Tap to Earn refers to a gaming model where players earn rewards for minimal actions, such as tapping or swiping on their screens. This model is particularly appealing for its simplicity and accessibility, making it easy for anyone to participate. In the context of Telegram, Tap to Earn games provide instant rewards in the form of in-game tokens or cryptocurrency, which can often be used within the game or exchanged for other digital assets.

Telegram has become a fertile ground for Tap to Earn games due to its extensive user base and the platform’s flexibility in integrating bots and mini-games. These games are easy to access, often requiring nothing more than joining a group or interacting with a bot, making them highly appealing to users looking for quick, rewarding experiences.

Notcoin and Hamster Kombat are two prime examples of Tap to Earn games that have gained traction on Telegram:

• Notcoin: One of the early adopters of the Tap to Earn model on Telegram, Notcoin offers players a straightforward way to earn digital tokens by simply tapping to collect coins. The game’s simplicity is its strength, as users are drawn to the easy-to-play format that allows them to accumulate rewards with minimal effort. These tokens can be used within the game or, in some cases, exchanged for cryptocurrency, providing a tangible incentive for players.

• Hamster Kombat: Building on the success of earlier Tap to Earn games, Hamster Kombat introduces a more competitive element. Players engage in battles with digital hamsters, tapping to perform actions and earn rewards based on their performance. The game’s combination of cute characters, competitive gameplay, and the potential for real rewards has quickly made it a favorite among Telegram users. It’s important to note that Hamster Kombat has over 300 million players which is pretty impressive.

The success of these games can be attributed to several key factors:

1. Ease of Access: Telegram’s user-friendly interface and widespread adoption make it an ideal platform for Tap to Earn games. Players can join a game with just a few taps, without needing to download a separate app or go through a complicated setup process.

2. Instant Gratification: The core appeal of Tap to Earn games lies in their ability to offer immediate rewards. Whether it’s earning tokens in Notcoin or progressing in Hamster Kombat, players receive instant feedback for their actions, which encourages continued engagement.

3. Community and Social Interaction: Many of these games thrive within Telegram groups, where players can interact, compete, and share their progress. This social aspect adds a layer of community engagement that enhances the gaming experience.

4. Monetization Potential: For players, the possibility of earning real-world value through these games is a significant draw. Whether it’s through cryptocurrency or in-game rewards that can be traded or sold, Tap to Earn games offer a unique blend of entertainment and financial opportunity.

Despite their popularity, Tap to Earn games on Telegram face several challenges. The simplicity of the gameplay can sometimes lead to repetitive or shallow experiences, which may limit long-term engagement. Additionally, as the number of Tap to Earn games grows, there’s a risk of oversaturation, where the value of rewards diminishes, and players become less motivated to participate.

Moreover, the volatility of cryptocurrency markets can impact the perceived value of in-game rewards, introducing an element of uncertainty for players. Ensuring the sustainability and fairness of these games will be crucial for their continued success.

The rise of Tap to Earn games on Telegram, exemplified by titles like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat, represents a significant shift in the mobile gaming landscape. By offering instant rewards for simple actions, these games are redefining how users engage with digital content and opening up new opportunities for monetization.

As this trend continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how developers innovate within the Tap to Earn model, balancing the need for engaging gameplay with the promise of real-world rewards. Telegram’s role as a hub for these games suggests that we are only at the beginning of what could be a major shift in mobile gaming dynamics.

A question they asked that stuck with me was if crypto has all of these use cases, why aren’t there a bunch of recognizable apps that they can use? Why doesn't the space have apps that an end-user can jump into using that isn't a wallet or exchange? To them, it was hard to imagine using a crypto-enabled app that wasn't Binance or Coinbase.

The reason why crypto doesn't have many mainstream apps yet is something I have some insights on, especially because there have been many broader industry discussions around this of late. That conversation again helped underscore the difference in perspective between an outsider and someone actively keeping up with developments in crypto.

If you engage with crypto a lot, you might be aware of tons of apps/products that let you do a bunch of ‘cool’ and ‘exciting’ things with your crypto assets. However, the average person doesn’t know of these and wouldn’t care much even if they knew because of the perceived complexity of using those products. They care about using products that solve a problem for them or are fun to use, and as far as many people (especially in the Western world) are concerned, crypto doesn’t seem to be focused on that or about that.

