As crypto has evolved and matured over the last 15 years, many of its promises have – contrary to popular opinion – come to fruition to a nontrivial degree. Every day millions of users globally bring their wallets to applications where they take onchain actions, with sovereignty over their own assets and data.
Many of these actions happen as a result of a user interacting with an app, protocol, or asset directly. But crypto’s open, composable, and permissionless nature means that all of these actions can just as easily be packaged up and presented as embedded experiences while retaining their full functionality.
These conditions have created the opportunity for a product like Daylight. At its core, Daylight is a feed of personalized transaction recommendations that can be presented to users in a variety of apps & wallets via an API integration. These recommendations take the form of mints, claims, quests and more – with new transaction types emerging as crypto’s apps become more varied. Provided with a wallet address, Daylight can ingest a user’s onchain activity and use it to help them find useful and personalized things to do onchain.
Today, Daylight powers recommendations on the ‘Home’ and ‘Discover’ pages for many of the most popular wallets, reaching over 6 million active addresses every month. Wallets, though, are just one type of application that knows of a user’s address, and this feed can actually be wielded by any internet application that is “address-aware” (meaning that it has users with a known blockchain wallet address).
Daylight’s discovery engine helps apps give users a better experience, and it also presents a revenue opportunity as onchain transactions are often quite valuable operations and Daylight can help app partners enter this flow. Furthermore, because of crypto’s open and composable nature, value flows can be stacked and embedded permissionlessly, opening up an infinite canvas for connecting value across applications and experiences.
For example, every time a mint takes place on Zora, the protocol pays out both the creator and the referring site. These rules are transparent and baked into the protocol, and rewards are paid out automatically upon every mint. To the extent that conduits like Daylight deliver transaction volumes to protocols like Zora, they earn a share of those rewards, and can further share them with their distribution partners, all without needing to establish a business relationship up-front. Referral flows like this are common in web2 but they require trust and contractual agreements, and are slow to pay out. Crypto’s openness, on the other hand, lets anyone step into this flow, creating a more inclusive and efficient value chain.
As crypto grows, there will be more and more eyeballs on and time spent in apps that are address-aware. This will present both an opportunity to suggest more actions to users and also an opportunity to understand users in much more detail. The result may be something that resembles the architecture of the web2 ad/referrals ecosystem, but it will likely also be materially different, given the open, composable, and address-aware nature of web3. We are excited to find out.
The dynamic and open-ended nature of the growth and discovery problems in web3 are part of what impressed us with the Daylight team. Co-founders Kyle and Morley have spent time across web2 and web3 organizations, have a deep understanding of wallets, and approach the space with immense pragmatism. We are very excited to get to partner with them and lead Daylight’s $6m Seed financing alongside our friends at 1kx. Daylight is hiring and will use this capital to expand to more surfaces. You can also use Daylight directly to find interesting things to do onchain.
