Forward the Original Title‘Nascent: Crypto’s AirTag Moment’

Aside from investment and speculation, payments are leading a series of use cases, with trillions of dollars in stablecoins flowing through various chains in the crypto space each year, transmitting value across the internet instantly at the lowest fees. DeFi offers a range of powerful financial primitives, including permissionless lending markets, decentralized exchanges (DEX), and an expanding array of yield opportunities.

Other consumer applications have also shown early potential, but their user base mainly consists of crypto-native users. Cryptocurrency has not yet broken through most of our self-contained ecosystems, as Vitalik recently pointed out. In fact, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi is not even as large as Apple’s stock fluctuation in a single day, and the market cap of the entire crypto industry is smaller than Apple.

We could spend all day debating why traditional financial firms haven’t moved beyond ETFs in their crypto involvement, why tech giants have only gone as far as hosting nodes for cloud services, or why retail businesses have only dabbled in accepting crypto payments or issuing NFTs. The truth is, cryptocurrency adoption is still in its infancy.

However, that’s about to change.

Cryptocurrency’s Superpower

When we look back at the rapid creation of a new financial system, what is our industry truly great at? The answer is incentives. Think back to DeFi Summer in 2020—starting with Compound’s liquidity mining, growing with Yearn’s fair launch, getting a boost from the short-lived YAM, and hitting its peak with Uniswap’s airdrop—crypto has proven itself to be the undisputed king of cost-effective user acquisition.

Unlike traditional advertising, where companies spend money hoping to attract users, cryptocurrency has perfected the art of shaping user behavior and rewarding engagement. Airdrops have become one of the most powerful strategies for driving participation. They often use point-based activities to further influence behavior and serve multiple purposes:

• Marketing—“Hey, you just got something valuable for free! Come check out what we’re offering!”
• Kickstarting the flywheel—“This is better than just adding liquidity or network effects, so we’re subsidizing early usage.”
• Distributing ownership and responsibility—“We need people to help govern or contribute to our protocol, and based on your past actions, you seem like the right fit… so here’s your share!”

What’s remarkable is that these strategies don’t require millions in upfront cash. By giving away tokens that represent ownership in the underlying protocol, new projects can attract and reward early adopters without needing huge amounts of capital.

While teams are getting more creative in setting eligibility criteria for airdrops, the biggest limitation remains their reach: except in rare cases, airdrops can only target users with some on-chain history, meaning they’re already part of the crypto ecosystem. The number of on-chain users is still just a small fraction of the potential audience these applications could reach.

Cryptocurrency has hit its current capacity, and to grow beyond this, we need to widen the net.

This Has Happened Before

It’s interesting to note that the development curve of cryptocurrency is strikingly similar to that of the Bluetooth tracking device, Tile.

Tile was innovative when it came to finding lost items, but only if your phone stayed within Bluetooth range, making it handy for locating things inside your home. If you lost your keys while you were out, though, you were out of luck.

Eight years after Tile launched, Apple introduced the AirTag, which taps into Apple’s widespread “Find My” network. Without any effort from iPhone users, Apple harnessed its entire user base to deliver a seamless experience for AirTag owners. Tile, limited by its range, remained a standalone product, while AirTag leveraged over a billion active iPhones, enabling people to locate their items through a vast global Bluetooth network.

Tile was certainly on the right track, but for products like these to reach their full potential, they need to integrate with widely available networks.

Entering the Era of Web Proofs

Thanks to a new technology known as zkTLS, or Web Proofs, cryptocurrency is approaching its own AirTag moment.

Web Proofs use the TLS Notary protocol and zero-knowledge proofs to confirm the authenticity of data from any server. It’s crucial to understand that this doesn’t verify the truth of the data itself—only that the data and its source are legitimate. Web Proofs can confirm, for example, that ESPN reported the Warriors beat the Lakers last night, a user bought Eras Tour tickets, or an Uber driver completed 1,000 trips with a perfect 5.0 rating. However, they don’t verify whether ESPN got the score right, whether the fan gave the ticket to a friend, or whether the Uber driver’s brother was the one actually driving.

So, how is this different from just pulling data from an API and putting it on-chain? API access can easily be cut off. If a tech company doesn’t like an application using their data for distributing tokens or conducting financial activities outside their platform, they can simply turn off access. But with Web Proofs, as long as a user can access their data via HTTPS on a website, they can’t be blocked. Companies can try to limit user access by moving the data to a different site, pushing it through other channels like email, or adding time delays, but these steps would only create temporary inconvenience and frustrate users.

This means that almost any Web2 data can now be securely and verifiably placed on-chain without needing the source’s permission or ability to block it.

This idea was first introduced by a Cornell University research team in 2016 in their Town Crier white paper. Today, pioneering protocols like Pluto, Clique, Opacity Network, OpenLayer, and Reclaim Protocol are implementing various versions of this concept.

So far, most teams have focused on simple forms of Web Proofs, such as proving ownership of a unique Twitter or Facebook account for basic sybil resistance. But this is only scratching the surface of what’s possible.