This conversation prompted me to write this article as a bid to contextualize crypto’s progress towards mobile apps that are accessible to everyone.

A good place to start is by highlighting that the crypto movement we’ve seen in the last few years started from a place of idealism sparked by the Bitcoin whitepaper following the global financial crisis of 2008. Some of the core ideas at the heart of the crypto movement were:

• Data, especially financial data, should be transparent and immutable.

• Individuals should have self-sovereignty over their financial assets.

• Monetary value should be easy to transfer among people, irrespective of their location.

While these might sound straightforward enough, they were incredibly technical problems to address and tackle.

For example, if in the 17th century you looked up at the moon and idly thought to yourself that humans ought to be able to visit there, getting to that point actually required a number of things to happen: the industrial revolution and the advancements in material science, engineering, and human coordination that stemmed from it. To put it simply, the human race needed to make a whole lot of infrastructural progress first before getting to the moon.

The same holds true with crypto. There were a number of end goals in sight from the start, but getting to the point where those goals could be realized required the infrastructure that would support them to be built first.

A parallel can be drawn to AI here. OpenAI was founded in 2015 but didn't launch their major consumer-facing product (ChatGPT) until 2022. That was seven years spent doing foundational research work that made the existence of a product like ChatGPT possible. This is despite the fact that AI research had been largely ongoing since the 1950s.

In that context, crypto's progress in close to two decades doesn't seem too bad.

If crypto has these numerous potential use cases, why have there largely just been an abundance of exchanges and wallets in the mainstream? Well, the answer is twofold:

1. As mentioned earlier, the crypto movement evolved as a response to the financial crisis of 2008, so a lot of the initial priority was on building infrastructure that offered users more financial autonomy and relative control over their assets. The quickest way to onboard people in this regard was by having centralized exchanges that allowed them to swap fiat money for cryptocurrency assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

   

   
   While some names like Binance and Coinbase are globally dominant, there are also a number of regional and country-specific exchanges. The front-facing positioning of exchanges as the starting point of crypto adoption is why many people instinctively think a crypto app can only equal an exchange.
   

2. Wallets are the gateway tools to interacting with any product built on top of a blockchain and are also how you move and keep your crypto assets. They are pretty much multi-functional; they allow you to send and receive assets like a bank account, authenticate transactions, and engage with other crypto products similar to how you can use your email address to sign into various apps and websites.
   
   Given the multiple uses and importance of crypto wallets, many companies spun out with the goal of offering the best wallet user experience. Besides exchanges, it’s the first touchpoint many people have with crypto. They are the keys that open up the doors leading to full-on immersion in the world of crypto, and a lot of companies have their own take on how these keys should be presented to the end-user.

So the simple answer to why there’s been a shortage of crypto apps is that:

• Building the needed infrastructure that would support consumer apps had to happen first, and the focus market for 'infra' products and solutions are developers, not end users.

• Exchanges and wallets are gateway products into crypto for the everyday person, especially for financial use cases, and it’s why they get center stage in marketing aimed at bringing people onboard crypto.

However, I believe we've hit a crucial point where sufficient infrastructure that allows for interesting and useful apps to start to emerge has been built. I say so because of two key developments:

1. Embedded wallets: To interact with a fully on-chain app, you need to own a wallet. Previously, this was a sore point for casual users because you first had to set up a wallet and note down the recovery phrase before using the app. This caused a lot of friction because of the number of steps involved. You wouldn't really bother with all that if you didn't have a strong incentive to use the product already.
   
   But embedded wallets change this by allowing products to offer built-in wallets. It means anyone can get around to using an on-chain app without having previously created a wallet; you can just jump right in.

2. Rise of gas-fee sponsorships: Gas fees have been a huge blocker to many people getting started with crypto products. Using on-chain apps/products previously required users to first fund their wallets with an appropriate amount of crypto to cover their gas fees for in-app transactions and actions.
   
   This was honestly very stressful, and everyone pretty much realized this, so now there are way more products sponsoring gas fees on behalf of their users because an infrastructural development that enables this now exists, making it a lot easier to get into using on-chain apps without worrying about how to cover gas fees.

