Rewarding Users for Social Activity on Twitter and Telegram
By: Shahul Hameed
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Airdrop, Rewards, Twitter, Telegram

We recently started rewarding users with Origin Tokens for following Origin and sharing featured content on social media. You can now earn up to 100 OGN for each piece of featured content you share.

One unique feature of our social sharing program is that you can be rewarded more for having a large number of followers and a well-aged account. Thousands of users have already verified their social media profiles through our rewards program, making it easy for us to calculate weighted rewards.

With that in place, we were left with only one question: How do we verify that the user has actually shared the featured content or followed us?

Verifying User Activity with Twitter

Origin Bridge is a core component in our infrastructure that bridges the gap between other Origin components and any third-party API. Twitter’s Account Activity API provides real-time activities of an authorized account. We extended the capability of Origin Bridge to expose a webhook that receives and processes the events sent by Twitter.

A core belief at Origin is the need to put the user first and respect their privacy. We were not keen on the idea of subscribing to the firehose of all our users’ activities on Twitter. We also didn’t want to hurt our usability by having to ask users to authorize additional permissions. Instead, we decided to keep it simple and just subscribe to the activities of Origin Protocol’s official Twitter account.

Using Account Activity API to reward users for following and sharing

When anyone follows @OriginProtocol on Twitter or mentions @OriginProtocol in a tweet, Twitter posts this activity to Origin’s Bridge server. Origin’s Marketplace app can then check Origin Bridge to verify the user’s activity. Once an activity is verified, our users will be rewarded with Origin Tokens.

Telegram Group Activity Subscription

Similar to Twitter, we also wanted to reward users who joined us on Telegram. Our approach is similar. We subscribe to our Telegram group’s activities. When any user joins the group, the activity gets posted to Origin Bridge and once the activity is verified, the user is rewarded with a share of Origin Tokens.

Using Telegram Bot to listen to user activities in a Telegram Group

However, there is no direct way to subscribe to a Telegram group’s activities. We ended up using Telegram’s Bot API to create a new bot that posts the user activities from the Telegram group to Origin Bridge.

What about Facebook?

We had plans to rewards users the same way on Facebook but Facebook’s Terms of Use doesn’t permit us to reward users for promoting content or a Facebook page. However, you are still encouraged to share our featured content on Facebook and spread the word.

Conclusion

In the end, we now have a reliable way to verify and reward our users’ activity related to Origin on social networks. Already, hundreds of users have followed our social media accounts and promoted our featured content since we introduced this feature a few weeks back.

So far, Twitter seems to be the most popular platform among our users but Telegram and Facebook aren’t far behind. We hope to expand this further to support other popular social networks giving our users even more ways to earn Origin Tokens.

Sign up for Origin Rewards and start earning OGN today!

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