The Audius protocol proposes introducing a fully decentralized incentive system, known as ‘$AUDIO Rewards’. This system allows artists and fans on Audius to complete challenges in exchange for small amounts of $AUDIO, leveraging Solana’s high performance and low costs to put more $AUDIO in the hands of the grassroots community than ever before.
$AUDIO Rewards is the culmination of many months of team engineering work, building on existing entities in the Audius ecosystem and adding new ones, including a bridged SPL $AUDIO token on Solana.
The engineering work completed for Rewards establishes key technical infrastructure and paves the way for the development of monetization, although in itself it is not monetization : it is a system designed to provide small amounts of $AUDIO to many users and incentivize top-of-funnel activity.
This document provides a high-level overview of the Rewards system, the funding process and the governance proposals required to implement it. As a community member, it is up to you to decide through your votes whether or not this should be introduced to the network.
Further discussion can be found on the Governance Forum: https://gov.audius.org/t/proposing-audio-rewards-on-solana/307
Specification
SPL Token
Audius currently has nearly 400,000 accounts registered on-chain, all of which are eligible to complete multiple challenges and earn $AUDIO rewards. Due to the latency and costs associated with Ethereum transactions, it would be impossible to distribute rewards at this scale with our existing ERC-20 $AUDIO token.
For this reason, we have chosen to bridge the existing Ethereum token to Solana as SPL $AUDIO , using Portal Token Bridge . $AUDIO Rewards uses this SPL token internally, with the Audius.co client application making the distinction between the two tokens as seamless as possible.
Portal Token Bridge is a bidirectional bridge that allows users to freely convert assets between multiple chains. While a deep dive is beyond the scope of this document, users can use the bridge to move freely between ETH and SPL $AUDIO.
Solana already processes hundreds of thousands of Audius transactions every day, supporting key protocol features such as play counts. Establishing an SPL token is the next major step in integrating the protocol with the Solana ecosystem, enabling fast and inexpensive transfers of $AUDIO for $AUDIO Rewards and future monetization efforts.
Solana Programs
At the heart of $AUDIO Rewards are two new Solana programs: ClaimableTokens and RewardsManager . We partnered with Kudelski Security to rigorously audit and test these programs for security vulnerabilities.
Kudelski Security Assessment for the Audius Protocol
In addition, we also conducted a peer audit of both programs with developers from Alles ; these individuals were extremely helpful and we would like to thank @A2nkf and @CherryWorm for their careful scrutiny.
Claimable Tokens
ClaimableTokens is a Solana program that allows users to custody SPL $AUDIO tokens using their existing Ethereum-based Audius identity. By leveraging secp_2561k1 signature recovery, an Audius Protocol user can prove ownership of a claimable token Solana account and control their funds. Importantly, ClaimableToken accounts can be derived deterministically from a user’s existing Audius eth wallet, allowing the Audius Protocol to set up the correct accounts for users behind the scenes.
Rewards Manager
RewardsManager is a Solana program responsible for disbursing SPL $AUDIO to a user’s claimable token account upon receiving challenge completion from a consensus of Discovery Nodes. The program is also responsible for maintaining a list of valid Discovery Nodes (i.e., registered with the existing Eth-based ServiceProviderFactory contract ), which are trusted to attest to a user’s completion of a challenge.
Funding $AUDIO Rewards
With community approval, we propose as a starting point to fund the $AUDIO rewards system by adjusting the annual funding rate from 7% to 6%, allocating the additional 1% to the rewards system.
Since the staking system has been running for more than a year, we also propose setting a new base for annual rewards inflation at 1,070,000,000 tokens, an increase from the existing 1,000,000,000. With 6% inflation on the new base, this amounts to 64,200,000 tokens issued annually versus the current 70,000,000 per year.
As we learn more about the performance of these rewards programs, we can further adjust these parameters in the future.
These tokens will be distributed weekly as part of funding rounds and will be automatically transferred to the Rewards Manager through a new Ethereum contract, the EthRewardsManager . Described in more detail below in the Governance section, EthRewardsManager is responsible for receiving funds from the ClaimsManager contract via the governable communityPoolAddress, and then transferring those funds cross-chain to the Solana RewardsManager program via Portal Token Bridge.
Protecting the $AUDIO Rewards System
Wouldn’t it be great if we were all 🎶 just in it for the music 🎶?
