BaseCamp 2025 — Base Ads Vision and Roadmap

So, welcome to the um the ads workshop here at base camp. Um as Jesse mentioned in his state of base, uh spinnel team was acquired earlier this year. We came on to build ads and part of the goal of this talk is to whatever negative connotation you have of ads, hopefully remove it from your minds and have you find it cool and exciting and something you're willing to participate in. Cool. So what is the point of spindle?

This is kind of the marketing spiel. Onchain growth platform that provides full fun attribution analytics creating a transparent and permissionless ads marketplace for everyone. What that actually means is there's a bunch of tooling and dashboarding. Imagine amplitude and mix panel but like natively rebuilt on chain. That's kind of what spindle started as actually.

Uh and then we realized we had to go further. We have to build audiences. We have to build an ad network. We have to build basically the full flywheel, little F flywheel. And the vision has always been again don't think ads.

I know you you guys think ads and you think those little blinking banners on top of ether scan and it's horrible. That's that's not what we're talking about. That that is not just delete that from your mind. That is not what we're talking about here. Um what we're talking about is you go into the spindle app and I'm going to show it to you in the demo.

You you literally say I want someone who mints this thing. I want someone who deposits in this pool. I want someone who lends in this morpho pool. Whatever. And I'm willing to pay somebody to make that happen.

Right? In the case of ads, it's the base app or BitGet or one of our publisher partners. Maybe you want to pay the user. Maybe you want to pay a k, right? The the idea is to actually enable a flywheel in which you're paying for real onchain user actions and you only pay if that thing happens onchain.

And it's all transparent. It's all onchain. We're going to launch it next week. It's going to be on the Dune dashboard. There's going to be a level of transparency that you that you've never seen anyone's ever seen inside an ad system.

This was one of the original Spindle fundraising slides from like 2022, which is total garbage because I designed it. Um but it's it's always been the vision right that like a web three comp web three remember web three web 3 comes in they say I want this sort of user they publish a smart contract the user comes in does the thing and then we pay whoever drove the thing and again it could be a ko inside base app inside Twitter even it can be the app itself it can be anything right the idea was always to incentivize real user actions happening on chance it's always been the spindle vision which is finally coming to fruition at Coinbase which is why we sold what is the underlying protocol to thing. I I talked about flywheel in the previous builder session. I don't know if you were here. It's a very general sort of reward protocol.

I'm not going to talk about that so much. I'm going to talk about specifically the the ads version of it, which Andre, who's over here, built. And the idea to that is you go and you create a campaign. I'm going to show you how that works in a second. You say again, I want to drive someone to do this thing inside my app.

Um there's an attribution system that's that literally sees the click in and then sees the onchain action happen because they're pulling in the wallet. And then it sees all the conversions. conversions are like the the user doing the thing and then it pays the publisher in the case of ads for having brought in that user and there's a full flywheel full transparency you see exactly what's going on that that is the sort of ads flywheel version of it and that's what's at the core of spindle and what we're launching on chain u next week uh the numbers are always kind of impressive so I'll just run by the numbers there's basically 8 million reachable wallets what that means is again this is not like regular crypto sites it's not coin gecko it's not coin market cap it's inside the bit wallet It's inside collab land in a discord that's wallet gated and you see the wallet. It's inside base app for example. It's somewhere there's a wallet in a transactional context where they're ready to do something on chain.

This is not just running on random websites. We've measured a lot of traffic. Almost none of it converts. Some of you probably already know that none of it actually converts. We know that because we started as a measurement system.

So this is very natively onchain sort of media 140 countries and then we have a lot of different audience segments you can pick just like you can inside Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Um, and what what do the ads actually look like? So, that's base over there. That's a unis swap ad unis swap ad running inside feed. Uh, that one isn't live right now, but it's what we launched with.

This is bit uh one of the biggest wallets in Asia. Second biggest exchange. Yes, we work with competitors. We're we're neutral at the end of the day. We're here to make base app developers reach users wherever they can find them.

We're not beholden to Coinbase. This is kind of neutral. There's a reason why we have the spindle branding. It's to keep it a little bit separate from the base branding. Um, that's Jumper, which is probably our our best performing unit.

It's a Jumper is a swapping and bridging platform. So, you like literally bridge to base and instantly you get hit with a unit that says, "Hey, why don't you do this thing on base?" And it works remarkably well. It's like very contextual. Um, and then this is inside of Discord for Collaband, which also performs really well.

Um, so again, very crypto native media is the sort of thing we're talking about. Um, oh yeah, the case study with Morpha. So, Morpho is one of our biggest clients, one of our biggest fans. Um, 6x the engagement of other channels. We we do we just do better than every other paid acquisition channel.

