Short answer: An ambassador program in crypto is a contributor structure with named ranks, defined work at each rank, and a stated reward for doing it. The hard part is not finding people. It is deciding what a rank owes, what it pays, and who checks. Polkadot published all three on-chain and paid its top rank 10,000 USDT a month. Most programs publish none of it.
Who this is for: crypto and web3 teams. Search ambassador program software today and the first page is e-commerce and DTC brand-ambassador tooling — Modash, Duel, BrandChamp, Greenfly, AmbassadorFlow — with no crypto result at all (checked 15 August 2026). That category exists to issue trackable referral links and pay commission on attributed sales. If that is the job in front of you, those tools are the right answer and Zealy is not.
Disclosure: Zealy publishes this and sells the product described in the second half of it. Zealy has no ambassador-program feature. There is a section below that says exactly that and then shows what you build one out of instead.
Last verified: 15 August 2026.
This post is about the operating structure. If you are earlier than that and still working out who to ask, Module 4 of Zealy's community management course covers recruiting, objectives and training, and nothing here repeats it.
What a crypto ambassador program is, and when a different tool is the right answer
A crypto ambassador program pays community members to do defined work — content, translation, events, moderation, developer support — in exchange for tokens, roles, status or a stipend. If your job is issuing trackable referral links and paying commission on attributed sales, stop reading: e-commerce ambassador platforms do that, and Zealy does not.
That distinction is worth holding onto, because the two things get conflated constantly. A DTC brand ambassador is a paid distribution channel with a coupon code attached, and the software around them is built to attribute a sale and cut a cheque. A crypto ambassador is closer to a part-time contributor: they run a Telegram group in Turkish, they translate the docs, they answer the same question in Discord four hundred times, they show up to a meetup in Lagos. Very little of that produces an attributable sale, which is why commission tooling has nothing to bite on.
Here is the thing Zealy does worse. Those DTC platforms give every ambassador a unique tracked link and pay them a percentage of the revenue behind it. Zealy has no referral payout a community controls. Zealy records who invited whom and pays your ambassador nothing for it — to reward referrals you build a quest that asks people to invite others and put the reward on that quest. (Zealy runs a platform-wide referral promotion of its own, but it is Zealy's, not something you can point at your program.) If commission on attributed revenue is the core of your program, buy the tool that was built for it.
Cardano is a good picture of what the crypto version actually contains. Its ambassador page publishes six contribution areas: Content Creation ("Articles, videos, podcasts and translations across languages"), Events & Meetups, Education & Advocacy, Development ("Building tools, contributing to open source and technical docs"), Moderation, and Business Development. That is a job description spread across six domains, and none of it is a sales funnel.
What the Cardano page does not publish is any tier or reward table. Its own timeline records a phase-2 rewards programme launching in 2020, and the page gives no current compensation detail at all. One of the longest-running ambassador programs in crypto tells you the six things it wants and nothing about what any of them are worth. That is the norm, not the exception, and it is the reason the next section exists.
What a published tier structure looks like: Polkadot's ranks and what they paid
Polkadot's Ambassador Program, passed on-chain as referendum 487, published three ranks above a Candidate entry state: Ambassador, Senior Ambassador and Head Ambassador. Head Ambassadors received a salary of 10,000 USDT a month. No rank drew a regular salary except Head Ambassador, though members at any rank could propose to the Treasury to cover expenses or recognise exceptional work.
| Rank | What referendum 487 says | Votes on the Ambassadors track | Regular pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Entry state. "Ambassadors can induct Candidates, but they will need approval from the Senior Ambassador track to get promoted to Ambassador." | not stated | none |
| Ambassador | "The main level of the program where the majority of people will stand" | 1 | no regular salary; may propose to the Treasury |
| Senior Ambassador | The track whose approval a Candidate needs to be promoted | 2 | no regular salary; may propose to the Treasury |
| Head Ambassador | "The highest ranking group of ambassadors and correspondingly hold the most power within the group." | 10 | "a salary of 10,000 USDT (or equivalent stablecoin) per month" |
Source: Polkadot referendum 487, status Executed. Voting weights are quoted from the proposal: "Each HA shall have ten votes, each SA shall have two votes, and each Ambassador shall have one vote".
Read the shape rather than the number. Recurring pay is concentrated entirely at the top, and so is voting weight — a single Head Ambassador outvotes ten regular Ambassadors. Everyone below the top rank has to ask the Treasury each time, and holds one vote. Even at the top the salary assumes activity: a Head Ambassador who needs a quieter stretch — vacation, family, illness — can place themselves on a reduced 2,000 USDT passive allowance until they are back full-time. Whether you think that is right depends on what you want the middle of your program to be: a farm team working toward a paid seat, or a broad volunteer base that was never going to be paid and should be told so.
