Share to earn. Play to earn. Whatever the fuck to earn. Unless the $ payout is sustainably significant, they just don’t scale.
Once I got a pitch from a "watch ads to earn" web3 project. As part of my DD I checked their product. I watched the leather gloves ad and earned some tokens. it turned out that these tokens were worth $0.0002.
Kids like doing fun things for fun. Reward those kids with a gold star and now fun isn't enough. They need the star. Adults operate similarly. The money is what makes it work, not play. Let's call X2Earn what it is: work.
agree, as of now, none of those models work. a better version: -own for free -play for fun
The fact is, unless you get credentials, nothing scales. We talk about the death of credentialism, but you can be mediocre and have some credentials and make a living. There are exceptional humans of course, they are going to win the internet economy.
I like to think of these models as fractional membership. By engaging and iterating with the community, there is a shared dividend payout in driving the network. A compounding a multiple streams of communities can be worthwhile.
Almost as bad an economic incentive mechanism as airdrops https://dune.com/blog/uni-airdrop-analysis
Curious about incentive/rewards models/approaches/tools people have seen that are working well so far in Web3 to sustain engagement. Lots of DAOs etc struggling with this unsurprisingly. Wondering if I am missing any interesting ones?
Two thoughts here. (1) X to Earn can be made to work if there is alternate source of money generation. Example: a profitable casino can fund exercise to earn apps. Think entertainment tax (on casino) used for funding public good (exercise). Granted rewards will be lower but for a certain demography it might make sense
these models all extract value from the system than they add. only on rare occasions are value added > value extracted. aside that, they would never scale.
imo, recognition is enough. enough recognition becomes money eventually anyways.
Reminds me of Brave ads. I love the browser, but the core value prop that was originally pitched (get tokens to view ads while searching the web) ended up being the thing I hated the most. Funny how the value of attention is so misunderstood…
The phrase “x to earn” has gotten a bad rep. Instead, I think about it more as participating in a tokenized community. Think sufficiently decentralized Instagram, where the value of the network is created and captured by users instead of founders and VCs. No ads. Photos and videos are collectable NFTs.
Been working on this new concept for a while, not sure it’s ready yet and def not certain about the name, but for now calling it Work to Earn.
You don’t have to earn on every action, that’s not how life works.
Share AND earn Play AND earn Feels more moderate and can scale better!