The prevailing theme that encapsulates consumer technology in the 2010s is gamification, a concept fitting for the era marked by the simultaneous rise of mobile and social connectivity. With the advent of mobile devices, everyone had a connected game device in their pocket, leading to a surge in companies employing gamification to transform mundane activities into engaging experiences and successful businesses.

Gamification, characterized by point systems, emerged as an effective strategy for promoting, marketing, and fostering user engagement and loyalty. Companies like Foursquare, Waze, and Duolingo gamified activities ranging from visiting places to monitoring traffic and language learning. The point systems allowed qualitative progress to be translated into quantifiable metrics, offering legible outcomes and channels to direct intrinsic motivation toward extrinsic rewards.

The integration of blockchains into this landscape further enhanced point systems as they provide a natural infrastructure for distributing value based on user actions. Traditionally, tokens on Ethereum (ERC20s) were used for this purpose, but the high costs and risks associated with on-chain transactions created challenges. As blockchain transactions become cheaper with the rise of Layer 2 and Layer 3 solutions, new on-chain primitives, such as attestations, are emerging.

On-chain attestations, a method for identifying and classifying users, offer a way to self-attest to attributes and provide a transparent mechanism for users to engage in a decentralized network. However, qualitative limitations in attestations call for more quantitative forms, especially in the current blockchain scalability landscape.

Recent experimentation with point systems in crypto, such as Blur points and Rainbow Points, has largely been off-chain, resembling web2 point programs. The text explores the potential of on-chain points, differentiating them from off-chain points and tokens.

On-chain points offer advantages in terms of composability, provenance, trust guarantees, sybil resistance, and community accountability. They serve as quantitative attestations that can be viewed and leveraged globally, providing a new dimension to a user's on-chain identity. The transparency and auditability of on-chain points ensure fairness in the allocation process, addressing challenges faced by web2 platforms.

While ERC20 tokens offer composability, on-chain points strike a balance between flexibility and blockchain benefits. They can be redeemed for ERC20 tokens in a trustless manner, and platforms like Stack* have developed solutions for this redemption process on any EVM chain.

Points, whether off-chain or on-chain, are seen as "meta-currencies" that convert into financial value, influencing usage without the complexities associated with tokens. On-chain points, with their unique benefits, present an opportunity for builders and users in the evolving decentralized landscape.

The text concludes by emphasizing the importance of designing point systems to encourage product usage, aligning with user and product goals. It suggests that while tokens remain powerful for coordinating and governing decentralized networks, on-chain points could serve as a complementary primitive, opening avenues for better user identity, ownership, and incentive alignment in a decentralized, user-owned internet.