Now, let’s bring this back to airdrops: while most airdrops have been limited to users already on-chain who’ve conducted transactions, the distribution criteria can now extend to any kind of internet activity.

So What?

This marks the “AirTag moment” for the crypto world.
In an instant, the audience for airdrops has expanded from millions of existing crypto users to a majority of the global population. Now, instead of competing for the attention and resources of current crypto users in a zero-sum game, projects can reach out to anyone on the internet and incentivize their participation.
As a starting point, you could now qualify for tokens based on things like:

• The artists you listen to on Spotify
• The stocks you hold on Robinhood
• The products you buy on Amazon
• The rides you take with Uber
• The deliveries you make with DoorDash

In these cases, users with substantial histories are unlikely to be fake. Most of these activities involve real economic or time investments, making Web Proofs perfect for distributing tokens to genuine potential users, rather than “airdrop hunters” looking for quick gains. This means Web Proofs can offer better guarantees for “proof of humanity” while also helping build authentic digital communities based on verifiable common interests and activities.
One team already exploring this path is PleasrDAO, an on-chain organization that purchased rare, iconic albums, such as those from the Wu-Tang Clan, and started selling tokens that will grant access to the music as the unlock date approaches. PleasrDAO airdropped some tokens to GME holders, aiming to engage crypto-adjacent communities.

That said, expanding the initial airdrop audience by allowing people to claim tokens based on their past activity on web platforms is just the start of what Web Proofs can do.
The real excitement begins when teams start using on-chain incentives to drive meaningful off-chain behavior. Imagine scenarios like:

• To mint an NFT of a specific artist, you’d need to have them in your top 10 most-listened artists on Spotify in the past month.
• A $KIRKLAND MEME coin, where weekly inflation is tied to how much you spend at Costco.
• A certain amount of USDC automatically rewarding contributors who merge PR into key open-source projects.

Retroactive rewards are nice, but proactive incentives are even better. While we’re still skeptical about the “X-to-Earn” trend (whether it’s Play-to-Earn, Run-to-Earn, or Sleep-to-Earn), the idea of offering targeted incentives to encourage or coordinate off-chain activities is fundamentally intriguing. Getting the right balance of clear incentives and linking them to verifiable actions could create a powerful system.

How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go?

But Web Proofs aren’t just about incentives—there’s potentially a much bigger breakthrough ahead.

Web Proofs provide a way to break down the existing barriers of Web2 markets, allowing liquidity and reputation to flow freely. The toughest part of launching a market is getting enough inventory and trustworthy participants so that lower fees or a better user experience can make an impact. By enabling the combination of on-chain and off-chain operations, Web Proofs let users tap into the higher availability of Web2 participants while still benefiting from the cryptographic guarantees of on-chain transactions.

Take ZKP2P as an early example—a platform for peer-to-peer trading where one party sends fiat using services like Venmo or Revolut, and the other sends crypto. The crypto is automatically released when payment is verified through Web Proofs.

This concept can also be applied to other markets, like secondary ticket sales for events. Picture a system where payments are held in escrow on-chain and automatically released once the seller provides proof that the ticket has been delivered to the buyer. This would drastically cut down the hefty fees charged by platforms like StubHub. Almost any off-chain digital asset could work this way—whether it’s ICANN domains, CSGO skins, or social media accounts.

This model could also be layered on top of existing markets. Sellers could list their products both on dominant Web2 platforms and these new Web Proof-based markets. If a buyer purchases directly on the Web Proof platform, they could enjoy potential discounts while still accessing the full inventory available on traditional platforms. They’d have the option to switch back if needed. With the right user interface, this could be similar to the Morpho Optimizer lending protocol, which enhanced efficiency on top of existing lending markets, ensuring borrowers never got worse deals than they would on Aave or Compound—and often got even better rates.

Being able to export reputation from existing markets would further strengthen this model, building a reliable track record and offering cryptographic proof of the outcome of future transactions. Many identity projects are focused on exporting data from existing platforms for potential future use. Web Proofs, on the other hand, can remain lightweight and practical by focusing on real-time identity verification and authenticating data at its source.

Web Proofs Are the Future

As cryptocurrency reaches a pivotal point in its evolution, Web Proofs have become a powerful tool for bridging the gap between early adopters and the mainstream. Much like how Apple’s AirTag turned Tile’s limited potential into a global success by leveraging a vast existing network, Web Proofs offer cryptographic, two-way access to almost any existing digital service.

By enabling verifiable on-chain data from any Web2 source, Web Proofs extend crypto incentives beyond the current user base, opening the door to a larger and more diverse audience. This technology doesn’t just redefine the potential of airdrops; it lays the groundwork for unprecedented integration between on-chain and off-chain activities while providing reliable tools to tackle existing markets.

Crypto’s AirTag moment is approaching fast—charge forward and grow the pie.

Special thanks to Plotchy, Kyle, Leighton, Tracy, and the Pluto team for their feedback.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [ForesightNews]. Forward the Original Title‘Nascent: Crypto’s AirTag Moment’. All copyrights belong to the original author [Dan Elitzer, Peter Shoemaker, Nascent]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
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