Engineering the Thirdwave of Advertising

The Thirdwave of Advertising is the vision for a new era, where digital and decentralized worlds converge, targeting creates alignment, and users become owners. Wallet-Aware Advertising bridges vision and execution, providing a privacy-first foundation for targeted, value-driven engagement.

Engineering the Thirdwave of Advertising unfolds through five levels, each addressing critical challenges, unlocking new opportunities, and demonstrating how Thirdwave is actively building the tools and infrastructure to enable this transformation:

● Level 1: Building a Wallet-Aware Ecosystem - unify blockchain data, surface key signals, and enable meaningful user insights.

● Level 2: Making Data-Driven Decisions - Empower developers with seamless access to wallet insights for smarter integrations and innovation.

● Level 3: Transforming Users as Owners - Transform engagement via web3 native discovery, linking wallet data to tailored incentives and sustained ecosystem growth.

● Level 4: Bridging Onchain Data to Offchain Advertising Channels - Unlock Wallet-Aware Advertising by integrating blockchain-based insights into traditional ad platforms, enabling precise targeting, unified attribution, and scalable campaigns across ecosystems.

● Level 5: Decentralizing Dynamic Discovery - Use blockchain primitives to align incentives, reward contributions, and drive cross-platform collaboration.

This phased approach offers a path toward a more precise, transparent, and value-aligned ecosystem. Wallet-Aware Advertising transforms how advertisers, developers, and platforms collaborate—ushering in an era where shared growth and user ownership define the future of digital engagement.

Level 1: Building A Wallet Aware Ecosystem

Blockchain generates an immense volume of data through wallet activity, representing user behaviors, contributions, and value across ecosystems. However, this data is fragmented, and spread across wallets, platforms, and chains, making it nearly impossible to see the full picture. Without the tools to access and unify this data, projects are left relying on incomplete or surface-level metrics, limiting their ability to make informed decisions.

To fully leverage wallet identifiers and unlock the potential of blockchain data, the industry needs tools that can streamline, consolidate, interpret, and elevate key user behaviors across fragmented ecosystems. This includes:

● Mapping Wallet Activity Across Chains: Mapping billions of transactions and wallets across chains to uncover patterns and cross-platform behaviors.

● Creating Holistic User Profiles: Aggregating wallet activity into privacy-safe, comprehensive profiles that connect behaviors across ecosystems.

● Surfacing Meaningful Signals: Tools that analyze wallet activity to surface meaningful signals like engagement, loyalty, and quality, distinguishing high-value users from noise. These signals go beyond raw transactional data and help identify users who actively contribute to ecosystem growth.

By making onchain data actionable, projects can unlock transformative possibilities:

● Understand Audiences: Gain a deep understanding of audience behaviors by identifying high-value users and segmenting them based on meaningful onchain activities, enabling smarter decision-making across ecosystems.

● Build for Longevity: Shifting focus toward long-term, high-quality users will foster sustainable growth, ensuring that campaigns are aimed at users who will contribute over time, rather than those who engage only temporarily.

● Scale Strategically: With the right tools to aggregate and interpret wallet data, projects can scale their initiatives, making informed decisions that support growth with actionable, reliable insights.

Thirdwave is addressing these challenges with Wallet Intelligence, a foundation for unifying and interpreting wallet activity. By connecting fragmented blockchain data across chains and platforms, Wallet Intelligence creates actionable insights that projects can trust. It surfaces high-value behaviors, such as engagement, loyalty, and contributions, while providing privacy-safe user profiles and tools for precise targeting. These capabilities empower projects to make data-driven decisions, laying the groundwork for Wallet-Aware Advertising.

Level 2: Making Data-Driven Decisions

Despite the potential of wallet data, developers face significant barriers to accessing and using it effectively. Without simplified tools, integrating wallet insights into applications remains complex, slowing innovation and adoption. Developer adoption is key to making Wallet-Aware Advertising a reality. Without integrating onchain signals into applications, these insights won’t shape how user quality is assessed or optimized for the market, limiting their ability to drive precision targeting and performance marketing at scale.

To unlock the potential of wallet data, we need to equip developers with tools that simplify access to and integration of actionable insights. This includes:

● Intuitive Data Access: Providing APIs and SDKs allowing developers to integrate wallet insights into their applications seamlessly.

● Fostering Ecosystem Innovation: Supporting developers through hackathons, grants, and resources that encourage experimentation and innovation with wallet-based data.

● Lowering Barriers to Entry: Offering clear documentation, community support, and streamlined tools to ensure developers can easily build with onchain signals.

By integrating wallet signals, developers can:

● Create Personalized Applications: Design user experiences that increase engagement, retention, and growth by tailoring interactions to verified behaviors.

● Elevate the Web3 Ecosystem: Enable richer, more interactive applications that showcase the power of wallet data to the broader ecosystem.

● Build for Scalability and Sustainability: Deliver data-driven personalization that scales with user needs while maintaining relevance and trust.

