Why Spindl(e)?

Originally described by Homer as one deity, Hesiod enumerated three Fates:

Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropo, who (respectively) spun the thread of human life, measured out a length, and finally cutting it to a certain size. The three figures, sometimes depicted as youthful but more often as old and gaunt, have featured prominently in art for centuries.

Spindl was conceived by asking two questions:

What piece of absolutely critical Web 2 infrastructure could and should be rebuilt along blockchain lines?

What absolutely critical infrastructure is missing from Web 3?

The answer to both questions was the same: attribution.

Specifically, attribution as the base layer of truth the entire user acquisition stack of social media, organic community building, referral programs and (gasp!) even ads. It's much more than just


Take the entire universe of Web 2 advertising, responsible for trillions in market cap and billions in revenue: it's nothing if not a trustless world where, nonetheless, parties must come to a unanimous consensus about who drove what marketing result, with lots at stake in the conclusion. Different standards abound of course: Google will try to convince your their 'last click' model is correct, while Facebook will force you to use their 'self-attributing' model instead. But ultimately mutually distrustful parties come to a consensus on what transpired, until the next set of transactions...exactly like a blockchain.

Web 2 is stale and legacy and beyond reform at this point; Web 3 is the future. What's striking about the future is how nothing even resembling proper attribution exists.

What's Aave's ARPU (average revenue per user), a basic monetization metric?

What's Sandbox's user retention rate by cohort (another basic metric)? 

Did that NFT or token drop work for the innumerable projects who've undertaken them? 

When 'token go up' is a law of nature, then acquisition costs are free. But when that's no longer true, suddenly Web 3 needs to abide by the longer-lived law of 'you must have sustainable unit economics when it comes to user acquisition.' Without an attribution system, you have no idea what those are. Without Spindl (or something like it), Web 3 won't succeed at scale.

In the fullness of time, Spindl will evolve toward a fully-decentralized attribution protocol, a form of public utility not uniquely owned and controlled by anyone. For now, we just want Web 3 developers to know

Web 3 as inverted Web 2

The 'funnel' is the organizing marketing metaphor which holds as true for highway billboards as NFT drops. At the top of the funnel we have experiences like Discord posts, tweets, Instagram ads, YouTube videos, and every first-touch media experience for a potential user. At the bottom of the ever-narrowing funnel we have the events we care about: NFT buys, providing liquidity, engaging with a game.

In Web 2, most of the complexity lives toward the top of the funnel: ranking algorithms, ad auctions, user targeting, delivery optimization...all very complicated ways to massage the initial experience to drive the eventual down-funnel result. Attribution itself is relatively elementary: you bought a $200 thing on an ecommerce site, or $10 thing inside a mobile game. Just tally the monetization events and call it a day.

Attribution in Web 3 is much more complicated.

Sure, the data is 'public' in that it's probably on chain (though most of the relevant metadata is not). But teasing out which function on what smart contract called by which address corresponds to the key in-game action that's the core of a certain experience, that's less easy. Also, disentangling the correct acquisition cost or monetization for a given wallet, given the novel and convoluted economics at play in many crypto projects, is still the murky territory of . It

(Consider for example the liquidity bonus equation for Dydx, which resembles the financial derivatives modeled on Wall Street trading desks.)

We're not summing the prices in your online shopping cart anymore. Matters have gotten complicated.

Never mind that the data infrastructure in blockchain is embryonic and hard to use. While you could--and some have--hack together basic versions of Web 2 style attribution if you had to, best of luck if you're rolling your own in Web 3. If Spindl succeeds, you won't have to.

Without that causal thread of attribution, life on the Web is chaotic and opaque.

To continue the analogy, like Clotho spinning wool into yarn with her spindle, attribution takes the tangled jumble of Web data and turns it into a causal thread joining user actions into one coherent narrative. The user starts their journey down the marketing funnel by seeing an ad or a tweet; they then click or tap onto some landing page; perhaps they install an app or log in with a wallet; eventually, possibly days or weeks later, the user does something meaningful we’d like to quantify and understand. The attribution system, Spindl in the Web 3 case, is what twists all that data into a neat story, and ultimately decides what bounty is paid out as a reward.

Web 3 as an inverted Web 2

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