Arriving at embedded wallets and being able to sponsor gas fees on behalf of users are infrastructural breakthroughs that make it a lot easier to distribute crypto apps. It’s a far cry from where the industry was just a few years ago when it was a lot more complex and tricky to get started with using a crypto app or doing anything on-chain.

Recently, there's been a general shift in sentiment within the crypto industry away from just continuing to build infrastructure towards building a lot more consumer apps.

Some of my favorite recent apps are Moshicam, Daimo, Bolide, and Warpcast. None of these apps require that you already own a wallet before you can use them, and they make me very excited for the near future of crypto consumer apps.

If this is the first you’re hearing of Warpcast and are wondering what it is, it’s a permissionless, decentralized social media app built on top of the Farcaster protocol scratch that, we promised this newsletter would be radically simple so here’s all you need to know: Warpcast is a recent social media app that was launched in February 2023 by a company called Merkle Manufactory.

From last year until a couple of months ago, access was only available to a small group of beta users but it went public earlier this year so anyone can sign up to use the app right now from anywhere.

In the few months since I started using Warpcast somewhat more actively, I’ve attempted to get a couple of my friends on board as well and one thing I quickly realized was that it wasn’t exactly clear to them why they should join yet another social media platform especially one not generally popular yet and that hasn’t captured the cultural zeitgeist that prompts people to join a social platform out of fear of missing out.

It’s in a bid to preemptively address this for future conversations that I decided to write this.

Firstly, I need to start by saying I don’t think Warpcast in its current iteration is for everyone nor has it hit a phase where it’s likely to be broadly appealing yet. At the moment, Warpcast has about 50,000 daily active users, a number that I believe will be a lot higher one year from now. But I personally believe Warpcast as it exists right now is for you if:

• You care deeply about using social media as a tool for globally connecting with people.

• You are generally very curious and like to be an early adopter of new tech/products.

• You care about exerting more intentionality with regards to what you consume via social media and want more transparency with how what gets shown to you is being curated.

It's not that you can’t use X (fka Twitter) or most of the social media apps out there to globally connect with people or any of the above. It’s more that given the current climate of the legacy social media apps, the average user doesn’t really default to thinking of them for these purposes anymore and tends to think more along the lines of using them to keep up with people they already know, content from their favorite creators, and what’s generally new pop-culture-wise. At least, that’s how it was for me.

There is nothing wrong with using social media to keep up with the people who matter to you — your family and friends. However, an underlying ethos for social media during its inception was how it could be used as a means to globally connect and make new friends around the world without the restriction of borders.

Like with many things, the 80/20 rule also holds true here. Most people don’t feel the inclination to participate in the social media value chain but for many who do, the current climate with the legacy social media apps doesn’t feel too encouraging in this regard. There’s a lot of vitriol flying around, and while your attention is recognized as a valuable currency, the focus is on how it can be farmed and tweaked to serve a bottom line.

To put it simply, it’s much easier to doomscroll than try to connect, to passively consume rather than actively participate.

Warpcast is often described as a cross between X and Reddit, a description that I don’t think is far off. It basically leans heavily into microblogging via text which makes it a great haven for conversations.

Here’s how I think Warpcast presents a better alternative than what we currently have as the norm with traditional social media apps when it comes to the points I made above.

• Making global connections: Something I find extremely cool about Warpcast right now is the fact that it hasn’t entered the mainstream yet means being active on there for the average person requires that you build your social graph (audience and followers) from scratch. If you get invited by someone, that might be the only pre-existing relationship you have when you join.
  
  The auto-follow recommendations for new users are a diverse list of accounts on the platform so engaging with people on there translates to gradually forming relationships with people across the world that you previously didn’t know. I’ve personally seen a lot of interesting outcomes firsthand from relationships on Warpcast: people starting projects/companies together (heck, this newsletter is a collaboration between myself and a friend I made on Warpcast), people intensely supporting each other’s products, companies, etc.
  
  The vibe is more welcoming & friendly, and the culture tends more towards good natured conversations rather than being combative.

• Being an early adopter: There are a lot of interesting new products and tech applications I have primarily discovered through Warpcast, and that’s really because a majority of the active scene there are builders working in interesting new fields like crypto.
  