Roughly eight months later Polkadot replaced it. Referendum 1267, the Polkadot Ambassador Fellowship, also passed and also executed. It says it aims to encompass "the learnings from programmes 1.0 and 2.0 and marry that with the wide ranging community feedback", and one of its co-authors, replying in the referendum's comment thread to an objection that the rank voting weights were disproportionate, described the intended shape as "a large number at 3-4 and very few at 5-6". The proposal states no stipend figures and is explicitly "uncoupled from salaries".
Be careful about what that sequence proves. Referendum 1267 does not say the earlier program failed; it says it incorporates the learnings. What is safe to take from it is that Polkadot published a program with a five-figure monthly top tier, ran it, and its successor deliberately separates rank from salary. If you are about to attach a recurring stipend to a rank, you are attaching two things that a large program later decided to pull apart.
So you have two reference points at opposite ends. Cardano publishes the work and hides the money. Polkadot published both, then unhooked them. The version worth copying is somewhere in between: publish what each rank owes, publish what it pays, and keep the pay attached to delivered work rather than to the rank itself.
How to price ambassador work
Price the work by how long it takes to do. Hannah Wartooth, marketing lead at Swivel Finance, listed everything she wanted an ideal ambassador to do in one month, scored each task by the time it would take, converted those points to XP by multiplying by 100, and set a prize at each level of engagement she wanted.
That is the whole method, and it is the most useful thing in Zealy's case-study archive on this topic. In her own words: "I first started with a list of everything I would want an 'ideal' ambassador to do in one month. From following our protocol to reading and understanding our docs, creating content, to even adding liquidity to our dApp." Then: "I built a journey for a bullish and educated user and then used a points system based on the amount of time it would take to accomplish each task."
Run it in that order and most of the usual arguments disappear.
- Write the month first. Not the tiers, not the budget — the actual list of things one good ambassador does in thirty days. Twelve to twenty items, each concrete enough that you could tell whether it happened.
- Put minutes against each item. A thread that takes ninety minutes is not worth the same as a retweet that takes four seconds, and the only reason programs pay them similarly is that nobody wrote the minutes down.
- Convert once, at the top. Pick one rate — what an hour of ambassador time is worth to you — and let every task price fall out of it. Now a new task is priced by estimating its minutes, and you never renegotiate the rate per task.
- Set a reward at each level of engagement you want. This is the step that turns a price list into a program. You are choosing how much cumulative work earns a promotion, and that number is your tier boundary.
For the size of the pot, VENT is one published crypto data point: "For our Ambassador Program, we offer $1000 worth of $VENT", with the team noting it might increase later. The interview does not say whether that is per ambassador or the whole program, so read it as an order of magnitude rather than a rate. Either way it sits a long way below Polkadot's Head Ambassador line, and both are real programs. Pick the number your treasury can pay every month without a governance vote.
One caution about the conversion step. XP on Zealy is a score, not money. Multiplying minutes by 100 gives you a consistent internal currency for ranking people, and it does not create an obligation to pay anyone. If you intend XP to convert into value, say so explicitly and say what the rate is — otherwise you have built a leaderboard and let people assume it was payroll.
Zealy has no ambassador feature. Here is what you assemble one from.
Zealy ships no ambassador program feature. There is no ambassador object anywhere in the data model — no role, no table, no domain, no task type, no reward type. What Zealy gives you instead is four community roles, level-gated quests, Discord role gating, sprints and a review queue. A program is assembled out of those five parts.
The tier mechanic fits in one sentence: a quest can hand out a Discord role as its reward, and another quest can require holding a Discord role before anyone can claim it. Clear the last quest in tier one, receive the "Ambassador" role, and the tier-two quests become claimable. Repeat for as many ranks as you want. RENEC describes running exactly this shape: "I love Zealy because it lets us run the project's ambassador program where users submit their tasks as Quests, and I can review all of them."
| What a tier needs | How you build it on Zealy | What it will not do |
|---|---|---|
| An entry bar | A condition on the tier's quests: a Discord role, a completed prior quest, a level, or a date window. Conditions combine with AND or OR. See conditions. | Level conditions only test above or below a number. There is no equal-to, and no raw XP threshold. |
| A named rank | A Discord role set as the reward on the promotion quest (Discord integration) | The rank name lives in Discord. Zealy has no rank object, and Zealy's own levels cannot be renamed. |
| Work only that tier can do | The same condition on every quest inside the tier's module (modules) | A module has no lock of its own. Miss one quest and that work is open to everybody. |
| A closed membership list | The Discord role, plus Zealy's role filter on the member list (manage members) | Membership is whoever holds the role. A fixed roster of named people is not something a quest can enforce. |
| Recurring duties | Quest recurrence: once, daily, weekly or monthly | Those four values are the whole set. No hourly, no fortnightly, no custom interval. |
| Ranked payout | A sprint — a leaderboard with a start and end date — paying by rank | Sprint payout is rank and XP based. There is no sprint raffle, and members with zero XP in the window are excluded. |
Now the parts you will assume and be wrong about, because every one of them is what a sensible person expects to exist.
