Affiliate code system

[gz-c]

An affiliate code system allows people who refer buyers to receive a portion of the coins sold.
They will not receive a portion of the coins taken in (BTC, ETH etc) because this makes the system much more complex (will need user accounts, a hot wallet or manual processing of withdrawals, etc).

Requirements:

• Affiliate Portal

A webpage "Affiliate Portal" allows a user to do the following:

• Provide a skycoin address and receive a URL to the "buy skycoin" page with an affiliate tracking code and a URL to the "join affiliate program" page with an affiliate tracking code
• If there is an affiliate code in the url of the portal page, save this affiliate code too. This is the original referrer.

On the affiliate portal backend,

• Payouts will be to the skycoin address received when generating the code. Save the skycoin address with the tracking code in the database.
• The tracking code format should be defined, possibly derived from the skycoin address irreversibly, such as a hash

Using only the skycoin address for this is simpler, but has other limitations. It does not work as a username or password, since addresses become public on the blockchain. Therefore the user can't do things such as check their pending rewards (if we send rewards on a time interval). Instead we will try to send their rewards immediately. Sending immediately has problems too, because some rewards may be too small to send. So, a compromise will need to be found, unless we want to implement a full user system.

In the teller service, add a new component for sending affiliate payouts:

• Reads from an channel exposed by Exchanger
• Exchanger writes to this channel when it sends coins
• This component saves a record of the coins sent, and determines the affiliate rewards
• This component has a processing loop that sends the affiliate rewards
• Use a separate wallet for the affiliate rewards
• Use a separate database for affiliate rewards

Affiliate reward calculation:

• When the affiliate signed up, they may have been referred by another. We kept track of this in the affiliate portal, to calculate tiered referral rewards.
• Add a configuration for how many referral layers to give rewards to, and the percent at each layer
• If the layer is 1, this is a simple, typical referral system.
• When processing the deposit, look up the original referring affiliate for this deposit
• Then, following each affiliate, find who referred who, up to N layers deep
• Calculate rewards per affiliate level, based on configuration
• Create a "send" event for each affiliate and write it to a channel
• In another goroutine, process the send events

There is a problem with this; if the affiliate reward is too small it can't be sent. Instead, this might be changed to calculate cumulative affiliate rewards on a fixed time interval, and if the cumulative reward is above a threshold, then send it.

[gz-c]

Spaco is developing this:
https://github.com/spaco/affiliate