TL;DR

The article highlights a shift in the crypto space from speculation to real-world value. Products like Blackbird help restaurants save on fees with stablecoin payments, while platforms like Farcaster and sound.xyz bring Web3 to social media, music, and art. "CreditONCHAIN" introduces an onchain reputation system, allowing consumers to own, verify, and monetize their data. With blockchain integrating into daily life, your onchain reputation could soon be as valuable as your digital identity. The onchain consumer movement is taking off.

“I often wonder if I'm in the wrong industry. Crypto is a damn casino for dum-dums. Number go up? Yay, when lambo. Number goes down? Lives get wrecked. Where's the contribution to humanity?"

This sentiment has repeatedly surfaced in the industry, echoing the frustrations of builders who want to create and innovate. During the market volatilities of these months, Péter Szilágyi, a member of the Ethereum Foundation and head of Geth development, once again questioned the value creation of crypto. Looking back, it’s true that cryptocurrencies have been largely speculative and financialized, with the onchain ecosystem heavily dominated by financial products. While the casino voice is still deafening, in this current wave, we are pretty sure that we are really seeing things to look forward to.

As Jesse Pollak, the founder of Base, observed during this onchain summer, "we're starting to see people build real social platforms, real games, and create products with food, music, art, and media onchain."

For the first time, we are seeing consumer-focused products being built onchain. Take Blackbird, a loyalty and payments platform for the hospitality industry. Blackbird helps restaurants build more profitable businesses by enhancing connectivity between restaurants and diners and enabling stablecoin payments. It introduces a unique rewards and scoring system using fungible ERC20 tokens on a public blockchain. Diners can pay with stablecoins like USDC, ensuring fast, seamless transactions. This approach allows restaurants to save the 2.5%-3% fees typically charged by credit card processors, which currently eat up about 50% of their profit margins. For restaurants operating on slim 5-6% gross margins, these fees are a significant burden. By adopting this Blackbird, restaurants can keep more of their earnings and provide a better experience for consumers.

Additionally, as a consumer and an experienced internet user, you can finally engage in meaningful discussions on Web3 social media like Warpcast. You can discover new music and support your favorite creators on sound.xyz, donate to nonprofits via crypto on Endaoment, co-create NFT art and earn from it on Basepaint, and enjoy real games with strategic depth on Gas Hero. We're even starting to see stable coin payments accepted at barbershops, cafes, and other small businesses.

These developments suggest that blockchain technology is moving beyond speculation and towards creating meaningful value and real-world applications. Perhaps we should stop emphasizing the vast divide between Web2 and Web3 and instead focus on whether consumer behavior is happening onchain. Today, purchasing art, limited-edition Adidas mystery boxes, coffee, clothing, a hot air balloon trip, or paying for knowledge—any consumer behavior that meets a person's daily needs could potentially occur on the blockchain in the future.

We have probably underestimated how quickly blockchain technology can integrate into our lives when it truly provides low-friction benefits to real life. Unlike the internet, where we had to undergo the entire hardware deployment cycle—waiting for undersea cables to span the Atlantic, satellites above our heads to orbit, and countless ground receiving stations to be built slowly—we now only need to open the app store and download a piece of software.

Inspired by a consumer-centric approach and in collaboration with Mint Blockchain, we launched our new brand, "CreditONCHAIN," to create a comprehensive reputation system for onchain consumers. Built on Mint, CreditONCHAIN is dedicated to empowering everyone to own, control, verify, and monetize your data, ensuring that the value - not only economic value, but reputation - generated from data ultimately flows to individuals of digital sovereignty.

The first step in this journey is to focus on NFT consumption data, encompassing your asset holdings, purchasing power, and onchain activities. By analyzing your historical data, we provide a neutral reputation score that reflects your overall onchain behavior as a reputable consumer. As the landscape of onchain reputation and identity continues to expand, and more consumer products are developed onchain, your reputation will evolve like a growing fish—starting as a baby and maturing into an adult. As you demonstrate greater purchasing power onchain and accumulate more "nutrients" (valuable onchain interactions and activities), your reputation will strengthen and grow. Soon, more asset categories will be added to our reputation evaluation mechanics, such as Real World Assets, and ERC20 tokens.

Your reputation and attestations will be recorded and stored in the COC Badge we issue. This badge will grow and evolve with your contributions and become more robust with the diversity of onchain consumption behavior, becoming your reputation, your history, and an essential symbol of your onchain identity.

In the future, brands looking for onchain consumers—whether they are jewelers, luxury brands, AAA game developers, or prominent artists launching new NFT PFPs—will find and invite you based on your badge and consumer reputation. In the future, we will create our unique mechaincs to ensure you obtain the share of income generated by your data, if anyone calls up the data via our APIs. We aim to establish a perceptible mental model through this approach, guiding users to recognize the importance and benefits of data ownership.

By redefining data ownership through blockchain—especially data related to consumer identity and spending—we hope to distribute a larger share of the value to the consumers. And you, all consumers, are the owners of that data. As Jesse Walden, the founder of Variant Fund, said: "Owning things on the internet is still an unbelievably huge opportunity. Things public blockchains make it possible to own include identity, money, data, infrastructure, products, art/media, experiences, attention."

We believe onchain consumer moment is coming, and we're gonna all in on it.