Ideation [SCP-173] Updating and renewing [SCP-65] We FOX’ed up Campaign for Support
Summary
The goal of this proposal is to empower Support (the Operations Workstream) with an additional budget of FOX per month reserved for use on potential user experience issues that would result in a refund to the user, and as a retention tool during support engagement with ShapeShift users.
While ShapeShift already has an existing ToS with language ultimately designed to protect the DAO against any refund responsibility, this proposal provides additional resources to the DAO to protect and retain ShapeShift users that may have had a bad experience due to a malfunction or unintended behavior in a ShapeShift product.
Abstract
This proposal revisits a campaign first proposed and passed to resolve issues and provide a better support experience for users. This campaign was in practice last at the DAO under the previous Support Workstream for 4 months before the wallet storing the funds was compromised and drained .
As Operations has inherited support responsibilities at the DAO, there have been a small number of edge cases discovered where users have had unnecessary transaction failures, or refunds of trades that were due to bugs in ShapeShift’s code and not the protocols integrated. Operations hopes to revisit the previous ‘We FOXed up’ campaign with Operations security best practices and sybil resistant tracking and monitoring of all claims and refunds.
The recent passing of the Operations Workstream renewal comes with the smallest and most conservative budget it has ever had with only room to refund users from the monthly test fund budget currently allocated for the whole DAO. The renewal states:
“If network conditions or the price of FOX decreasing dramatically alters or changes Operations ability to perform required deployment and regression testing, an additional proposal addendum for test funds may be proposed.”
While this request is not specifically for test funds, it would have ultimately been deducted from DAO test funds and could trigger an Operations test fund increase proposal if not supported in an individual proposal here.
‘We FOXed up’ budget can additionally be used to incentivize, retain, and/or show appreciation for users that provide feature requests, have unexpected experiences with ShapeShift, or have an experience with the platform, DAO, or support that is worth recognition or acknowledgement with a little FOX.
Motivation:
Currently if a user performs a Thorchain trade that fails due to slippage or market movement and they were assessed an affiliate fee for using ShapeShift, that user is not refunded the affiliate fee as a feature of the protocol. ShapeShift still collects that fee but the user is issued a refund minus the gas used to broadcast transactions and the affiliate fee ShapeShift will collect later.
In edge cases like this or numerous others where a user can provide blockchain evidence that a ShapeShift built action caused a failure in a transaction, unnecessary gas fees, excessive unnecessary approvals, or any other blockchain related failure or reversion, ShapeShift has the evidence necessary to verify and validate if a user is owed a refund.
Being leaders in non-custodial services comes with ‘use at your own risk’ warning labels. While this proposal does not supersede any of those sentiments, terms or policies previously put in place, it does allow the DAO to provide a better user experience and retention tool as a resource via support where it previously did not.
Specification:
This proposal requests an addition of $1500 in FOX per month to be added to the current Operations Workstream budget. All unused funds will roll over and accumulate. Any unused funds may be returned to the DAO at the end of the Operations term or rolled over in a renewal.
Refund tracking and management will be able to be viewed in the Operations Notion page tracking all eligible refunds as well as users who have received FOX as a retention tool.
- Funds will be sent monthly and stored in the Operations Workstream Colony address and withdrawn/converted only when a refund is required.
- Refunds and FOX incentivization transactions are to be solely administered by the Operations Workstream Lead from the DAO Operations test funds wallet.
- Tracking information for every transaction includes on-chain transactions of the exchange in question, support tickets, date, amounts, and TXIDs of refunds.
- Refunds will always be sent in the native asset and asset amount to the sending address provable from the blockchain link of the problem transaction(s) in question.
- Gas fees for failed transactions deserving a refund can be additionally tracked and refunded at Operations discretion.
- Terms of Service can still be applied to any specific user issue and this proposal passing does not guarantee refunds to any failure.
- Slippage and natural market conditions that can cause transaction failure are not viewed as caused by ShapeShift.
- Users or addresses caught attempting to abuse or game any refund program will be exempt from future refunds.
Benefits
The major benefit to this proposal is in potential user retention of users that have a bad experience in ShapeShift. It also provides a manual resource to Operations to provide refunds to users in situations where ShapeShift will collect fees on failed trades.
Drawbacks
An additional $1500 worth of FOX will be added to the monthly Operations budget. This proposal will also increase an area of Operations admin and oversight adding to an already lean team.
Vote
Voting “For” this proposal adds the $1500 per month in FOX budget to the Operations Workstream budget (starting in March 2024) for refunds and as a user retention tool.
Voting “Against” this proposal would enact no changes.