The accessibility and autonomy of the cryptosphere has produced a number of inventions that offer the typical internet user new ways to earn money from activities they partake in every day.
Staking coins in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) system revolutionized passive earning potential when it first emerged, but now looks rather simplistic compared to the new range of gamified ways to generate crypto earnings.
In the past few years, concepts like Play-to-Earn gave birth to thousands of blockchain games in the vein of Axie Infinity, but most have since degenerated into unsustainable one-click staking mechanisms which greatly stretched the definition of “games.”
Evolving Earning in Crypto - First Steps
Now, the next evolution of Play-to-Earn has given us concepts like Move-to-Earn, typified by projects like STEPN (GMT) and others, where users are incentivized to get outside and start moving to earn cryptocurrency rewards.
STEPN’s vision of giving users the chance to generate income while getting fit was no doubt laudable - and resulted in the project climbing to a $2.4 billion market cap within little over a month of launching.
However, STEPN’s non negotiable conditions of donning our running shoes and getting outside proved too much for most denizens of the internet. Coupled with the fact that users first of all had to splash their cash on gamified NFTs in order to reap the rewards STEPN promised, the concept of Move-to-Earn has since failed to take hold in the way that many imagined. The initial excitement of Move-to-Earn faded just like a New Year’s resolution to get fit. The secret to incentivizing the generation of crypto income perhaps lies elsewhere.
Watch, Play and Earn
Rather than try to impose the earning of crypto rewards on an activity that few people have the time or energy to engage in, a new generation of blockchain applications is attempting to make every-day activities profitable for the first time.
The concept of Watch-to-Earn seeks to combine the every-day process of watching videos with a crypto-economy - one which benefits both the end user (the one watching the video) as well as the content creator who produced the video.
With over 240 million regular video viewers in the United States alone, Watch-to-Earn apps are on the verge of leveraging the most popular communicative medium of modern times in order to create earning potential for the average web user.
Some apps of this kind opt to create their own video content platforms and then hope to attract users to the site with the promise of earning crypto rewards. While this method certainly has no lack of ambition, the prospect of pulling millions of users away from such established social media juggernauts like YouTube and Twitch may be asking too much.
Other Watch-to-Earn apps instead take the more subtle approach of building on the success of the likes of YouTube and Twitch - complementing and adding to a well-proven business model rather than competing with it.
XCAD Network
XCAD Network, for example, provides a browser plugin that works directly with sites like YouTube to add a crypto-economy to the existing business model. Users can earn fan tokens that are issued directly from their favorite creators, and then have the option of cashing out their rewards on the open market.
While this aspect of XCAD relies on content creators opting in to the program (and many already have), there are other ways of earning by watching with XCAD. An upcoming feature known as the Play Area gives an additional option for video viewers who may not be interested in tying their earning potential to a specific creator.
XCAD’s Play NFTs allow users to mint unique NFTs using their XCAD tokens which can then be used to generate income from watching videos. Play NFTs come with 4 different variable characteristics which determine the amount of crypto earned from the process of watching video content: reputation, luck, speed and stamina.
Reputation determines the base rewards generated from viewing content; luck dictates the frequency of bonus points and access to other elements like loot boxes; speed adds a multiplier to the earnings generated from a video based on how quickly it is viewed after being uploaded; and finally, stamina refers to the efficiency of repairing an NFT after it has been used for an extended period of time.
Similar to the fee mechanism present in projects like STEPN, the fees from the minting of Play NFTs are returned back to the XCAD economy, and are used to purchase and burn XCAD tokens - delivering increased value to XCAD token holders.
Web 2.5
The co-mingling of web3 projects like XCAD with existing web2 sites like YouTube represents a unique spin on the Play-to-Earn concept. Indeed, this “Web 2.5” idea that combines the best aspects of crypto with web2 may prove to be the smartest iteration of the idea to date.
YouTube content creators have already signed up to the XCAD project en-masse, bringing over 500 million subscribers and followers with them.
As the crypto winter deepens moving into the seasonal winter months, the possibility of earning crypto from an activity that makes no additional demands of its users other than partaking in something they do every day may well prove to be bear-proof, and could be the most adroit manifestation of the X-to-Earn movement yet imagined.
