Galxe: From Crypto Quest Platform to Web3’s Super App
Galxe's Journey of Innovation in the Web3 Industry
TL;DR
As the Web3 market becomes increasingly competitive, attracting users is more challenging. Galxe supports industry growth by connecting Web3 projects and users through its quest based onchain distribution platform.
Furthermore, Galxe addresses industry challenges through infrastructure innovation. The zero knowledge proof based ‘Galxe Identity Protocol’ addresses data sovereignty issues, while the omnichain settlement layer ‘Gravity’ tackles liquidity fragmentation and complex usability issues.
This approach positions Galxe to significantly boost the growth potential of the Web3 industry. In particular, it aims to accelerate the mass adoption of Web3 technology and advance the industry by reducing barriers between chains and creating a user-friendly environment through Gravity.
1. The Competitive Marketplace of the Web3 Industry: A Battleground for Innovation
The Web3 industry is rapidly developing in both size and technology, yet it remains a nascent and highly competitive market. This competition is further intensified by the lack of established industry standards, leading to increasingly complex market dynamics over time.
A competitive market environment may be a crucial driver of innovation, but it also presents significant challenges. The influx of numerous players makes it increasingly difficult for individual projects to gain recognition. Even those with distinctive strengths struggle to capture user attention.
While capturing user attention is crucial in traditional industries, it is even more vital in Web3 space. Web3 is inherently a community-driven ecosystem. Community building is essential for the success and longevity of a project. This is due to the decentralized and infrastructural nature of the Web3 industry. Consequently, Web3 projects thrive and gain value when integrated with a community, rather than standing alone.
Early-stage projects, in particular, face heightened challenges. Without their own token or effective user onboarding tools, projects can encounter substantial difficulties in user acquisition. Moreover, the Web3 ecosystem relies heavily on community building centered around direct rewards such as airdrops, making user acquisition and retention even more difficult without these incentives.
2. Galxe: An Onchain Distribution Bridging the Web3 Industry
Galxe has emerged as a platform that effectively supports user onboarding in the competitive Web3 landscape. It serves as an initial entry point for Web3 projects and as an onchain distribution platform, facilitating connections between users and projects within the onchain environment.
While many platforms aim to bridge the Web3 industry, Galxe stands out as the most popular due to its ease of use and flexibility. Galxe offers no-code community-building tools and an on-chain loyalty points system, enabling even nascent projects to efficiently design their own reward-driven structures for user acquisition.
The value of a distribution platform stems from its substantial user base. Currently, Galxe boasts over 25 million users and more than 6,000 onboarded projects. This strong user base is a significant competitive advantage, setting Galxe apart from other platforms.
2.1. What Does Galxe Offer?
Galxe is a ‘Super App’, which offer a variety of interconnected services rather than being limited to a single function. These services work together seamlessly, creating synergies and fostering a harmonious ecosystem. This distinctive approach is Galxe's competitive advantage. Here are the main services that Galxe offers:
2.1.1. Galxe Quest
Galxe Quest is a no-code community-building platform based on a loyalty point system. Projects can effectively promote themselves to users through 'quests,' which can provide educational content like quizzes or encourage users to explore different features and products within their ecosystem. Additionally, Galxe Quest supports social activity promotion through integration with external channels such as Discord and X (Twitter).
The key to this service is that it structures interactions between projects and users in the form of quests. This approach engages users through gamification. Notably, the results of a user's quest are recorded as on-chain credentials. These credentials materialize as an NFT and an On-chain Achievement Token (OAT), which is similar to a Soulbound Token (SBT). This feature differentiates Galxe Quest, as users can use these credentials across other services or external ecosystems, making it highly versatile and scalable.
2.1.2. Galxe Compass
Galxe Compass is a service that leverages AI technology to discover and recommend Web3 projects with potential reward opportunities, enabling users to effectively find promising projects. Recognizing that the existence of numerous projects can create a competitive environment, Galxe aims to optimize the user discovery process through advanced AI technology.
The service also features a data aggregator, allowing users to view key information at a glance, such as a project's funding size and investors. Additionally, the curation feature provides personalized project information to enhance the user experience.
2.1.3. Alva
Alva is a natural language-based AI service that provides a similar experience to ChatGPT. It uses real-time data to recommend Web3 projects to users and facilitate the exploration and analysis of the Web3 market.
