Consumer Brypto

Bm. It’s been a while since the last ecosystem overview, and the beras have been quite busy fleshing out new primitives and products. This week’s post will cover some of the applications building consumer apps available exclusively on Berachain. 

Consumer crypto has a weird history. It’s difficult to define the sector because most crypto applications can be considered consumer-facing in one way or another. Consumer crypto has grown into an ecosystem of social products, betting apps, and a handful of RWA-focused marketplaces - but what really is a consumer crypto application? These products have evolved massively,  and Berachain’s consumer crypto ecosystem is set up to stand out against the rest. 

Over the last couple of months, it seems to have dawned on most people that for crypto to succeed, we need to create new experiences enabled by blockchain tech. As an industry, it isn’t productive to reskin successful apps of the web2 era - consumer crypto needs to push boundaries and actually reinvent the wheel. 

The idea of consumer crypto has been discussed frequently since the more recent successes of Farcaster, Pump Fun, Fantasy Top, and Friend Tech. All of these applications can be categorized as consumer focused apps with blockchain powering their main features. They’ve done well to offer differentiated experiences from DeFi and net-new ways of enabling interactions on-chain. The core use case of crypto has always centered around payments, but blockchains elevate often mundane experiences. The acts of sending a message, listening to a song, or playing a video game can all benefit from blockchain-enabled incentives in one way or another - that’s the consumer crypto thesis.

Consumer crypto is often associated with web3 social experiences. For better or worse, these are the apps that take the bulk of the crypto community’s attention, mainly because it’s easy to make a case for why blockchains help in these instances. Owning the social graph, enabling easier payments, and earning revenue from your hard work; these are examples of ways blockchain technology can actually benefit the majority of users. 

Unfortunately for the industry, it’s not so easy to build consumer applications at scale, and SocialFi has had problems of its own around differentiation, attention spans, and reaching a ceiling in user base expansion and virality effects. 

Jess from Seed Club wrote the following about his definition of what consumer crypto is: “Crypto often blurs the line between work and play, retail and professional, user and owner, but we think token-powered networks should be thought about as consumer products.”

Instead of trying to spot the differences between a DeFi app and a social networking app built on crypto rails, it’s easier to look at the target audience for any given crypto app and form two distinct buckets. 

Polymarket doesn’t market itself as a consumer app, but its core user base is in line with the definition of consumer software: “any software that is designed for the general public or a large and diverse group of users.” 

Polymarket’s user base is able to trade liquid markets covering anything from US election outcomes and Oscar winners to niche situations like airdrop predictions or whether or not Elon might tweet about a dog. 

Where a DeFi app like Lido might have a very specific target market, consumer crypto apps aren’t bound by the same rules. Someone can use Fantasy Top to collect their favorite accounts’ cards or choose only to use it for competitive tournament purposes. On the other hand, users on Friend Tech might interact with accounts to network themselves or use the app as a way of trading social metas, with only one goal in mind - to make money. 

There isn’t a set way to play, and that’s what makes consumer crypto so extendable to new audiences. The experiences provided are often unique and unlike anything available online or in an app store. 

The lineup

Berachain has been developing a large ecosystem of DeFi projects, and for the past few months, a few consumer focused projects as well. The core messaging of PoL centers around shared incentives and native alignment between users, apps, and validators - consumer crypto on Berachain is setting out to be entirely different from what’s been previously attempted, thanks to these built-in mechanisms for incentive alignment. 

Crypto has done well at creating consumer apps that don’t require a significant modification of existing user behavior. Instead, these apps implement new elements that are additive to these behaviors, expanding the set of actions you can take on-chain. A number of the following products building on Berachain are emblematic of exactly this - experiences that are made better through crypto integrations. 

While this post will briefly touch on PoL and how these consumer crypto apps make use of it, the goal is to highlight their strengths and explain the unique opportunities being targeted by these teams and why Berachain is a good fit. 

PuffPaw

PuffPaw is a first of its kind vape-to-earn (V2E) project building on Berachain. It might sound ridiculous on the surface, but the team has developed an actual product and has extensive experience bringing  something like this to market. 

Each passing year, we learn a little bit more about just how harmful smoking is,  and how it’s become a type of plague on society. PuffPaw wants to help smokers quit and pivot to healthier alternatives, with a little bit of help from crypto incentives. It may sound far-fetched, but the team has built and shipped millions of vapes in the past and possesses a deep understanding of the supply chain- a background that’s atypical for the traditional crypto founder(s).

