An upcoming vape-to-earn project wants to use token incentives and blockchain-enabled vapes to make nicotine addictions additions go up in smoke.
Called Puffpaw, the project intends to sell specialty vapes that record their user's smoking habits on the blockchain. It will reward them in their tokens for gradually reducing their nicotine intake.
Puffpaw is among a cadre of startups betting on the yet-to-launch Berachain blockchain, a venture capital darling. The quit-smoking project itself raised $6 million in seed funding led by Lemniscap Ventures.
Lemniscap General Partner Shaishav Todi said the investment is a bet on decentralized physical infrastructure, commonly known as DePIN.
"By building at the crossroads of culture and crypto and health, Puffpaw is making DePin accessible and practical, and has huge potential for mass adoption, particularly given increasing consumer demand for health-conscious vaping solutions," Todi said in an email statement.
Using token incentives to support healthier behavior isn't new in crypto. Puffpaw's leader Reffo Tse compared aspects of his gambit to StepN, a run-to-earn app on the Solana network.
Puffpaw's model attempts to create a self-supporting ecosystem of smokers who try and buy its products while weaning themselves of nicotine. Users can only take a certain number of puffs per day from their specialty vapes. They earn more tokens for taking hits of lower-nicotine level vape cartridges. They can then use those tokens to buy more vape cartridges from Puffpaw.
In an interview, Tse said the tokenomics aim to cover 30% of the price of the vape in users' first month of tracking their data. He added it includes social bonuses for, say, bumping vapes with other Puffpaw users.
The project takes into account possible attempts to game the system by, say, having one user "farm" tokens by ripping multiple Puffpaw vapes at once, Tse said. He was less clear on the possibility that users might be dishonest about their smoking practices, by, say, continuing to hit non-blockchain enabled nicotine vapes while collecting tokens from Puffpaw's special hardware.
Puffpaw's full seed round included investments from Volt Capital, Spartan, Folius Ventures, Karatage, Seed Club Ventures, Hypersphere, Panga Capital, EVG, Corner, Social Graph Venture, and Nonce Classic, a press release said.