Thirdwave is enabling this transformation by providing the infrastructure and developer tools necessary to integrate onchain signals into applications. Our suite of APIs, SDKs, CLI tools, and comprehensive support empower developers to create the next wave of Web3 innovation. With the Wallet Intelligence API delivering single wallet requests in under 100 milliseconds, developers can rely on real-time insights to build faster, smarter, and more personalized applications.

Lowering technical barriers ensures developers adopt wallet-based insights as a core part of their applications.

Level 3: Transforming Users to Owners

Web3 projects often rely on short-term tactics like airdrops and quests, but these strategies are often "Wallet Blind"—missing the onchain signals required for effective user targeting & measuring effectiveness. While these tools can be powerful, their impact is limited when they attract fleeting attention rather than building long-term value. Moreover, the absence of standardized attribution and real-time optimization limits scalability and prevents meaningful evaluation of campaigns.

By introducing wallet-aware growth tools, we create the opportunity for a fundamental shift: from attracting short-term users to cultivating long-term owners. Owners are more than just participants; they are users deeply invested in your project’s success, both financially and emotionally, because they see themselves as integral to its growth. This transformation not only strengthens relationships but also fosters loyalty, engagement, and advocacy within your ecosystem.

For Web3 growth tools to evolve, they must fully integrate wallet-based insights to enable targeted and impactful campaigns. This involves:

● Behavioral Segmentation Through Onchain Activity: Focusing on actionable wallet behaviors, like high-value transactions or active participation in DeFi ecosystems, to reach users who contribute to long-term growth—and to build stronger relationships with these contributors

● Dynamic Campaigns Powered by Real-Time Wallet Data: Using live signals like recent transactions or token activity to adapt incentives dynamically and maintain user engagement.

● Transparent Attribution via Wallet-Based Metrics: Linking campaign success to meaningful outcomes, such as staking, token swaps, or NFT interactions, by leveraging wallet-based cost-per-action (CPA) models and multi-wallet attribution.

By evolving growth tools to utilize wallet-based insights, Web3 projects can unlock measurable and sustainable value:

● Prove ROI: Campaign spend can be directly tied to meaningful outcomes, ensuring resources focus on actions that drive real value.

● Cultivate Long-Term Owners: Verified onchain behaviors allow for precision segmentation, enabling campaigns to not just acquire users but to build relationships with contributors who are invested in the ecosystem’s success. Ownership drives loyalty, advocacy, and collaboration, turning passive participants into active stakeholders.

● Strengthen Community Relationships: By understanding and investing in high-value users, projects can transform their ecosystem into the ultimate CRM—creating deeper, more personalized interactions with their most valuable contributors.

Wallet-aware growth tools lay the foundation for transforming users into owners by identifying meaningful behaviors and fostering deeper investment in the ecosystem. Ownership isn’t just about participation—it creates alignment and shared value between projects and their communities. Owners are more likely to engage in governance, contribute to growth initiatives, and remain loyal because they see themselves as integral to the ecosystem’s success. By equipping projects with wallet-aware tools, Thirdwave enables them to move beyond transactional campaigns and cultivate transformative relationships that drive long-term value.

Level 4: Bridging Onchain Data to Offchain Advertising Channels

Traditional ad systems deliver massive scale but lack the precision and transparency needed for modern advertising, especially as cookies and device IDs decline. Wallet data offers a privacy-safe, deterministic alternative, but its potential remains unrealized without integration into existing tools like DSPs and attribution platforms.

Wallet Aware Advertising becomes a reality by embedding wallet data into the systems advertisers already use:

1. Incorporate Wallet-Based Targeting into Programmatic Advertising: Define audience segments using verified onchain actions, such as staking activity or high-value NFT purchases. These insights feed into DSPs and SSPs to enable real-time bidding strategies that prioritize high-value users.
2. Enhance Attribution Systems with Wallet Metrics: Attribution systems already excel at connecting campaigns to outcomes, but Web3 data fills in critical gaps by incorporating wallet signals, such as staking volume, token transactions, and user progression. This added layer of data enables a more deterministic and comprehensive view of ROI, empowering platforms to assess the relative value of acquisition channels and project predictive lifetime value (PLTV) for users immediately upon onboarding, grounded in their actual onchain activity.
3. Close Privacy-Driven Data Gaps: Replace legacy identifiers with wallet identifiers that are privacy-compliant and scalable, meeting the demands of modern regulations. Wallet IDs are platform-agnostic, ensuring compatibility across ecosystems and unlocking actionable insights while preserving user trust.

Integrating wallet data into global advertising unlocks:

● Reduce Complexity While Driving Innovation: Advertisers can unlock the power of blockchain data without disrupting their workflows. Integrating Wallet Intelligence into trusted tools like DSPs, SSPs, and attribution dashboards enhances targeting and measurement without requiring specialized expertise. This seamless approach minimizes friction, making innovation and strategy evolution easy at scale.