Levels are not yours. Zealy's level thresholds come from one fixed XP curve that is identical in every Zealy community. You cannot rename a level, change a threshold, or decide how many levels there are. Levels are useful as a rough seniority signal and useless as tier names, which is why the tier names in the table above live in Discord.
Modules do not gate. A Zealy module is a container with an order, not a prerequisite chain. There is no "complete module 1 before module 2 opens" setting. You get that behaviour by putting the same condition on every quest in module 2, and if you forget one quest, that quest is open. A module with no published quests is invisible to members, which is a useful way to stage a tier before you launch it.
There is no token-balance gate. You can gate on holding an NFT, and only on Polygon. Holding a quantity of your token is not a condition Zealy offers. If the point of the gate is keeping opportunists out rather than organising contributors, how to run an airdrop that doesn't get farmed covers which conditions actually raise the cost of a second identity.
Referrals pay your ambassador nothing on their own. Zealy records a referrer permanently when someone joins through an invite, and that record does no work by itself. To pay for referrals you create an Invites quest — "invite five people" — and the referrer claims it. You can make invites consumable so one referral cannot be counted twice, and you can require the invited person to reach a level of activity before the referral counts. Both are community security settings, and both are worth turning on before you attach money to invites.
Partnerships do not move people. A Zealy partnership is a request plus a set of settings. It does not transfer members or rewards on its own. The mechanic that actually reaches across communities is the partnership quest task type, which is what you use when an ambassador's job includes co-marketing with another project.
For the ambassador journey itself — the onboarding sequence before any of this gating matters — How to Hack the User Journey using Zealy covers the onboarding side, and Module 9 covers finding contributors worth promoting in the first place.
Who reviews the work, and what handing out Reviewer costs you
Zealy has four community roles — admin, editor, reviewer, guest — plus a banned state. Reviewer is the one to give an ambassador. It is also the level at which Zealy stops hiding private member data, so a reviewer sees the wallet address and email of everyone whose submission they open. Treat it as a trust decision.
That is the single most important line in this post for anyone about to delegate. Reviewer is not a narrow chore permission. Reviewer is the threshold at which Zealy stops stripping private fields from a member record, so the panel beside each submission shows that contributor's wallet address for your community's chain, their email and their linked social accounts — and there is no way to grant the queue without granting that. A reviewer can also pull the plain member list — names, roles, join dates — but the filterable members page with its private columns sits a level higher, at editor. The wallet and the email arrive one submission at a time, which is a slower door to the same information rather than a closed one. If your top-tier ambassador is a pseudonymous person you met in Discord four months ago, that is what you are handing over along with the review backlog.
The permissions themselves are a straight line rather than a matrix: admin contains everything editor can do, editor contains everything reviewer can do, reviewer contains everything guest can do. There is no à-la-carte permission picker. Practically, that means promoting someone to review one campaign also promotes them everywhere.
Reviewer permission is community-wide. You cannot restrict a reviewer to one module, one quest or one campaign. The filters in the review queue are convenience for the reviewer, not access control for you. Anyone who has run a program with regional ambassadors will feel this immediately — the obvious design is "the Portuguese ambassador reviews Portuguese submissions", and Zealy cannot express it.
What a reviewer can do inside the queue is generous: approve, reject, star, flag, comment, award bonus XP up to 20,000 on a claim, work in batches of up to 1,000, and undo a verdict. Zealy excludes a reviewer's own claims when a verdict is submitted, so a reviewer cannot approve their own work — though the claims are not hidden from the queue listing, they are simply dropped at the moment of judgement. Admins and editors are not excluded that way, which is worth knowing before you make an active ambassador an admin. The review documentation covers the queue itself.
An admin can invite someone straight into the Reviewer role, by link or by email, from the dashboard. Only admins can change roles at all, and nobody can change their own. Everything in this section describes the Zealy dashboard; Zealy's public API applies stricter role floors than the dashboard does for most write operations, so check the API reference rather than assuming the dashboard's rules carry over.
How each tier actually gets paid
Zealy's quest editor offers six reward types: XP, Discord role, Zaps, USDC, your own token, and a custom "other". Only USDC reaches the member without you doing anything, out of a balance you pre-fund. Token rewards are recorded, not sent — Zealy writes down who won and which address to pay. NFT rewards are unavailable.