PuffPaw’s team had seen the challenges previous play-to-earn and walk-to-earn projects had faced when attempting to integrate physical products and experiences into the crypto space. StepN had gotten around this by selling virtual sneakers on-chain, though eventually succumbed to economics issues with the model. 

PuffPaw is situated in the realm between DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure) and consumer crypto - lots of people smoke and many others vape. What if there were a way to incentivize people to quit smoking and switch to a healthier alternative? Could it be possible to do this with the help of blockchain-powered incentives and the Berachain community?

After creating an actual physical vape, PuffPaw determined the best way of doing this was to monitor individuals’ puffs per day, durations/timestamps of puffs, nicotine levels, and a social graph consisting of other vape users, entirely on-chain. The team saw an opportunity to flip the traditional DePIN model of user investment, product interaction, and eventual token reward into something multilayered and unique. 

The usage of a physical product for PuffPaw makes sense - after all, you can’t vape on-chain just yet. Puffpaw’s idea is to enable this net-new behavior with the help of token incentives, a unique physical product, and the belief that this community can enable healthier activities for everyone involved. There were three distinct variables chosen in the design of PuffPaw:

• Making each physical vape a node, where smokers need to own a node license to enter the game, and different nodes possess varying tiers mining efficiency via a rarity system
• Physical pods come in different flavors and different percentages of nicotine
• Each smoker will have a different amount of puffs per day on PuffPaw

“Smokers must determine the optimal strategy to strike a balance between their gaming experience, their addiction to smoking, and their financial returns.”

Through this intricate balance, PuffPaw facilitates the first example of DePIN + GameFi + SocialFi, done exclusively on Berachain. The following PuffPaw flywheel chart is quite comprehensive, leaving a ton of room for players to implement their own unique strategies and play the game in a way that suits their lifestyle the best. And you can tape vapes with others to add them as friends, which is almost certainly only possible with PuffPaw. 

PuffPaw is exciting because there really isn’t anything to compare it to. GameFi saw the rise and fall of Axie Infinity, SocialFi is still in its training wheels phase, and DePIN is very sophisticated - PuffPaw has somehow taken the best of all three categories and morphed it into a singular product that’s one-of-a-kind. The team hasn’t announced when vapes will go on sale, but you can read more about their vision in this post or check out their Twitter here.

Beratone

“BeraTone is all about carving out your own slice of fantasy paradise.”

Modeled after the casual gaming experience of Animal Crossing, Beratone is a Berachain native, on-chain game offering online multiplayer for those that wish to experience the beraverse. Beratone is a role-playing game that features immersive 3D environments, giving players the opportunity to explore however they wish. Players can fish, farm, craft, and even dance. Beratone’s gameplay revolves around building and decorating a unique home, traveling to meet delightful NPCs, and exploring the many landscapes within Beratone.

There’s been significant growth in the consumer gaming industry, particularly in “casual” gaming experiences. Games like Overcooked, Slime Rancher, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing have all seen tremendous success. Gamers don’t always want to be fighting enemies, constantly grinding towards new upgrades, or playing games that might feel more like a chore than genuinely fun. Casual gaming has unlocked a new market for gaming that was previously untapped, after the discovery that many individuals just want to play a relaxing game that helps them wind down.

Beratone taps into this market by integrating web3 experiences into its vast open world of beras. Users can play however they want, whether this means navigating the beraverse solo or teaming up with friends to hang out in Beratone. 

In their own words, Beratone is “an online multiplayer game where you can meet new friends, embark on epic adventures, craft items, customize your home, earn rare items, and trade with other players.”

There isn’t an end goal to Beratone. You can’t just beat the game and walk away, but that’s by design. Crypto has yet to see a metaverse-like game reach wider audiences and sustain massive success, but there’s a real possibility Beratone might become something like that. Instead of just hanging out in the Berachain discord or messaging with other beras on Telegram, community members can hop on Beratone and hang out in the beraverse for a more personal experience. 

Additionally, Beratone will be implementing some competitive elements. This is crypto, after all. But users don’t need to feel boxed into the traditional play-to-earn elements of most web3 games, as Beratone doesn’t require you to participate in it. The team is working hard and developing the game as Berachain works towards its eventual mainnet launch, so if you’re interested in learning more, you can navigate to their Twitter here or their Medium here. 

OverUnder

If you’ve ever ventured into the depths of the internet beyond the confines of crypto twitter, there’s a high chance you’ve crossed paths with the Twitch streaming or sports betting communities. These are extremely dedicated groups that make crypto twitter look tame by comparison. 