  If you are a curious person who likes being early to using products with a likelihood of growing in popularity and adoption, then I simply can’t recommend Warpcast enough. I strongly believe we’ll see a number of million-dollar products emerge there, and you’ll have a front-row seat to seeing these companies take shape and evolve in real-time. To be on Warpcast is to be at the forefront of (crypto) innovation.
  
  One of my all-time favorite products that I’ve discovered on there and actively use is Daimo, an app that makes it easy to globally send and receive money using Stablecoins, and there are even more interesting functionalities native to Warpcast like ‘Frames’ which allows you to interact with an app right from your feed. It means you can perform in-app actions without having to leave your Warpcast feed.

• Intentional about what you consume: If you are aiming for more intention when it comes to what you consume during your time online and would prefer to streamline it to a particular topic, Warpcast gives you a lot of agency in this regard via a feature called ‘Channels’.
  
  Think of channels as kind of like sub-reddits, they are conversational spaces exclusively focused on one topic, there are channels dedicated to music, reading, food, and more esoteric interests plus you can always create a channel that you think should exist so you can pretty much curate the content you consume by spending time exclusively in channels relating to your interests and ignoring what else is generally happening.
  
  Another huge unlock with Warpcast in this regard is not having to contend with any ads, Warpcast eschews the ad model for social media for an onboarding fee of $5 which means that in effect you get to see only the things you want to see and signal that you want to see.

To be clear, it’s not that I think Warpcast is an idyllic platform with no issues whatsoever. Being in a relatively early phase means it still has a number of growing problems:

• The scene there often tends heavily towards crypto chatter because that’s the space where a fair number of initial users come from.

• There’s a lot of in-group synchrony; many people there share similar views on technology, crypto etc. which is great and contributes to the homey feel of the conversations. However, it also means there isn’t as much diversity as there could be.

• Some people might find the onboarding flow that requires owning a crypto wallet and backing up a recovery phrase too tedious.

But despite that, I think the (potential) value-add far surpasses the trade-offs and the experience will only get much better especially because the team behind it is one very committed to listening to user feedback and shipping fast.

If you’re curious about Warpcast and are open to checking it out, you can indicate your interest by leaving a comment under this post or sending a mail and we might send a free invite your way.

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There’s a gulf of difference between the psychology of people who get onboarded to crypto and start doing things on-chain because of financial incentives and the average consumer that needs to be targeted when we talk loftily about bringing a billion people on-chain.

The average consumer really doesn’t care about bonding curves in social-fi apps, L2 ecosystems, infra-wars, or whatever is the hot-button topic on Warpcast/Crypto Twitter. They simply want to use a product that works and is useful to them in some way, but a lot of content around crypto still leads with ideological talk and technical chatter.

It’s not that content like that is non-useful. In fact, the opposite is the case; it’s extremely useful in getting builders to catch the spark and build in crypto. It paints a very compelling vision of future outcomes in finance, social, etc. worth striving for that’s a lot better than the norm; it just isn’t very useful to the average consumer.

Really, try to have a conversation with someone in your personal circle who isn’t much interested in crypto about who has the superior tech between Ethereum and Solana. If they are polite, they are likely to make a pretense of following by dutifully nodding their head and asking questions at the right intervals before they go on with their day. If they are less so, you’ll literally see their eyes glaze over mid-conversation as they start mentally listing the activities they’d rather be doing at that moment.

The current major focus in crypto is abstracting away the clunky UX bits and building more consumer apps, but we strongly believe there should be an equal focus on abstracting away the technical/non-straightforward lingo at the forefront of crypto narratives and leading with use-cases that people can relate to. Less of “permissionless decentralized infrastructure blah blah” and more of “this app or product allows you to do x and y.”

There needs to be more differentiation between content for the crypto-curious and content for end-users. Right now, there’s a lot of leading with content that assumes everyone is curious about crypto, but what is needed is more content that talks about exciting and useful product experiences that just happen to be built on-chain.

Users don’t really care about what happens under the hood with products they use; what they do care about are experiences that directly benefit them in some way.

Often, the best way to articulate your criticism of the state of things is by doing something about it, not sitting idly. We’ve said a lot about how we think there needs to be more variety with content in crypto, so we are getting around to doing something about it.

We have just two requests of you:

• Subscribe to be a part of our journey.

• Share as widely as possible.

Our first issue goes live in a bit! 🥳