On-Chain Ads Are Finally Here, in a Win for Privacy and User Experience

Cookies, pop-ups, and sketchy device fingerprinting are on their way out. Web3 users will control their online identities and be served relevant ads.

Web3 users will finally be able to control their online identities and be served relevant ads, thanks to the arrival of on-chain advertising. This marks a significant departure from the intrusive and privacy-violating ad practices of Web2, which heavily rely on cookies, pop-ups, and device fingerprinting.

"Ads" Are Everywhere in Crypto

Interestingly, despite the strong aversion to the term "advertisement" within the cryptocurrency community, nearly everything in crypto essentially functions as an ad. For instance:

NFT mint links displayed within wallets are considered ads, as the referring wallet application typically receives a cut of the minting fees.

Links to new decentralized exchanges posted in Discord or Telegram channels, where the poster receives a substantial portion (often up to 10%) of your protocol fees through a referral program, also qualify as ads.

Every memecoin can be viewed as a highly precise ad, a self-measuring barometer of attention. The price of a memecoin tends to rise if people are discussing it and falls if they aren't.

Antonio Garcia Martinez is the founder and CEO of Spindl and author of "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." This opinion piece is part of CoinDesk's Web3 Marketing Week, presented by Cookie3.

Crypto Is More Ads-Focused Than You Think

In essence, crypto is more spiritually ads-focused than it realizes, and to a greater extent than Web2 was when it first emerged. I was present at Facebook during the run-up to the IPO, and suddenly monetization became crucial; it was all being built as a desperate afterthought to cover server costs and appease investors.

Meanwhile, crypto has been diligently inventing (or at least rebranding) channels for user growth: quests, airdrops, points systems, and more. However, very little has been constructed in the way of on-chain ads technology. A few self-styled "Web3 ad networks" are essentially just very basic Web2 ad tech being run on crypto-focused publishers: a banner ad running over a block explorer like Etherscan or a token price charting website, nothing more.

But something new is afoot, which will radically change all that: Web3 consumer is finally happening. Farcaster, the decentralized social network, is gaining traction, and its many clients like Warpcast, Supercast, and Phaver are also taking off. Coinbase Smart Wallets that can easily issue a wallet with a social login are spreading. Onboarding services like Privy and Dynamic and embedded wallets are also gaining ground. Perhaps most significantly, Telegram is building native wallet support into its immensely popular messaging app, which boasts almost 1 billion active users. Now we’re talking real numbers, numbers that rival Web2 platforms.

How This Impacts Marketing

From a marketing perspective, this means that while most of the on-chain action so far has been at the end of the user journey—a user lands on a project’s page from somewhere off-chain, connects a wallet, and only then transacts—the top of the user funnel is finally on-chain too. The apps baking wallets into their user experiences will of course be using them to transact on-chain, which enables a whole new class of sponsored content.

Now, when I say "ads," I don’t mean the hideous and annoying banner ads or mobile pop-ups of Web2. I mean in-context, native, and relevant sponsored calls-to-action like the ones you’re starting to see in the "Explore" or "Perks" tab of just about every wallet app, from Coinbase to MetaMask and all the rest. Wallets are suddenly in a ruthlessly competitive market and simply offering token swaps isn’t enough anymore: they’re slowly but surely crafting themselves into the portals for Web3, which means social and discovery feeds (and yes, ads).

Imagine This: A One-Click Ad in The New York Times

Consider this: What would Amazon pay for a one-click ad that lets you buy the product you abandoned in an Amazon shopping cart, all while browsing The New York Times? It would pay billions and billions for it, given the impact on conversion rates. But such a thing can’t be built using legacy Web2 technology (the closest we have is TikTok shopping that uses Apple Pay for identity and payment).

With the blockchain managing identity and payment, such interactive ads can be so easily built that everyone and their brother is doing so. They're called Frames and launched on Farcaster in February. There are so many of these things running that Warpcast (the largest Farcaster client) has a Frames-specific feed just to see them all.

Now imagine similar user experiences, inside a consumer app, correctly targeted via a wallet-based audience informed by on-chain transactions, and paid for by payment rails that accept your protocol token. Imagine that anyone can be a publisher: every Discord or Telegram channel mod can finally get paid for the thankless task of