Fueling Network Effects: How Send Uses Onchain Incentives to Grow

One of Send’s most powerful growth engines since launch has been our rewards program. By distributing SEND tokens to early adopters and active users, we’ve managed to grow a robust community and bring tens of thousands of new users into our app. In this post, we’ll look at how the rewards program has evolved, highlight key successes, and explain our plans for the future.

The Story So Far: 12 Rounds of SEND Distributions

From September of our inaugural year through February of this year, we’ve completed 12 distributions of SEND tokens to reward community members. Early distributions rewarded holders simply for holding SEND, while later rounds emphasized onchain activity such as sending, referring, and registering Sendtags. These efforts ultimately drove engagement and brought new users to the platform.

Key highlights across all distributions:

• Number of Distributions: 12
• Total SEND Distributed: 41,396,327
• Total Value Distributed: $697,422

Notable Examples:

• Distribution #1 (September Holder Rewards): 7,171,007 SEND at an approximate value of $54,499
• Distribution #4 (March Holder Rewards): 6,185,087 SEND at $247,403 in value — the first time we saw a major jump in per-token valuation.
• Distribution #10 (December Activity Rewards): 5,000,000 SEND at $50,000 — highlighting our shift toward rewarding onchain activity.
• Distribution #12 (February Activity Rewards): 3,000,000 SEND at $22,500 — marking our most recent distribution and another step toward evolving the program.
• Each of these distributions has a transaction record on Ethereum or Base, ensuring full transparency and letting the community track the movement of SEND tokens onchain.

The Program Right Now: Rewarding Activity That Builds the Network

At the moment, these four user activities qualify for activity rewards:

• Registering a Sendtag – (The only activity generating direct revenue for Send today, with 75% going to affiliates.)
• Holding a Minimum Amount of SEND – Encourages users to hold, supporting the token’s stability and liquidity.
• Referring Others – Classic word-of-mouth growth, boosted by onchain transparency.
• Sending SEND – Keeping the ecosystem active and pushing transaction volume.

Why These Rewards Mattered

1. Bootstrapping Usage and Community

In the early days of any network, the biggest challenge is the “bootstrap problem”: How do you attract enough users to make the network valuable before it’s reached meaningful scale? Borrowing from Chris Dixon’s insight on open networks, we realized that tokens offer a powerful way to align incentives among participants. If you participate early, you earn part of the network. As more users join, the token’s value can increase — creating a virtuous cycle:

Rewards → More Users → More Revenue → Stronger Token → More Rewards

This flywheel helped Send attract its first wave of users. People came for the token rewards, stuck around for the seamless sending and will discover our expanding features like Swaps and Earn.

2. Demonstrating Affiliate Marketing Onchain

One unexpected benefit was a proof of concept that affiliate marketing works onchain. By paying out tokens to users performing or referring valuable actions, we replicated the effect of a traditional affiliate or referral program — but in a fully onchain, transparent manner. The data is out there for anyone to analyze via tools like Dune Analytics

The Program Evolves: Reward What Truly Benefits the Network

As we move forward, we’re shifting from a simple “hold SEND or do an activity” model to rewarding actions that give back to the network. In other words, we want people to “game” the system if it means:

• Depositing assets that generate yield. (Send Earn)
• Swapping on our platform, which drives volume and fees. (Send Swap)
• Exploring new revenue-generating products that align well with community incentives.

This evolution is natural and expected. As we refine our product offerings (and add new ones), the rewards will evolve alongside them. Much like Chris Dixon wrote about token networks in general, the token model is most powerful when it rewards participants for making the whole network stronger.

Inspired By Chris Dixon: Tokens as a New Way to Build Open Networks

Chris Dixon’s article on tokens is a great primer on how open, token-powered systems can level the playing field for newcomers. In past eras of the internet, open protocols like email and the web emerged because government and university funding fueled them — making them public goods. But that left them at an architectural disadvantage when massive proprietary platforms (think Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google) rose to dominance.

Tokens help solve this by:

• Allowing Networks to Finance Themselves: SEND tokens have funded the reward distributions, which in turn drew users into our ecosystem without a single centralized entity pulling all the strings.
• Aligning All Participants: Instead of seeing developers, operators, and users each competing for value, tokens unify them around a shared goal: growing the platform.
• Overcoming the Bootstrap Problem: Distributing tokens early offsets the risk of joining a new network. Users were rewarded at a time when the platform’s utility was still nascent.

In Dixon’s words, “Tokens are a breakthrough in open network design that enable new ways to incentivize open network participants, including users, developers, investors, and service providers.” Send’s journey has been a live case study in exactly that.

What’s Next for SEND Rewards

Further Aligning Rewards With Revenue-Generating ActionsWe’ll continue to reward deposits, Earn usage, and meaningful swaps. If a user action helps the Send ecosystem generate fees or attract new capital, we want to incentivize it.

Flexible & Frequent DistributionAs we saw in the conversation around daily rewards, smaller, more frequent pay-outs might keep users more engaged — much like a “credit card points” system. We’re exploring how to implement this without losing the simplicity and transparency people love.

Transparent, Data-Driven IterationAll of this will remain onchain, with publicly viewable transaction hashes and real-time stats available on

Dune Analytics or other blockchain explorers. We’ll keep iterating based on what the data tells us.

Balancing Growth and SustainabilityWe’ve reached a point of scale where continuing to pay out large monthly sums solely for “holding” is no longer sustainable. The network has matured enough that real usage (deposits, swaps, Earn) should take precedence. We’ll keep adjusting the supply of token rewards and the structure of payouts to ensure the long-term health of the ecosystem.

Conclusion

Our reward program at Send has been a powerful catalyst, successfully bootstrapping user adoption and proving out affiliate marketing onchain. It was never meant to stay static: as we grow, we’ll keep evolving how we reward users to ensure we’re incentivizing the most productive behaviors for the network.

We owe a debt to the ideas that Chris Dixon and others have laid out about how tokens can re-introduce openness and innovation to a web once overshadowed by Big Tech. As we continue refining our program, we’re proud to stand at the forefront of that shift — using open network incentives to create a platform that grows through real usage, real utility, and a passionate community.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you to everyone who’s been part of the Send journey so far!

Have questions or feedback on our rewards program? Join the conversation on our official social channels or check out the real-time data on Dune Analytics. We’re excited to build the future of onchain finance together.

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