyone wins.

Nominex

So once you look outside the crypto industry, there’s many fish in the sea when it comes to affiliate partnerships. But the world of digital money can’t cope with other industries in terms of referral initiatives, the choice is pretty scarce. We in Nominex chose not to create yet another boring ‘program’ and made ours truly revolutionary.

Why? We see it this way: cryptocurrency is more than Bitcoin in relation to the dollar. It’s a lifestyle. We want to return crypto to a friendly, positive, intriguing context, creating an approach we named ‘entertading’ and lining up a series of useful products, the referral program involved.

We tailored it smartly. First of all, the structure is a binary tree, a one with no precedent in the market and an unlimited number of possible levels. Effectively, this means you can have not two or three but a hundred, or a million levels in your referral structure. Thus, the tree makes you able to grow income with no further efforts at all. 

Spillovers will help you get new people in the tree, ones you never knew. Potentially, this is a stand-alone business of its own where you make no input and just collect rewards. Once you get enough NMX tokens to maintain your program status, you will earn up to 5-10% of all commissions made by your referral members.

You as a trader can enjoy all benefits of the product itself, i.e. the exchange, and instantly collect extras from all activities of your teammates. There are many side benefits, like bonus cards that give points and rewards as well. And you do contribute to building a community!