OverUnder is an alternative to the legacy systems in place, offering a new way to interact with the streamers you might watch everyday. The team is building a platform for real-time live wagering on Twitch streams, unique to Berachain. Users can navigate to OverUnder, bet on the future events that they believe might occur on stream, and potentially profit from their predictions. 

Polymarket has dominated the crypto prediction markets ecosystem, but the available markets are decided upon by the Polymarket team members in a permissioned system. OverUnder’s system involves the use of computer vision technology that’s accumulated vast amounts of data from streams, making OverUnder’s engine capable of pulling from its dataset to automatically create and adjust odds. Through this, the platform becomes permissionless - computer vision determines the market opportunities, not people. 

The rise of influential streamers and their increasingly dominant social media presences is a very niche vertical that hasn’t been tapped into by anyone in the crypto space. Sports betting has crept its way into every aspect of American sports and their broadcasts, with mobile apps like DraftKings and Fanduel being almost ubiquitous on the home screens of tens of millions of cell phones. 

The growth of eSports-specific betting has grown modestly, though it’s difficult to place bets on niche outcomes aside from winners or losers of specific competitions. Users from all over the world want to wager on the content they value the most, with the content being increasingly online centric. 

When it comes to streaming, the daily active viewing numbers on platforms like Twitch are becoming increasingly larger threats to traditional media sources. Not everyone might enjoy playing games, similar to how not everyone wants to get onto a football field and get tackled - but almost anyone can enjoy a streamer playing a popular video game. OverUnder has the unique opportunity to really unlock new distribution channels between crypto audiences and the web2 world. 

OverUnder’s approach is unique because it adds another level of immersive experience to streaming. Sports betting has increasingly poked its way into our daily lives, mainly due to the level of retention it offers for these media platforms. If you put money into an outcome you’re much more likely to view the game or match in its entirety. With OverUnder integrating betting into streams, viewers become more involved and aligned with the outcomes of the streamer, adding another level of connection between audience and creator. 

Goy

Goy is the first GameFi hardware publisher, a physical distribution layer for web3 games built with the help of Berachain and Build-a-Bera. The team wants to build a flywheel that draws in gamers and keeps them around through the addition of web3 incentives. Goy saw the growing demands of gamers in the physical gaming space and changes in consumer behavior dynamics. 

Products like the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch have experienced massive growth, as gamers lean into more casual experiences at a cheaper price. Goy is building out a Steam Deck-style gaming console, with a built-in Web3 Gaming operating system and a hardware wallet operating system. 

Integrating crypto into the physical gaming experience hasn’t been attempted yet, and for good reason: we don’t know what this will look like. The Goy team thought otherwise, deciding it was time to elevate the experience of gaming and bring blockchain-based interactions directly to the source, in this case a physical console. Goy wants to push the boundaries of web3 and create experiences that can be shared between the web2 and crypto worlds. 

For too long, web3 games have sputtered and failed to see product market fit at any stage. Gamers don’t want tokens, they want experiences. Goy is rewriting the script of GameFi’s go-to-market and attempting to deliver a new experience for crypto enthusiasts and no-coiners alike. At launch, you’ll be able to play any Berachain native game and in the future, any game you might on web2 game hardware. Goy is still under active development, but you can navigate to their Twitter here for more updates and news. 

Closing thoughts

Berachain’s consumer crypto ecosystem is fundamentally different from anything else out there because of PoL. There isn’t another blockchain where shared incentives come together to create net-new experiences on-chain. Projects like PuffPaw couldn’t exist without Berachain, in the same way that Berachain wouldn’t be the same without its ecosystem and community. These projects feel unique and almost tailormade for Berachain, with the community, ecosystem, and of course, PoL, breathing life to these ideas.

There’s a case to be made that DeFi projects can cultivate consumer-like experiences on their own, but this post was only meant to highlight some of the non-DeFi projects on Berachain. With PoL, it’s quite easy to make a case that Berachain’s DeFi ecosystem is the first example of a consumer-first experience - but there’s this additional layer of DePIN, GameFi, and other consumer experiences that are only available on Berachain. 

Time will tell just how far teams can extend PoL into their applications’ workflows, but the early examples look good. The ecosystem feels fresh and isn’t tied down by existing crypto guardrails. If you’re interested in more of these projects’ developments and the broader Berachain ecosystem, you can follow this link to learn even more. 

Ooga booga, and thank you for reading.