What justifies advertisers increasing their bids for an unchanging QR code?

Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News

As attention becomes a scarce resource, a Base chain attention machine centered around QR codes is capturing community interest. QRcoin, a project that promotes links for auction winners through daily auctions, is being viewed by the community as a rental product for advertising space targeting small and beautiful projects, as well as an Alpha discovery engine.

Meanwhile, the QRcoin token QR has increased more than 13 times since May, currently reaching a market cap of 4.3 million dollars. The Base official has also stated that QRcoin is a "fusion of games, performance art, and on-chain attention machines."

What is QRcoin?

QRcoin is essentially a daily attention auction platform based on Base, and it has also launched a Mini App on Farcaster. The operational logic of QRcoin is quite simple:

Every day, an auction (bidding in USDC) opens on the platform's website, and the "item" for auction is the right to direct the QR code for that day (the QR code never changes). In other words, the winning bidder can decide the website that the platform's QR code points to for that day—whether it's a personal social media account, a Twitter post, a blog, or a project’s official website, token page, or charity site, they can gain exposure through this "traffic entry." If the bid is surpassed, the funds will be immediately refunded, so there’s no worry about losses.

QRcoin will announce the daily auction winners on social media platforms like X and Farcaster, directly driving traffic to the target website. Considering that the QR code never changes, as it continues to spread in online and offline communities, the links pointed to by the auction winners are expected to gain exponentially increasing traffic. This means that each successful auction contributes to the "brick by brick" spread of the QR code, allowing future exposure to continuously accumulate as the reach expands.

QRcoin.fun has also introduced a "Discover-to-Earn" mechanism. Users only need to visit the qrcoin.fun website, check the winning projects of the day’s auction, and then return to the page to claim a small amount of QR tokens. This mechanism encourages users to explore new on-chain projects daily while earning rewards through participation. Users can also share screenshots of their claims and their Ethereum addresses on the X platform to win additional QR rewards.

The developer of QRcoin is @0FJAKE, who is quite active on Twitter and has previously released the Base Colors NFT series (a 1/1 series of 16,777,216 colors in the RGB color system).

Data Insight: The latest winning bid for QRcoin has reached 3,500 dollars

As of now, QRcoin has held 96 auctions, with the latest winning bid reaching 3,500 dollars, setting a new historical high, and the total auction winning amount is close to 44,000 dollars. It can be clearly observed from the chart below that the recent auction activity has significantly increased.

Source: QRcoin

Past winners include Noice (a like reward project) with 5 winning bids, Clip.fun (similar to Reddit but allows earning rewards through posting and commenting) with 3 winning bids, and even the ZORA official website, which has promoted Twitter pages and posts, Farcaster posts, and token page promotions.

QR Token

QRcoin developer Jake issued the QR token on February 6 through Clanker on Farcaster. QRcoin officials have stated that QR has no team allocation, no internal personnel, and no VC.

Within 22 days of the QR token's release, its market cap remained below 40,000 dollars for most of the time, rising to a historical high (around 6 million dollars) yesterday (June 10), and currently falling back to around 4.5 million dollars.

Regarding the token effect, QRcoin will use a portion of the daily auction revenue to purchase QR, closely linking the value of QR through the auction mechanism with the demand for advertising space, forming a positive cycle between the token and the ecosystem. However, it is currently unclear how many tokens QRcoin purchases daily. Additionally, the previously mentioned Discover-to-Earn mechanism can enhance platform traffic to some extent, encouraging users to explore the links of the winners.

Summary

Compared to traditional advertising platforms, the on-chain auction model of QRcoin.fun is completely decentralized and transparent. Bidders can directly direct traffic to their projects or promotional content. Furthermore, users can earn tokens through simple interactions without needing to invest, which may attract a large number of new users to join the ecosystem.

The unchanging QR code of QRcoin acts as a "traffic anchor," which may exhibit compound growth over time. However, if future auction winners cannot achieve sufficient traffic returns (such as low conversion rates), long-term bidding enthusiasm may decline. Balancing short-term traffic exposure with long-term value accumulation, and truly becoming a value link connecting users with quality projects, will be key to QRcoin's continuous evolution.

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