[Note: I'm going to write glowingly about this app, but that doesn't mean go and buy the token.]
Sweatcoin gets a lot of stuff right that founders in Twitter Spaces and Web3 Discord can't seem to grasp. We're not even talking about the $SWEAT token yet — let's just talk about smoothly onboarding millions of people into web3 by creating that elusive "utility." No super in depth tech talks, no pie in the sky nonsense about esoteric fringe utility, just a basic, fun application that anyone can use.
Sweatcoin is simple. They give you $SWEAT to walk. You can trade that $SWEAT for marketplace rewards. The app has great sponsors, from jewelry to tech accessories. They also have charity events and other ways you can spend your $SWEAT if you want.
For a long time, $SWEAT was only a rewards token. It wasn't on chain, and you could only trade it for rewards. Today, they started a liquidity pool and brought the token on chain. Waiting until they had millions of users before starting an LP made sense for many reasons:
1. They have time to accumulate REAL users (13 million by their count),
2. they have time to cultivate relationships with sponsors for token sinks (utiliteee), and
3. they have time to build up their stablecoin reserves to create a deep LP.
Now all those users who were just using $SWEAT as rewards can now, at their leisure, come into web3 and use those tokens for whatever else. Defi, whatever. The company also got listed on a number of exchanges (OKx, Bitfinex, FTX, Bybit and Kucoin), so even normies have easy access to the token.
The big takeaway was that web3, wallets, crypto, tokens — none of that was ever pushed on the userbase. The app had announcements that the token would be on chain soon, but they were simple announcements that never got in the way of Sweatcoin being just a basic web2 tradfi rewards app. If you want to participate in web3 when we move, you can. If not, just keep walking for samples of perfume.
The way Sweatcoin accomplished this smooth transition should be a lesson for all web3 founders. Put web3 where it belongs in your product and let it enhance the experience. Web3 does not have to take your shit over. Ya dig?
