What gives an unchanging QR code the right to increase advertising prices?
Written by: KarenZ, Foresight News
As attention becomes a scarce resource, an attention machine on the Base chain centered around QR codes is gaining community attention. QRcoin, a project that promotes links through daily auctions for the winning bidders, is being viewed by the community as an advertising space rental product for small and beautiful projects, as well as an Alpha discovery engine.
Meanwhile, the QRcoin token QR has risen more than 13 times since May, with a current market value of $4.3 million. Base has also stated that QRcoin is a fusion of "games, performance art, and on-chain attention machine".
What is QRcoin?
QRcoin is essentially a daily attention auction platform based on Base and has launched a Mini App on Farcaster. The operating logic of QRcoin is relatively simple:
Every day, an auction (bidding with USDC) is opened on the platform website, and the auction "subject" is the day's QR code pointing rights (the QR code never changes). In other words, the successful bidder can decide which website the day's QR code points to - whether it's a personal social media account, Twitter post, blog, project official website, token page, or charity website, all can gain exposure through this "traffic entry". If the bid is outbid, funds will be immediately returned, so there's no need to 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 link pointed to by the auction winner is expected to gain exponential traffic growth. This means that each successful auction is "adding bricks and tiles" to the QR code's spread, allowing future exposure to continuously accumulate as the spread expands.
QRcoin.fun has also launched a "Discover-to-Earn" mechanism. Users only need to visit the qrcoin.fun website, view the day's auction-winning project, 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 win additional QR rewards by sharing screenshots and Ethereum addresses on the X platform.
The QRcoin developer is @0FJAKE, who is quite active on Twitter and has previously released the Base Colors Non-Fungible Token series (a 1/1 series of 16,777,216 colors in the RGB color system).
Data Perspective: Latest QRcoin Winning Bid Price Reaches $3,500
So far, QRcoin has held 96 auctions, with the latest winning bid price reaching $3,500, creating a historical high, with total auction winning bids close to $44,000. From the chart below, it's obvious that auction enthusiasm has significantly increased recently.
Source: QRcoin
Previous winners include Noice (likes reward project) with 5 wins, Clip.fun (similar to Reddit, but can earn rewards by posting and commenting) with 3 wins, and even the ZORA official website, with promotions on Twitter pages and posts, Farcaster posts, and token pages.
QR Token
QRcoin developer jake issued the QR token on Farcaster via Clanker on February 6th. QRcoin has officially stated that QR has no team allocation, no internal personnel, and no venture capital.
Within 22 days of QR token release, the token market value remained mostly below $40,000, rising to a historical high yesterday (June 10th) of about $6 million, currently falling back to around $4.5 million.
Regarding token effects, QRcoin will use part of the daily auction revenue to buy QR, closely linking QR's value with advertising space demand through the auction mechanism, forming a positive cycle between the token and ecosystem. However, the current daily token purchase quantity by QRcoin is not yet clear. Additionally, the aforementioned Discover-to-Earn mechanism can somewhat enhance platform visits and encourage users to explore winning bidder links.
Summary
Compared to traditional advertising platforms, QRcoin.fun's on-chain auction model is completely decentralized and transparent. Bidders can directly drive traffic to their projects or promotional content. Moreover, users can obtain tokens through simple interactions without investment, and this low-cost participation method may attract many new users to the ecosystem.
QRcoin's never-changing QR code is like a "traffic anchor" that may show compound growth over time. However, if future auction winners cannot obtain sufficient traffic returns (such as low conversion rates), long-term auction enthusiasm may decline. How to balance short-term traffic exposure with long-term value accumulation and truly become a value link connecting users with quality projects will be key to QRcoin's continuous evolution.
