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The downturn in the crypto market hasn’t been felt equally across the board, as evidenced by W2E project XCAD Network
The cryptocurrency market experienced a seismic dip in late 2021, as $1.8 trillion was wiped off the global market cap. This resulted in losses of over 75% for many altcoins, while coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum lost more than half of their value.
While the bear market cycle continues to spin, some bespoke sectors of the cryptocurrency market have continued to boom regardless of the general downturn.
Watch-to-Earn (W2E) is one such example – a market sector focused on providing crypto rewards to users for the time they spend watching videos on content sites like YouTube and Twitch.
The rise of watch-to-earn is typified in one example by the fortunes of the XCAD token, the native token of the XCAD Network. The value of XCAD increased 171% in the four weeks leading to time of writing, from $1.77 to $4.81.
One of the XCAD Network’s products is a browser plugin for YouTube that lets users earn crypto rewards for engaging with the content of their favorite creators. The creators issue unique personalized tokens to their audiences which can then be traded on the open market. Creators can also fashion NFTs out of memorable moments from their uploads and streams, which can then be traded on XCAD’s NFT marketplace.
W2E builds on the recent emergence of move-to-earn (M2E) projects which incentivize participation in certain activities. The most popular of these is STEPN (GMT), which grabbed headlines when it launched in Q1 by rewarding cryptocurrency rewards to users who achieved certain walking, jogging and running goals.
After suffering the same fate as every coin during Q2’s downturn, STEPN’s native GMT token remains perched 950% above the dollar value it held when it commenced trading just three months ago.
Watch-to-earn foregoes demanding strenuous activity from its users and instead looks to add a blockchain-based, crypto-enabled, economic framework to an activity that people do every day. Video content is already the most popular form of media among marketing professionals who have long since learned the communicative value of the moving image. The power of video on the consumer front is such that the average daily viewing total is already over 100 minutes per day, and that figure is expected to continue to rise.
W2E projects like XCAD look to harness this potential by delivering some of the revenue generated by this juggernaut industry back to the end-users, who have generally been excluded from the circle of compensation that revolves between advertisers, creators and platform stakeholders.
Notably, W2E doesn’t need to compete with video giants like YouTube to be a success, it only needs to complement it. Browser plugins like XCAD’s operate side-by-side with YouTube’s existing financial model, acting as a supplement rather than a replacement.
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