What's left of the category.

The crypto-rewards category started with earn.com (Balaji Srinivasan, 2018), whose stated mission was blockchain enabling international micropayments and paid communications — get paid in cryptocurrency to read or respond to messages, regardless of geography. Coinbase acquired earn.com that year and repackaged the earn-for-an-action primitive into Coinbase Earn (educational token-launch quests). Two branches grew out of it: Western learn-and-earn + crypto-native questing (Coinbase Earn, Galxe, Layer3) and Asian exchange trading contests (Binance, OKX, MEXC). Post-FTX (November 2022), social-platform crypto ad restrictions accidentally fueled the Western quest boom. By 2025–2026, the structural economics caught up: token-launch performance eroded, the cost of supporting custom chains exceeded the revenue, and the regulatory thaw under the new US administration removed the scarcity of paid distribution. Coinbase shut its learn-and-earn flagship and acquired Web3 ad-tech platform Spindl to anchor a new distribution play centered on Base. Galxe pivoted to building Gravity (a Monad competitor) and stopped publicly maintaining most questing stats. Layer3 is expanding into DeFi (ample.money) with monthly active on-chain paying users at ~8K in March 2026 (down 90%+ from peak per their public Dune). Asian trading contests stuck around. ZKPuzzle came in through a different door — we started as DAO and onchain-org tooling, found a niche supporting privacy chains that L3/Galxe couldn’t, and are now expanding into mainstream consumer rewards. The differentiator: we combine ads + giveaways/gift cards + quests in one platform, with an audience spanning crypto whales, farmers, and mainstream consumers.

1. The earn.com origin (2018). The category traces back to earn.com (formerly 21.co), led by Balaji Srinivasan. Their own announcement when joining Coinbase framed the mission around blockchain enabling international micropayments and paid communications: letting anyone get paid in cryptocurrency to read or respond to messages, regardless of geography or banking access. That was the consumer-product wedge — small, programmable cryptocurrency payments crossing borders without correspondent-banking friction.

Coinbase acquired earn.com in April 2018 for roughly $120M and launched Coinbase Earn in December 2018 — the same earn- for-completing-a-task primitive, repackaged as educational quests funded by token-launch projects. The lineage from earn.com’s paid-communication mechanic to Coinbase Earn’s learn-and-earn flow to Galxe and Layer3’s quest marketplaces is direct: someone funds a verifiable on-chain action, the user completes it, the user gets paid.

Editor’s note: ZKPuzzle’s own framing of this pattern as triple-entry bookkeeping / DCC (Dynamic Collective Capitalism) is our interpretation, not earn.com’s stated framing. We extend the mechanic into shared interest issuance for users contributing to the networks they grow — but that’s a thread we’ve pulled, not a claim earn.com made publicly.

2. The Western branch: learn-and-earn + crypto-native questing. Coinbase Earn ran the core mechanic — short educational tasks (often Insta-story-style explainers) about a specific token, mixed with actual execution (try a DeFi protocol, install a wallet, interact with a new chain). Token-launch projects funded the distribution; Coinbase got new-asset attention; users got crypto without buying it. It was the canonical Western learn-and-earn flagship.

Two structural pressures stacked over time. The cost of supporting custom networks and indexers per campaign grew faster than the revenue per campaign. And projects had to tokenize earlier than they wanted to fund the campaigns — before clear PMF or revenue — which meant token performance often deteriorated post-launch and hurt the projects more than the distribution helped them.

Then FTX collapsed in November 2022. Major social platforms (Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube) tightened policies on crypto-promotional content — shadow-banning, reduced reach, outright bans on crypto ads from crypto companies on certain platforms. Paid distribution channels for crypto projects dried up. That accidentally fueled the rise of crypto-native questing platforms in 2022 — Galxe and Layer3 became the durable distribution surface for projects that couldn’t buy ads anywhere else. They each built on the same underlying mechanic (verifiable-action quest → token reward) but at different scale and audience targeting than the exchanges.

3. The Asian branch: trading contests and 100-USDT giveaways. The Asian exchanges — Binance, OKX, MEXC — pioneered a different shape of the same primitive: trading contests. Instead of educational tasks, the action was trading a new token listing and hitting a volume threshold. Rewards were typically fixed-USDT-equivalent giveaways (often $100-class). The economics worked because both sides got value: the exchange got user trading activity on new listings, the listed project got token exposure to high-intent traders. This model required the project to already be tokenized, which made it less accessible to early-stage teams but more sustainable for launched-and-trading assets.

4. The 2025 unwind: regulatory thaw + token economics + project preferences. Through 2024–2025, the structural pressures from earlier compounded. Token performance for projects that distributed via questing deteriorated as the model scaled, which made the next cohort of projects less willing to pay for that distribution. The cost of supporting custom-chain infrastructure per campaign kept rising. Then the US regulatory environment shifted significantly under the new administration in 2025 — crypto promotion became legal again across most major social platforms, which removed the artificial scarcity of distribution that had been driving projects to questing platforms in the first place. The strongest projects increasingly opted for direct token sales over distribution-via-questing.