Take those one at a time, because the differences decide how much manual work your program creates every month.
USDC is the automatic one. You top up a community balance, and a quest with a USDC reward locks funds against it. When a member's claim succeeds, the USDC is credited to them without anyone pressing anything. It accrues as a Zealy-held balance that the member later withdraws for themselves. For a monthly ambassador stipend paid per delivered task, this is the path with the least operational overhead.
Token rewards are a ledger, not a transfer. Zealy records which verified address should be paid and does not move the token, so an admin sends from the community's own wallet and pastes the transaction hash back in. For a monthly stipend that means a manual send every month, which is worth knowing before you promise one. The full mechanics, including what Zealy does and does not check about that hash, are in how to distribute tokens to active members.
NFT rewards are not something you can attach today. If your tier design ends in a commemorative NFT for Head Ambassadors, that part happens outside Zealy.
For a ranked payout across the whole program, a sprint is the instrument. A sprint is a leaderboard bounded by a start and an end date, and it pays out by rank. Tiered mode is the one that matches an ambassador structure: you define rank ranges, each range takes a percentage of the pool, and the money is split evenly inside each range. Ranges can neither overlap nor leave a gap, and you can define up to fifty of them. Proportional mode instead gives each member their share of the pool by XP. There is also a hard top-N cutoff if you only want to pay a reward zone, and members with zero XP in the sprint window are excluded either way.
One warning about the alternatives. Zealy's raffle reward method draws winners at random from the successful claims, which means it is entirely capable of paying your least useful ambassador. In a program where the whole point is that rank reflects delivered work, the tiered sprint is the mode that matches your intent.
Two Discord delivery details that will bite you exactly once. A Discord role reward is delivered asynchronously by the Zealy bot, and a member who has not linked Discord never receives one — so a tier gated on a Discord role silently excludes anyone who earned it without linking. When delivery fails, Zealy shows admins two buckets: missing bot permission, and member not found in the server. Only the permission failures can be retried, within the last seven days and 250 at a time. And a role earned before someone joins your server is not applied when they arrive — Zealy records the member, it does not backfill the grant. The member has to run the Zealy bot's /resend-roles command, so tell your ambassadors that the command exists.
How to tell whether the program is working
Zealy cannot filter members by recent activity. The only date field in the member filters is the day they joined, so there is no last-active list and no XP-in-the-last-30-days query. The measurement you actually have is a sprint: a leaderboard with a start and an end date, scoring what happened inside that window rather than all time.
"Who is still active" is the first question anyone asks about an ambassador program, and it is the one Zealy's member list cannot answer: join date is the only date you can filter on, and XP cannot be filtered at all. How to distribute tokens to active members works through that constraint in full.
The sprint sidesteps it. Because a sprint scores what happened between its start and end dates, the sprint leaderboard is the active-ambassador list for that window — bearing in mind that XP you granted by hand inside the window lands in it too. Run one per month with the same window length and you get a comparable series: who delivered in July, who delivered in August, who has quietly stopped. That series is also what you promote and demote on, which closes the loop back to the tier boundaries you set when you priced the month.
When it is time to pay, take the leaderboard or reward-winners export rather than the members export — only the first two carry wallet addresses.
One footgun before you touch anything. Resetting the leaderboard is destructive: it soft-deletes manual XP grants and zeroes every quest's claim counter, and because invites are counted from the last reset onward, everyone's invite tally starts again from zero. If a sprint is running when you reset, it also pulls that sprint's start date forward to the moment of the reset. Do not reset a leaderboard to "start the new ambassador season" while last season's sprint is still open.
The part no platform does for you
Every Zealy mechanic in this post is configuration, and configuration is the easy half. The program is a document you write first: what each rank owes, what it gets, who decides, and how someone moves up or out. Cardano publishes the first half of that. Polkadot published both, then pulled rank and salary apart.
The reason it is worth writing down is that ambassadors are frequently the hiring pipeline. A Gelotto ambassador puts it better than any case study normally does: "I was just a plumber before Gelotto asked me to join the team as an ambassador (I still am a plumber lol). I quickly moved up the ladder and am now a core team member and admin." Bermese, Verasity's junior marketing manager, started as a chat moderator on the project's Discord server before the team brought them on board full-time to help with marketing. If the top of your tier structure leads somewhere real, say so in the document. It is the cheapest reward on the list.
Start with the month. Write down the twenty things you want one ambassador to do in thirty days, put minutes against each of them, and pick the rate. Everything after that is a quest with a condition on it, and you can build the first tier on Zealy in an afternoon.