Users can ask for information ranging from detailed queries, such as how to participate in a specific project's airdrop event, to broader questions about recent Web3 industry trends. The natural language-based conversational interface allows users to explore information conveniently.
Alva is currently in its beta testing phase, with plans to fully launch in August 2024. It will be interesting to see how it performs in the future and how it integrates with other Galxe services.
2.1.4. Galxe Score
Galxe Score is a service that comprehensively analyzes users’ on-chain and off-chain activities, providing easily understandable quantitative metrics(Experience, Fame, Asset, Expertise, Humanity). It measures a variety of data, including on-chain credentials earned through Galxe Quest, crypto assets held, and social media account activity. Projects can use this metric to identify organic users, while users can leverage their Galxe Score to demonstrate the value of their activities and potentially earn higher rewards from projects.
2.1.5. Galxe Passport
Galxe Passport is a KYC service designed for the Web3 environment. By leveraging zero-knowledge proof technology, it ensures the secure protection of users' identity information while enabling its use across various Web3 platforms. This service empowers users to manage and utilize sensitive off-chain personal data, such as government-issued IDs or driver's licenses, with complete control and privacy.
With Galxe Passport, users can unequivocally prove their identity, distinguishing genuine users from bots. They can selectively disclose personal information such as country, age, and gender as needed, enabling them to verify their identity while maintaining full control, even in situations where KYC is mandatory.
This service can be used in a variety of ways. For example, with Web3 gaming banned in South Korea, it can be effectively employed when a particular Web3 gaming project needs to exclude South Korean users to comply with regulations. Additionally, if a project wants to target a specific audience, it can encourage users to selectively disclose their information to receive additional benefits or rewards.
These features make Galxe Passport an important tool for balancing privacy and compliance within the Web3 ecosystem. By ensuring users' control over their personal information while allowing them to prove their identity when necessary, Galxe Passport is flexible enough to be utilized across a wide range of Web3 services and projects.
2.2. Galxe: Driving Web3 Ecosystem Growth
As an onchain distribution platform and super app, Galxe effectively facilitates connections between users and projects. Their impact is demonstrated through tangible results. A prime example is the Arbitrum Odyssey program, which launched in June 2022.
The program was launched with the aim of developing the Arbitrum ecosystem, and it strived to engage users through a variety of specific tasks. The results were remarkable, with 423,309 Arbitrum NFTs minted, 300,000 unique users brought to Arbitrum, and over $40 million worth of assets bridged to Arbitrum. These achievements have been recognized as significant contributions to the Arbitrum ecosystem.
In addition to Arbitrum, several other Web3 projects, including Optimism, and Linea, have run ecosystem activation programs through the Galxe Quest platform and have seen significant growth since. Image from Galaxy Digital's research shows that both Arbitrum and Optimism have experienced substantial user growth since the start of their Quest programs.
In particular, Optimism has seen a roughly 2.9x increase in daily transactions since the start of the Quest, and this number has remained relatively stable since the end of the Quest program. These examples clearly demonstrate that Galxe can effectively support the growth and user engagement of Web3 projects.
3. Beyond the Quest Platform: Galxe's Infrastructure Journey
With its Quest platform, Galxe enables effective user onboarding and facilitates the development of the Web3 industry. However, their commitment to innovation extends to significant infrastructure developments. Drawing from extensive operational experience, Galxe's innovations are driven by genuine needs within the industry.
3.1. Galxe Identity Protocol: Infrastructure for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)
Galxe was originally launched to build a Web3 credential data network, and the Quest platform naturally accumulated data on interactions between projects and users. However, these data were only utilized within the Galxe platform, and it was difficult for users to leverage their data on external platforms. This limited environment did not provide users with full control over their data.
To solve this problem, Galxe launched the ‘Galxe Identity Protocol’ mainnet in April 2024 and began to innovate on the infrastructure side. The protocol is notable for providing a foundation for users to fully manage, own, and share their data, and for protecting privacy by utilizing a zero-knowledge proof mechanism. It is also permissionless and highly scalable, showing promise as a broad credential infrastructure that can be expanded to various environments, not just the Galxe platform.
The protocol's flexible structure allows for a wide range of applications, and its potential is noteworthy. For example, the Galxe Identity Protocol can be utilized to build a reputation system for the gaming sector with credentials issued through Web3 gaming platforms as well as Web2 gaming platforms such as Steam. It also enables a variety of use cases, including data markets where users can trade their data directly with full control over their personal data.