Um the wallet connect rate is like 50% literally half of the users that come to app.morpho.org or whatever it is connect their wallet which is like crazy high. Um and then there's a 20% conversion rate from impression to onchain action which if you've measured your conversion rates using spindle maybe most onchain conversion rates are at best 2% 3%. So this is roughly an order of magnitude higher than most than most media that you're paying for.

And again you can measure all this inside spindle as part of it. Okay. So now I'm going to give you a little bit of a tease of what's coming. We're doing a live demo which obviously is always fraught with risk. Hopefully it works.

So this is kind of what Spindle normally looks like just to take a breather before I go into the live demo. Uh this is like the audience as it breaks down people who are using your app, what chain are they on, what tokens do they hold, what's their net worth, etc., etc. Um you get fullfunnel analytics. Again, it looks like mix panel amplitude, but imagine you magically could see what's going on on the blockchain.

That's kind of the experience of spindle. Um and then you know you manage creative and all that stuff in there. But let me let me go to the live demo. The chance of me screwing this up is non zero. This this is what spindle looks like.

This is the audience is you. Um new thing we're also announcing today. Uh Spindle's aspiration was never just to like equal Google and Facebook and Twitter, but to actually be better. So this is one of the better targeting UIs. I'm actually we're going to launch AI that lets you actually specify an audience.

So I also can't misspell it. So, okay. So, everyone who traded per or NFDs in the past 90 days, you press go. It hits our wallet intel database. Um, you go save audience.

Okay. So, that's that audience. So, 34,000 people in the Spindle publisher network have traded per or NFTs in the past 90 days. I just save that as an internal audience. What that means is next stop I go to campaigns.

So here I just go to create campaign uh base test and here's where I select an event. So this is Morpho. So I'm going to pay base app 100 $100 USDC for everyone who comes in and deposits into a Morpho pool. Just magically like that's it. Like we don't need to put any code on the site because we have the blockchain.

We have the consensus truth. We don't need it. Um and then pick an audience here. This one the one I just created. and then hit create campaign a bunch of things happen and then confetti which is important um and then if you actually go to base scanner uh what you'll see is this is the net result of all the transactions and yeah here it is ad campaign created so all the metadata I loaded in the previous screen gets written on chain so it's all public you can actually run a dune query and see all the ad campaigns running does everyone love that no but we can talk about that um but yeah that's basically what the deal is and then um in fact I think if you Open your base app right now.

This is the Morpho ad. So the Morpho video ad that says the best platform for whatever. You should be seeing it inside your feed. Unless you impression capped out. We limit the number of ads you can see.

So you've already seen it five times. You're not going to see it. But if you haven't, it should be inside your feed right now. Cool. While you guys are hopefully seeing a more ad in your feeds, I'm going to switch to another demo.

Another thing we're announcing, one last thing, Steve Job style. So we're building a spindle interface that's a mini app that lets you boost content inside BassApp to the base app feed. If you guys have ever run like Twitter ads, you know how you pick like a tweet and say, "Hey, I want this to like be boosted in feed." We're we're building that as a mini app inside base app itself. So, this is obviously my feed.

I posted this photo base camp. I say, "Okay, look, I want to boost post." I boost post and some of you might be familiar with online dating and boosting your profile and online dating. It's kind of the same vibe. And so, you go, "Okay, I want to boost this post for eight hours."

Boost post. Wallet transaction happens. Confirm. This is on test net at the moment. It's launching soon.

Uh, pass key. Done. That's it. I've boosted the content. And I can actually go back and like where's some of the expired ones?

This one. Oh, there has to be. It's not a demo if there isn't one failure. Uh, okay. Here we go.

Uh, probably not the good one. Uh, let's go back. Sorry. Which one have I boosted? This one.

Say, obviously I've tested a lot. Okay, here we go. So this is the actual analytics for that cast. So you can go in and say, "Okay, look, I got, you know, 230,000 impressions, 20,000 likes." And you can see the actual full flow here.

So it's kind of like the spindle analytics app thing that I showed you, but inside a mini app inside TBA itself or sorry, base app itself. And so you can literally boost content inside, you know, base app itself in a native self-s serving like self-serve way. So if you've got a content coin you want to pump and you want to boost, you can go in inside and and boost it. You've got a mini app. Uh you guys have a game, you want to boost that, you can go in and boost it and you'll just get way way more delivery, way more way more engagement.

The Spindle team's around. Please uh hit us up uh if you want to get on Spindle. And uh yeah, thanks for your attention. Hope you do. You find ads at least not bad now.