Puffpaw Brings Its ‘Vape-to-Earn’ Model to the Mainstream with New NFT Launch

The DePIN project Puffpaw has pioneered an innovative ‘vape-to-earn’ model that aims to rid smokers of harmful nicotine through tokenized incentives – and is bringing its product to mainstream users with the launch of are new NFT collect and vape.

“The goal is to attract more real users,” Puffpaw’s co-founder, Reffo Tse, said Declutter. “If you sell to the real smokers, real consumers, they don’t know anything about crypto,” he explained, adding, “We’re creating a new consumer experience here.”

The upcoming Gen2 NFT collection will launch on Berachain, which spawned 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.

While the Puffpaw Genesis collection was aimed at crypto degens, with airdrops and additional benefits for early users, the next wave of devices and NFTs are aimed at mainstream users with a coin price under $100, including shipping and customs clearance.

“It only covers our production costs for making the vapor and shipping costs, so we don’t make a profit from selling the product from the second batch,” Tse explains. Instead, the goal is to reach a broader audience of regular users, with customers able to purchase the Smart Vape and NFT using fiat money, expanding the benefits of Puffpaw’s ‘vape-to-earn’ model.

Vape to earn

Puffpaw’s new business model aims to leverage financial incentives to help smokers and vapers quit nicotine.

The Smart Vape uses a tea extract-based, nicotine-free e-liquid designed to help users gradually reduce and quit nicotine use. Although Puffpaw’s closed-pod ecosystem contains pods of nicotine, they provide fewer rewards the more nicotine is in the pod, Tse said.

“We put Bluetooth modules in each of the pods and each of the vape machines,” he explained. The device connects via 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, monitor and record all your smoking data: the duration of each puff, the time stamp of each puff, the nicotine level, the flavor,” Tse said. That information is recorded on the chain and determines how rewards are distributed to each user. “To maximize your financial rewards, you should opt for 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, while the rest are spread across the US and Europe. “In the Web3 world it doesn’t matter where you are. We focus heavily on specific regions as our target markets,” Tse said, adding, “We do even much bigger business than infrastructure projects in the Korean market because this is a real, tangible consumer product.”

Puffpaw works closely with “local, regional vape partners,” Tse said, explaining that the company has established a recycling program through which it ships empty pods to Korea, with its vape partner refilling the pods and shipping its devices to Korean users sends. He added that the company’s business model allows it to compete with established vape giants on both pricing and supply chain logistics from day one.

The goal is to demonstrate that while blockchain technology offers benefits to end users, “it’s the same product; it’s the same quality of the vapor, the same kind of great taste of the juice that you can compare with other general products.

“Many young people don’t vape because of nicotine addiction; they vape because everyone else vapes,” Tse said. “So we offer everyone who smokes the opportunity to quit nicotine.”

“There are 1.3 billion smokers,” he added. “If we can convert some smokers to vaping, and they stick with the nicotine-free product, then we are contributing to the world.”