The result: Coinbase shut down its learn-and-earn questing flagship and acquired Web3 ad-tech platform Spindl to anchor a new distribution play centered on Base — essentially trading the educational-quest model for a paid-attribution model where projects buy targeted reach on-chain. Coinbase still runs BTC giveaways tied to trading volume, but the strategic bet on rewards-as-distribution has moved from learn-and-earn to Spindl-powered ads. Galxe stopped publicly maintaining most of its questing stats around January 2026 (peak quest participation had hit ~18M monthly in mid-2025 per their public Dune dashboard; the public numbers fell roughly 90%+ before the dashboard quietly stopped updating most fields), and pivoted to building Gravity, a Monad competitor that uses the existing Galxe audience as its GTM surface. Layer3 is at ~8K monthly active on-chain paying users in March 2026 (down 90%+ from peak per their public Dune dashboard) and is expanding into DeFi distribution with surfaces like ample.money. Asian trading contests are still running — that branch of the original primitive turned out to be the most durable, because it serves already-tokenized projects rather than depending on early-stage token launches.

Coinbase Earn. Learn-and-earn questing flagship is shut down. Coinbase acquired Spindl to anchor a paid-distribution model on Base, plus BTC giveaways tied to trading. Strategy still evolving alongside Base’s broader pivot.

Galxe. Public Dune dashboard largely stopped updating around January 2026 after participation fell ~90%+ from peak. Top spaces typically running <1K participants. Galxe team pivoted to building Gravity (Monad competitor).

Layer3. ~8K monthly active on-chain paying users in March 2026 (per their public Dune dashboard), down 90%+ from peak. Expanding into DeFi distribution surfaces like ample.money.

Asian exchanges (Binance / OKX / MEXC). Trading-contest giveaways still running — fixed-USDT rewards for trading new token listings and hitting volume thresholds. The most durable branch of the original primitive.

ZKPuzzle. ~300K+ existing audience spanning crypto whales, crypto farmers, and mainstream consumers. ZKPuzzle Arcade is the highest-volume ZK application in the world after Worldcoin since Aleo mainnet (Sept 2024). Expanding mainstream rapidly while keeping the privacy-chain niche.

The crypto-questing positioning is real, but it’s not how we started — and the origin matters for understanding what ZKPuzzle is today and where it’s going.

ZKPuzzle started as private onchain org treasury and multisigs. Then expanded into broader onchain-organization tooling. Then expanded into onchain dev & privacy tools plus onchain consumer & growth tools. (The full arc is in /blog/nucleo-to-zkpuzzle-v2; the timeline with receipts is on /research.)

Along the way, we naturally fit a niche as a questing platform specifically for privacy chains and privacy apps. The reason: we were the only product that could support both sides of that ecosystem. The dev & privacy tools side — Alchemy and Infura don’t exist for custom ZK chains the way they do for EVM L1s and L2s, so projects building on Aleo or similar networks needed infrastructure we already had. And the consumer & growth tools side — Galxe and Layer3 didn’t support the high infrastructure investment required to run quests on custom ZK chains. So we carved out the privacy-chain niche almost by accident.

That’s still part of the business. We’re more selective about what we bring on now — privacy chains and privacy apps that meaningfully advance the broader mission (bringing every organization onchain and adopting triple-entry bookkeeping / DCC as standard everywhere, as outlined in the v2 anchor blog). The bigger expansion through 2025–2026 is mainstream consumer rewards: the daily-game habit, group chat with family and friends, direct deals from real businesses, gift cards, USD redemption. Most of our growth now is mainstream — but the crypto-native part is intact, and the combination is what makes ZKPuzzle different from every other surface in this category.

What makes ZKPuzzle structurally different from Asian exchanges, Coinbase, Galxe, and Layer3 isn’t one feature — it’s the combination of offering breadth and audience composition.

Offering breadth. Asian exchanges offer trading contests + USDT giveaways. Coinbase Earn offered learn-and-earn quests (now shut down). Galxe and Layer3 offer quests. ZKPuzzle is the only platform in this category that combines all three: quests (try an app, complete a milestone, earn), giveaways and gift cards (shops, marketers, and users upload directly through ZKPuzzle apps), and ads (paid placement for projects that want it on top of organic distribution). For a project trying to grow an audience, that means one platform where they can run any combination — quests for engagement, giveaways for breadth, ads for targeting — instead of integrating with three different tools.

Audience mix. Galxe and Layer3 are crypto-native — their audience is predominantly crypto farmers and Web3 users. Coinbase Earn (when it was running) reached Coinbase’s exchange audience. Asian exchanges reach their respective trading audiences. ZKPuzzle’s 300K+ existing audience spans three psychographics: crypto whales (high-net-worth on-chain natives, often early to ZK and privacy chains), crypto farmers (active questers and yield-seekers from the Galxe/L3 era), and — importantly, the part growing fastest — mainstream consumers (users who came in through the daily-game habit, the group-chat layer, or the direct-shop rewards, and who don’t self-identify as crypto users at all). For a project, that’s reach across three normally-siloed segments through one campaign.