While we are incredibly excited to get more rewards into the hands of our amazing community, the network must also be prepared to handle the malicious activity this system is likely to attract.
There are a variety of potential attack vectors to consider, from simple attacks, such as users controlling multiple accounts via scripts, to more sophisticated operations, such as Click Farms and Botnets . To combat these exploits, we are proposing a new off-chain service, the Anti Abuse Oracle , designed to safeguard the integrity of the rewards system in a decentralized way.
Community-operated Discovery Nodes and Anti Abuse Oracles work together to protect the $AUDIO Rewards system. Both types of nodes are responsible for attesting that a user has completed a challenge; this attestation takes the form of a Secp256k1 signature , produced by signing a string that uniquely identifies both the user and the challenge.
A Discovery Node will only attest to a challenge once its view of on-chain actions indicates that the challenge is complete.
An Anti Abuse Oracle takes as input the user’s identifier and some challenge-specific metadata, and produces a score representing the likelihood that the given user is abusive. The oracle will only produce an attestation if the score is above a certain threshold; otherwise, it will reject the user or prompt the application to request more information.
The criteria used by the Anti Abuse Oracle to identify malicious behavior are intentionally kept opaque. If these implementation details were widely known, bad actors would have a significant advantage in exploiting the rewards system.
This cat-and-mouse game is frequently seen on popular social media services such as Reddit and Instagram , where users try to reverse-engineer and game the ever-changing algorithms, sometimes to great effect.
We believe the rewards system is best secured if the oracle’s internals remain unknown to the general public, and the oracle’s operation and ongoing private development are managed by a decentralized group of community stewards, chosen transparently through community governance.
With a community mandate, we propose deploying a new contract, EthRewardsManager, which will register the Ethereum addresses of three oracles at launch. These three initial nodes will be operated by known and trusted protocol participants: Open Audio Foundation , Endline Network and Creator Seed .
The community will have the opportunity to ratify the inclusion of EthRewardsManager in the contract registry through the established governance process (more on that in the Governance section).
Once EthRewardsManager is deployed, Discovery Nodes on the Audius Protocol will periodically index the contract to stay up to date with the latest registered oracles.
To claim a reward, a user requests attestations from a quorum of Discovery Nodes and a single Anti Abuse Oracle, including the same Oracle address in each request to Discovery, which checks the provided Oracle against EthRewardsManager. When the user finally submits the collected attestations to the Solana Rewards Manager, the program verifies that the Discovery Node attestations originate from legitimate registered nodes, and that the included Oracle attestation matches the one attested by Discovery.
This approach ensures that every disbursed reward is attested by a known Anti Abuse Oracle, while giving the community flexibility to add and remove Oracles through governance.
Governance Proposals
To enable $AUDIO Rewards, we have submitted five governance proposals for the community’s consideration:
This proposal adds the Eth Rewards Manager contract to the contract registry. The Eth RewardsManager has two responsibilities:
- Maintain a governable list of Anti Abuse Oracle addresses, which are indexed by Discovery Node
- Act as the recipient of funds from communityPoolAddress and send the tokens through Portal to fund the RewardsManager Solana program.
This proposal adds the Wormhole Client contract to the contract registry. Wormhole Client is an Eth contract that allows Audius users to swap their ERC-20 $AUDIO for SPL audio via the Portal bridge.
This proposal calls the updateCommunityPoolAddress method of ClaimsManager to point communityPoolAddress to the ethRewardsManager contract, in order to receive weekly funding at the start of the round.
- Update communityFundingAmount from 0 Wei
This proposal calls the updateRecurringCommunityFundingAmount method of ClaimsManager to update the weekly funding amount. With community approval, the 1% annual inflation will be allocated entirely to the rewards system through the community.
Given the current token pool of 1,070,000,000 tokens, this amounts to an additional 10,700,000 tokens per year, or 10,700,000 / 365 * 7 = 205,205.4794520548 tokens (205205479452054800000000 Wei) weekly.
- Update recurring funding amount from 1342465753420000000000000 Wei
This proposal calls the updateFundingAmount method of ClaimsManager to update the recurring funding amount from 7% annually to 6%, to account for the additional 1% in community funding. Using the current token pool of 1,070,000,000 tokens, this works out to 64,200,000 tokens annually, or 64,200,000 / 365 * 7 = 1,231,232.8767123288 tokens (1231232876712328800000000 wei) weekly, down from the existing value of 1342465753420000000000000 WEI weekly.
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