‘Quiz-to-earn’ crypto app hooks 3 million users in Indonesia

Wild Cash, an app that pays users crypto tokens to take quizzes, has become a hit in Indonesia.

It has ranked no. 1 in the country on Google Play Store’s trivia games category since September 2022, garnering 3 million monthly active users in fourth quarter of 2022 after launching on Binance’s BNB Chain.

Photo credit: Tech in Asia

The company behind it has secured some brand-name investors, too. Binance Labs, the VC arm of the crypto exchange, and Sequoia China Seed Fund co-led the seed round.

A lucrative bet

The premise of the app is simple: Users create an account, answer a series of questions, and get rewarded with tokens by the end of the day. They can then choose to withdraw or “stake” the currency, which involves locking the tokens for a period of time in order to earn interest.

The secretive company behind Wild Cash is Hooked Protocol. It aims to become a leading on-ramp layer for Web3 and the infrastructure that enables decentralized social networks. Its founders – Jason, Jess, and Mike – have declined to reveal their full names.

But according to their Linkedin profiles, Jason and Jess had stints in Silicon Valley companies including ride-hailer Uber.

Hooked Protocol’s fundraising efforts appear to have been successful. The company has bagged US$6 million through private token sales for its governance token Hook and secured a further US$2.5 million via a public sale.

Retail investors have benefited as well. From its public sale price of US$0.1, the Hook token has jumped to US$2.54 at the time of writing, netting a 25x return.

But its founders emphasize that Hooked Protocol is no cash grab. “We want to provide all necessary Web3 infrastructure for new users entering the Web3 space, and that means [providing the infrastructure for] their first wallet, their first decentralized identity, and so on,” Jason tells Tech in Asia.

Refining “X-to-earn”

Wild Cash is no doubt the first expression of Hooked Protocol’s broader ambitions.

To earn tokens, users answer questions ranging from something as general as “What is the currency of the US?” to something more specific like “Which of these Italian cities are further north?”

In return, they are rewarded with HGT (Hooked Gold Token), a token with infinite supply. Wild Cash also has “invite-to-earn” mechanics: Think of it as a referral system, but instead of just giving HGTs after the invitation is redeemed, users will also receive a percentage of mining rewards from their invitees.

These features naturally raise a bunch of questions around the future price of HGT and the ability to retain users as Wild Cash’s earnings dwindle – a problem that has plagued many “X-to-earn” apps.