The referral program I shipped in the last update had a problem. Bringing a friend to HivePredict got you a quarter of the fee on their bets for 90 days, and then it stopped. So the people you most want to bring in, the ones who stick around and keep playing, stopped earning you anything three months later. The suggestion was simple: keep 25% each for the first 90 days, then give the referrer a smaller cut for good. That's what I've built, plus a fix for a bigger leak I found along the way.
If you haven't tried it: you predict outcomes on real-world events (crypto, sport, Hive itself), stakes go into a shared pool, and whoever called it right splits the losing side. Log in with Keychain or HiveSigner. No signup, no email.
Referrals that don't run out
Your invite link is on your dashboard, and the share button on any market adds it for you. When someone follows it and places their first bet, you're recorded as their referrer on-chain. From there:
- First 90 days: you get 25% of the fee on their bets, and so do they, as a rebate. Same as before.
- After 90 days: you keep 20% of the fee on their bets for as long as they keep betting. Their rebate ends at 90 days.
In real numbers: the fee is 3% of the pool, so every 100 HIVE your friend stakes carries about 3 HIVE of fee. You get 0.75 HIVE of that in the first 90 days, and 0.60 HIVE every time after that. One friend who bets 100 HIVE a week is worth about 30 HIVE a year to you once they're past the first three months, and that doesn't stop at a year.
None of this costs anyone extra. It all comes out of the platform's share of the fee, so bettors pay exactly what they paid before and creator commission doesn't change.
Tipping counts too
Monthly tipping competitions didn't pay referral rewards at all before. Now they do. A friend's 25 HIVE entry earns you a share of the competition's platform fee on the same terms: 25% each for 90 days, then 20% to you.
New to Hive? Your invite no longer gets lost
This was the bigger leak. HivePredict needs a Hive account to be at least 30 days old, with some reputation and a few posts, before it can bet. That's there to stop people spinning up throwaway accounts, and it isn't going anywhere. But it meant anyone brand new to Hive couldn't place a bet for a month, and the referral only lived in the browser they first clicked your link in. By the time they could bet, it was usually gone.
Now, when someone signs in after following an invite link and hasn't bet yet, a bar under the menu offers to save the invite to their Hive account. One click and one signature, and it's on-chain. The 90 days still start from their first bet, not from the day they saved it, so nobody loses time waiting to be allowed in.
XP and levels
Someone else suggested a level system, mostly for fun and bragging rights. They wanted XP for every HIVE bet, doubled on a win. I went a different way, because that rewards whoever stakes the most, and HivePredict has spending limits and self-exclusion for a reason. I'm not going to build a counter that cheers you on for betting bigger.
So XP is for taking part and calling it right:
- 10 XP for every resolved market you bet on, and 15 more if you won it
- 25 XP for every market you created that resolved
- 10 XP for every tipping competition you finish, plus 2 XP per correct tip
- 50 XP for every friend you refer who places their first bet
Betting 1 HIVE or 1,000 HIVE earns the same. Voided markets earn nothing, and betting both sides of a market gets you the 10 XP but never the win.
Each level needs 100 XP more than the last: level 2 at 100 XP, level 3 at 300, level 4 at 600, level 10 at 4,500. Your level and a breakdown of where your XP came from are on your profile, and there's a new XP board on the leaderboard for the week, the month or all time.
XP is worked out from what's already on-chain, so everything you've done since HivePredict launched already counts. Go and look at your profile. A few of you are higher than you'd expect.
For builders
The new operation is hivepredict_claim_referrer with {"referrer": "username"}, signed by the account being referred. It's only honoured before that account's first bet or tipping entry. XP is at /api/users/:username/xp, and the leaderboard takes board=xp. Everything is listed in the API manifest.
If you've got an idea like these two, leave it in the comments. Both of today's changes started there.