How Web proofs can change airdrops

Web3 most important feature is its ability to incentivize people's actions and data sharing. This principle is widely used by various players in the space, such as DeFi protocols launching new products and features, and new blockchain networks incentivizing traffic. An entire industry, known as Web3 marketing, is taking shape around this concept. However, the Web3 incentive economy is highly circular, with the same projects chasing a limited pool of users who farm incentives.

This leads to several issues:

1. Tokens are often farmed by opportunistic accounts
2. On-chain targeting is poor, with limited data points (e.g., balance, NFT holdings) that don't necessarily help in understanding users.
3. Breaking the acquisition/retention engagement cycle beyond mainstream users is challenging due to the difficulty in leveraging data that better describes user personas

Instead of relying solely on the few alternatives for forming on-chain identities available in the market today, projects could explore options to onboard specific Web2 user segments using Web2 attributes, potentially bridging the gap between traditional and blockchain-based marketing strategies.

Bribing users to try products is not sustainable. On-chain data are not sufficient to understand what really motivates them and design the right incentives

This can bring airdrop marketing beyond web3 users.

Web proofs are powered by TLS

Imagine you're sending a letter to a friend, but you want to make sure that no one else can read it or change it before it gets to your friend. You also want to make sure that the person who receives the letter is actually your friend, not someone pretending to be them.

Now, instead of a letter, think of the internet as a big post office where computers send messages to each other. TLS (Transport Layer Security) is like a special envelope that you use when sending your message over the internet.

When you visit a website with "https://" at the beginning, you're using TLS. It ensures that the information you send to the website (like your passwords or credit card numbers) is secure, only readable by the website, and hasn’t been tampered with.

TLS Notary adds an extra layer of verification to the TLS protocol, specifically for proving that a certain piece of information was received from a legitimate server without tampering.

Ethereum Foundation funded TLSNotary, which is currently an open-source protocol powering several use cases.

TLS Notary allow third parties to verify any information coming through https requests

Web proofs can boost web3 marketing

Web proofs can verify https data, without users revealing sensitive information

This is a step improvement on how airdrop targeting is done today. Generally speaking, it can foster the growth of new wave of consumer apps.

Let's recap the benefit of web proofs

• Add verifiable data to your application from any internet source
• Open up the closed data silos of Web2, making it possible for users to own their identities

This greatly expands the space among which airdrops can operate and to target power users of competing web2 apps

• Target users based on real life behavior (fitness data from strava
• Target users based on e-commerce purchases
• Target power users of competing or adjacent web2 apps (a web3 game targeting high spenders on Steam or Reddit users with high karma)
• Tokenize and exchange loyalty points without explicit consent of brands

Web proofs are entering their Proof of Concept phase, but we are close to these tools being available to all the web3 marketers (and incentive platforms like Tide Protocol will integrate them).