● Precision Targeting for Both Web2 and Web3 Advertisers: Wallet data allows campaigns to focus on high-value users across ecosystems. In Web3, advertisers could target wallets with patterns of high transaction volumes in DeFi protocols, frequent NFT marketplace activity, or consistent participation in token staking. For Web2, luxury and premium brands can identify high-value buyers based on verifiable spending behaviors. This precision not only improves conversion rates but also reduces wasted spend by ensuring campaigns reach users who matter most.

● Better Predictive LTV Models with Web3 Data: Adding Web3 data enables attribution systems to connect campaigns to meaningful onchain actions, offering unprecedented clarity into user behavior. By connecting campaigns to onchain actions—like wallets increasing token holdings after rewards, engaging in multi-chain staking activity, or reactivating dormant assets—advertisers can identify which strategies drive sustained economic impact. For example, two campaigns might acquire the same number of users, but attribution reveals that one campaign drives wallets reinvesting rewards into staking and liquidity pools, while the other attracts wallets that claim airdrops and immediately withdraw assets. This clarity empowers advertisers to optimize for campaigns delivering high-value, engaged users over those generating extractive, short-term behavior, ensuring resources are allocated toward real ROI.

At Thirdwave, we’re making Wallet Aware Advertising possible by integrating Wallet Intelligence into the entire existing ad tech stack, enriching it with deterministic wallet data to reveal user value, predict behavior, and connect ad spend to real outcomes. By reducing adoption barriers and demonstrating the power of wallet data within familiar frameworks, we’re enabling a scalable model that bridges Web2 and Web3 advertising.

With Wallet Aware Advertising established, the next step is to deepen its potential by introducing blockchain primitives like user ownership, value exchange, and decentralized collaboration.

Level 5: Decentralizing Dynamic Discovery

Web3 campaigns operate in silos, with little interoperability between platforms. Incentives are misaligned, leaving users under-rewarded for their contributions and projects struggling to build ecosystem-wide loyalty. Without shared standards or infrastructure, collaboration remains limited, stifling cross-platform growth.

Solving these challenges requires blockchain primitives—tools that establish trust, align incentives, and drive collaboration—enabling value-driven decentralized ads. We envision a decentralized system that orchestrates value flows between participants while maintaining alignment of incentives. Each component plays a critical role in fostering collaboration, rewarding contributions, and enabling sustainable growth.

● Empowering User Ownership: Giving users control over their data and rewarding their meaningful contributions, transforming them into active stakeholders across platforms.

● Blockchain-Backed Incentives: Establishing transparent, verifiable systems for rewarding user actions, ensuring that incentives align with the value created by each participant in the ecosystem.

● Interoperability Across Platforms: Creating shared standards for targeting, measurement, and attribution, ensuring seamless engagement across chains and driving network effects.

By prioritizing user ownership and blockchain-powered engagement, this approach unlocks key advancements that redefine how decentralized advertising operates:

● Rewarded User Participation: Users are rewarded for their contributions based on the value they bring to the ecosystem, ensuring long-term engagement and sustainable growth.

● Collaborative Ecosystem Growth: As platforms adopt shared standards, the ecosystem becomes more interconnected, amplifying the collective impact of individual contributions.

● Scalable Decentralized Ads: Infrastructure for interoperability and value-based rewards enables advertising to scale effectively, serving both advertisers and users.

Thirdwave is contributing to this vision through the Wave Network, a decentralized platform that integrates blockchain primitives. By enabling user ownership, interoperability, and transparent incentives, the Wave Network empowers projects to target and reward users in ways that drive sustainable growth and lasting engagement.

The Future of Advertising is Wallet-Aware

Wallet-Aware Advertising isn’t just the next chapter in digital growth, it’s a reimagining of how value is created and shared. By turning users into owners, aligning incentives, and delivering transparency, this approach creates ecosystems where everyone wins.

At Thirdwave, we’re building the infrastructure to make this vision a reality by meeting advertisers where they are today. By integrating blockchain data into existing Web2 technologies, we reduce barriers to adoption and demonstrate the power of onchain data within familiar frameworks.

2025 is going to be a defining year for our industry and for Thirdwave, as we introduce the world to Wallet-Aware Advertising. This is your invitation. Whether you’re a developer, a protocol, or a brand, join us in building the Thirdwave of Advertising—a future where growth is collaborative, user-centric, and truly transformative.

If you're building in Web3 and share our vision for the future of advertising, we want to work with you. Whether you're a protocol looking to grow sustainably, a brand seeking to engage Web3 users, or a developer building the next generation of decentralized applications, reach out to learn how you can be part of the Thirdwave. DM me (@pbjonas) or the team (@thirdwavelabs), or email hello@thirdwavelabs.com

ABOUT THIRDWAVE

Thirdwave is building the key advertising infrastructure for the onchain economy. Powered by Wallet Intelligence and the Wallet Graph, we combine verified blockchain data with powerful predictive models to enable precise targeting and sustainable growth across Web2 and Web3. www.Thirdwavelabs.com → Start Building