🧑‍🌾ERC20 Campaigns and Applications

With Merkl, you can create what we call ERC20 campaigns - campaigns where users are rewarded based on their time-weighted balance of a token.

These campaigns, in their simplest form, are equivalent to classical StakingRewards contracts and can serve a wide range of use cases: providing liquidity in constant product formula decentralized exchanges (like Uniswap V2). With Merkl forwarding technology, this simple mechanism can be extended to seamlessly support rewarding tokens staked in periphery contracts or blacklisting some addresses.

ERC20 Campaign Design

In Merkl ERC20 Campaigns, users holding an ERC20 token - that is incentivized by an incentive provider - in their wallets are rewarded based on their token balance. Reward distribution is proportional to the percentage of the total token supply a user holds.

For example, if a user holds 1% of the total token supply for a period of time, they are eligible for 1% of the reward pool for this period of time.

Customizability Hooks

When creating a campaign, Merkl incentive providers have the possibility to specify some hooks to modify the default behavior of their campaign. They can typically choose to blacklist or whitelist some specific addresses that should not or should be the only ones receiving rewards. Or they can choose to enable forwarders to allow users to earn rewards even if the incentivized asset is not directly present in their wallet (because they staked it in another contracts).

Hooks come particularly handy for ERC20 campaigns as they can enrich and extend over what would be possible with a classical onchain StakingRewards behavior.

For more details on customizability hooks, please refer to this page.

Applications

The advantage of ERC20 campaigns is that they can cover a wide range of different use cases. Technically, all the protocols that give their users a receipt token when they deposit into it or take action with it are by default supported within Merkl, ensuring that users participating in different activities can earn rewards.

This notably applies to:

• constant product AMMs (like Uniswap V2): any incentivizer can use Merkl to incentivize Liquidity Providers on a Uniswap V2 or Sushiswap pool based on how much liquidity they provide with respect to others

• lending and borrowing protocols that emit receipt and debt tokens (i.e., ERC20 tokens) when users lend and borrow: lenders can be rewarded based on how much they lend over time, or borrowers based on how much they borrow relative to others

Not all lending and borrowing protocols issue ERC20 receipt or debt tokens when you borrow from them. These protocols require a custom integration within Merkl. You can find more details on these dedicated lending and borrowing campaigns here.

It is important to note that for the constant product AMMs and lending and borrowing protocols that issue receipt tokens, we still strongly recommend you to be fully supported by Merkl. There are some cases otherwise where the Merkl API may not be able to correctly compute the APR and TVL of the pools being incentivizing, and with a full Merkl integration this can all be solved seamlessly.

If you want your Constant Product AMM, or lending and borrowing protocol to be fully integrated and supported by Merkl, or to create tailored protocol-campaigns (as we did for Silo and Radiant), please contact us on the Merkl Discord by opening a BD ticket to discuss the integration process. Integration allows APRs and TVL calculations.

Some of the fully supported lending and borrowing protocols on Merkl include Compound, Gearbox, Sturdy, Aave, Ionic. For the constant product AMMs: Uniswap V2, Balancer V2, Velodrome V2, Aerodrome V2 and Quickswap V2 are all fully supported.

Additionally, some lending/borrowing protocols may want to be able to offer more tailored incentives (e.g., incentivize lenders while blacklisting those who fold their liquidity). In this case as well, we recommend a dedicated integration, as we did for Silo and Radiant.