Galxe Identity Protocol gives users complete control over their data, enabling a wide range of innovations within the Web3 ecosystem. It is expected to become an important piece of Web3 infrastructure that opens up new possibilities while solving fundamental problems in the Web3 ecosystem.
3.2. Gravity: Layer 1 Blockchain Infrastructure for an Omnichain Future
In May 2024, Galxe announced the launch of Gravity, a Layer 1 blockchain solution designed to address the fragmentation of the Web3 industry. Gravity aims to connect and integrate multiple blockchains to ensure interoperability within the fragmented Web3 ecosystem and ultimately drive mass adoption of the Web3 industry by significantly enhancing the user experience.
As previously mentioned, the Web3 industry is a competitive market due to the lack of established standards. As a result, new chains with different technical standards are constantly emerging, which leads to the fragmentation of the ecosystem.
The token market is also very competitive, with an average of 5,300 new token projects created every day. This leads to liquidity fragmentation for users, who are forced to manage their assets across multiple chains and wallets. These issues make the use of Web3 technology complex and difficult, especially for new users, and create a high barrier to entry, which hinders the expansion of the Web3 ecosystem.
Gravity is Galxe's solution to the fragmented Web3 ecosystem. Gravity is an omnichain settlement layer that connects different chains and allows users to have a seamless experience as if they were operating in a single ecosystem. This will be made possible through Intent-based transactions and Full-chain Abstraction, which are key technologies that Gravity leverages.
The first key technology that Gravity employs is intent-based transactions. This allows users to simply express an intent, such as “swap token A for token B.” Gravity helps developers find an optimized path based on the user's intent and perform complex, multi-step transactions. This approach is expected to reduce the difficulty of using complex decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, making them more accessible, especially for new users.
The second key technology is full-chain abstraction. While intent-based transactions can be applied within a single chain, the concept of chain abstraction deals with interactions between multiple chains. The goal of this technology is to abstract everything in the chain, separating the technical complexity from the user and creating a user-friendly experience. It's similar to how you can simply dial a number on your mobile device to contact a user with a different carrier without any technical understanding. This will create an extremely simplified experience in the Web3 ecosystem, where users will be able to use any wallet, chain, and dApp as if they were all integrated into one.
These technologies are expected to significantly lower the barriers to entry for Web3 and mark a pivotal point, enabling more users to benefit from blockchain technology. By connecting liquidity accross different chains, Gravity can actually improve overall liquidity and enhance the trading experience for users.
4. Can Gravity Unite Web3?
In the Web3 industry, the emergence of new infrastructure often creates new silos rather than solving existing problems. As seen in current blockchain market mainnet and Decentralized Identity (DID) market cases, many projects introduce different technical standards and promise innovation but often end up as separate silos.
However, Gravity has a unique strength that sets it apart from other projects. It's more than just a technical manifesto; it's designed with real-world experience gained from operating the Galxe platform. In the two years since its launch, Galxe has served as ‘bridge’, connecting more than 6,000 projects to users, integrating more than 35 mainnets along the way and gaining a wealth of experience in chain integration.
Given this background, Gravity is the most likely main player to bring the decentralized Web3 market together, rather than simply becoming another silo. It is also expected to leverage its accumulated experience to solve industry problems more efficiently and provide simple and practical features for users, leading the development of the industry.
5. Conclusion
Galxe’s journey exemplifies the evolution of the Web3 ecosystem, and its recent announcement of Gravity marks a significant milestone in this progression. The Web3 industry is growing rapidly, but fragmentation and complexity are hindering mass adoption. In this challenging environment, Galxe has successfully bridged Web3 projects and users by offering various services as a super app, starting with the Quest platform.
Additionally, Galxe aims to address data sovereignty issues through the Galxe Identity Protocol and the fragmented Web3 ecosystem with Gravity. The fragmented ecosystem has hindered the Web3 industry’s development, scattering liquidity and making asset utilization inefficient, while also complicating the user experience.
Gravity offers a clear solution to these problems. It unifies decentralized liquidity with omnichain technology and improves the user experience with an intuitive and simple interface. The goal is to abstract the technical complexity of Web3 and make it accessible to the average user.
This approach is expected to play an important role in realizing the growth potential of the Web3 industry. By lowering the barriers between chains and creating a user-friendly environment, it will accelerate the popularization of Web3 technology and the development of the industry as a whole. Therefore, it is worth paying attention to the changes that Gravity will bring and its impact on the Web3 ecosystem.
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