Game Shows Are the Killer App for Web3 Consumer Social

For a few days each year, we all get excited about crypto consumer for one reason: Game shows. "Mad Realities." "Love on Leverage." "Crypto the Game." The challenge has been letting anyone make these sustainably. Until now.

For a few days each year, we all get excited about crypto consumer for one reason:

Game shows.

"Mad Realities." "Love on Leverage." "Crypto the Game."

The challenge has been letting anyone make these sustainably.

Until now.

Imagine this. It’s a few years from now, and a protocol wants to run its own version of "Shark Tank" as a new kind of hackathon: one where its community tunes in to vote on their favorite projects.

This feature is part of CoinDesk's Web3 Marketing Week. David Phelps is the cofounder of JokeRace, which lets anyone deploy contests on 90+ chains to run, grow, and monetize communities

The winning projects get huge rewards, the losing projects get recognition and on-chain credentials for making it so far, and the audience at home gets points from both the chain and from every project they vote for.

Both contestants and voters pay in – because it’s worth it to them for the money, status, opportunities, social connections and potential airdrops they all earn. And that lets game show creators earn big in a way they never could before.

Now imagine bigger. "Survivor." "The Voice." "American Idol." "The Bachelor." "Love Island." All giving contestants and new ways to earn reputation, to earn rewards and to collaborate socially.

Or think even bigger than that. A monetizable "Product Hunt." Presidential debates with an audience live-voting on responses. The Grammies and Oscars with audiences picking who wins.

Any creator could have game shows for their fans to decide who they partner with. What track they release. What’s the most persuasive case they can make for future trends.

And all of this would be built on financial and reputational rails for everyone to earn.

Which is to say:

All of this can only be done on-chain, particularly through us at JokeRace. By anyone. Without needing to worry about a single line of code.

There’s a lot of reasons this wasn’t possible before now – high gas fees, high overhead for managing the tech and challenges letting anyone pay in to vote – but the main one is that it’s been hard to offer meaningful rewards for everyone involved in a game show.

In game shows, there’s literally some reward that’s at stake. That reward is usually financial: you get prize money. Sometimes, it’s reputational: you want the status of winning or backing a winner. And on rare occasions, it’s social; you form a community with others to back a favorite candidate. The best game shows will often integrate elements of financial, reputation and social rewards all at once.

A game show without any rewards at all is a fairly doomed category, and we have a name for this cursed vertical in crypto: governance. In a sense, governance is just a game show without incentives or rewards, and yet in an industry *built on* incentives and rewards, we’ve insisted that the only types of decisions that anyone can make on-chain are rewardless governance.

Why? You might argue that rewards corrupt the integrity of the decision (maybe), but the real answer is because we haven’t wanted to do anything on-chain that would enable these rewards in the first place.

It wasn’t until the launch of EIP-4844 in March, which lowered fees on layer 2s by over 100x, that it started to become sustainable to run social processes on-chain in the land of Ethereum. And it wasn’t until our introduction of "anyone-can-vote" that there was a way for anyone to participate in voting on-chain.

This is the first time it’s been feasible to build game shows like the ones above. And now that it’s cheap and fast to operate on-chain, we can see the rewards for running on-chain game shows could be huge.

Let me break that down a bit deeper to show how wild this opportunity is for all parties: the contestants, the viewers and the game show creator.

First, and most obviously, contestants can earn from winning. A recurring show might give rewards to all players and teams on a given night, including the lowest-ranking ones that get eliminated.

That seems clear enough, but let me emphasize: contestants can also earn from losing. Even if the losers earn nothing, they still earn on-chain reputation.

Every single person who votes for a contestant is attesting that they liked them. That’s a powerful social graph of permissionless data that the contestants can leverage for future communities, job opportunities, status, social connections and, yes, airdrops. (For instance, if you won on karaoke night, a music project could do worse than to airdrop you its token.)

Imagine running all tiers of a game shows – votes to decide the contestants, votes to decide the finalists, votes to decide the winners