Tech

Puffpaw Brings its ‘Vape-to-Earn’ Model to the Mainstream With New NFT Launch

DePIN project Puffpaw is pioneering an innovative “vape-to-earn” model that aims to wean smokers off harmful nicotine through tokenized incentives—and it’s bringing its product to mainstream users with the launch of its new NFT collection and vapes. “The purpose is to attract more of the real users,” Puffpaw’s co-founder, Reffo Tse, told Decrypt. “If you’re selling to the real smokers, real consumers, they know nothing about crypto,” he explained, adding that, “We’re creating a new consumer experience here.”

The upcoming Gen2 NFT collection will launch on Berachain, which incubated Puffpaw, and the website of Korean vape and juice brand TREATs, Puffpaw’s strategic partner in Korea. Billed as “probably the most unique sales event in this multi-billion dollar industry,” the collection consists of 30,000 NFTs, each of which comes with a Puffpaw box containing one vape and three pods. Where the Puffpaw Genesis collection was aimed at crypto degens, with airdrops and additional benefits for early users, the next wave of devices and NFTs targets mainstream users with a mint price below $100 including shipping and customs clearance.

“It’s just going to cover our production cost for making the vape and the shipping cost, so we’re not making a profit from selling the product from the second batch,” Tse explained. Instead, the aim is to reach a wider audience of mainstream users—with customers able to buy the Smart Vape and NFT using fiat cy, extending the benefits of Puffpaw’s “vape-to-earn” model. Puffpaw’s novel business model aims to leverage financial incentives to help smokers and vapers quit nicotine.

Its Smart Vape uses a tea-extract-based, nicotine-free e-liquid designed to help users gradually reduce and quit nicotine use. While Puffpaw’s closed-pod ecosystem does include pods with nicotine, they return fewer rewards the more nicotine is in the pod, Tse said. “We put Bluetooth modules into each of the pods and each of the vape machines,” he explained. The device connects over Bluetooth to a mobile app, which uses a crypto wallet to log in and authenticate the user’s Puffpaw NFT.

“We can use the mobile app to track and monitor and record all of your smoking data—the duration of each puff, the timestamp of each puff, the nicotine level, the flavor,” Tse said. That information is recorded on-chain, and determines how rewards are distributed to each user. “In order for you to maximize your financial rewards, you have to go with the non-nicotine pot, to smoke only within a certain range of each day, to have a higher rarity of your NFT,” he explained.

To date, Puffpaw has attracted a diverse user base, with 50% of its customers based in South Korea and Japan, with the rest split between the U.S. and Europe. “In the Web3 world, it doesn’t matter where you are located. We are heavily focusing on specific regions as our target markets,” Tse said, adding that, “We’re even doing much bigger business than infra projects in the Korean market, because this is a real, tangible consumer product.”

Puffpaw is working closely with “local, regional vape partners,” Tse said, explaining that the firm has set up a recycling program that sees it ship empty pods to Korea, with its vape partner refilling the pods and shipping its devices to Korean users. He added that the firm’s business model enables it to compete with established vape giants on both pricing and supply chain logistics from day one. The aim is to demonstrate that while blockchain technology offers benefits to end users, “it’s the same product; it’s the same quality of the vape, the same type of great flavor of the juice that you can compare to other general products.”

“A lot of young folks, they don’t vape because of nicotine addiction; they vape because everybody else is vaping,” said Tse. “So we’re providing an option to anyone who is a smoker, to help them to quit nicotine. There are 1.3 billion smokers,” he added. “If we can convert some of the smokers to vaping, and they stay with the non nicotine product, then we’re contributing to the world.”

Terron Gold