πŸ”₯Problems We Solve

bonuz wasn't built from a whiteboard. It was built in response to real, measurable problems that affect billions of people, millions of businesses, and the entire trajectory of the digital economy.

These are the eight problems that make bonuz necessary.

  1. The Sovereignty Problemarrow-up-right β€” 99% of people don't own their digital identity

  2. The Trust Crisisarrow-up-right β€” AI, bots, and deepfakes have broken online trust

  3. The Middleman Problemarrow-up-right β€” Agencies eat margins and own the data

  4. The Fragmented Identity Problemarrow-up-right β€” 100+ accounts, none talk to each other

  5. The Broken Loyalty Problemarrow-up-right β€” $48B in points wasted annually

  6. The Engagement Verification Problemarrow-up-right β€” Billions spent, no proof of who showed up

  7. The Creator Lock-in Problemarrow-up-right β€” Platforms own the audience, not the creator

  8. The Web3 UX Barrierarrow-up-right β€” Infrastructure is ready, humans can't use it


1. The Sovereignty Problem

6 billion people are online. Only ~60 million hold self-custody wallets. That's ~1%.

The internet was built on a model where platforms own everything β€” your identity, your data, your audience, your content, your engagement history. Users create enormous value, but they don't own any of it. When a platform shuts down, changes its algorithm, or bans your account, everything you built disappears.

Your Instagram followers belong to Instagram, not you. Your Starbucks loyalty points expire and can't transfer to another brand. Your event attendance history lives in a ticketing company's database, not your wallet. Your professional credentials are locked in someone else's ecosystem.

Web3 promised to fix this with self-custodial wallets and on-chain identity. But the tools are too complex for 99% of people. Seed phrases, gas fees, and fragmented UX have kept self-sovereignty locked behind a technical barrier that most humans will never cross on their own.

How bonuz solves this: Self-custodial identity and ownership through a wallet that onboards in under 45 seconds via social login. No seed phrases. No gas fees. No crypto knowledge required. Ownership becomes the default, not the exception.


2. The Trust Crisis

In an age of AI, who is even real?

AI influencers. Deepfakes. Bots. Fake accounts. Click farms. The internet is flooded with synthetic engagement, and it's getting worse every month. People don't know who they're dealing with online, and brands can't tell real engagement from manufactured noise.

This isn't a minor nuisance β€” it's an economic crisis. Brands spend billions on growth campaigns where 30-50% of engagement comes from bots and fake accounts. Influencer fraud costs advertisers an estimated $1.3 billion annually. Global ad fraud is projected to exceed $100 billion per year. And users increasingly can't verify if the person they're interacting with is real, an AI, or a bot.

The internet has a trust deficit, and it widens every day as AI-generated content becomes indistinguishable from human-created content.

How bonuz solves this: Verifiable on-chain identity. Every bonuz ID is tied to real engagement β€” verified through multiple methods including linked social accounts, KYC, World ID, government IDs, and Proof of Participation at physical events. The result is portable reputation that travels with the user, verifiable engagement that brands can trust, and a system where real humans are distinguishable from bots. Trust becomes portable. Identity becomes verifiable.


3. The Middleman Problem

Brands are trapped in an agency-dependent model that eats their margins and owns their data.

When a brand wants to run an engagement campaign β€” loyalty program, influencer activation, event gamification, community building β€” they typically need agencies, influencer platforms, campaign managers, and third-party providers. Each layer takes a cut, adds latency, and keeps the data.

The result: 20-40% of campaign budgets go to middleman fees rather than reaching the audience. Brands don't own the relationship β€” the agency manages the influencer, the influencer manages the audience, and the brand is two steps removed from its own customers. Campaign data stays with the middleman; brands get a report at the end, not real-time verifiable engagement data. And creative execution is bottlenecked β€” launching a new gamified campaign requires weeks of agency coordination, not minutes of self-serve setup.

Worst of all, there's no composability. Each campaign is a standalone silo. An influencer campaign can't connect to a loyalty program, which can't connect to event attendance, which can't connect to in-store visits.

How bonuz solves this: A self-serve dashboard with no-code tools to create Quests, loyalty punchcards, vouchers, memberships, tickets, certificates, and Proof of Participation campaigns β€” all without agencies. Brands own the relationship, own the data, and own the engagement history. Influencers and creators still participate, but through direct collaboration on bonuz rather than through a middleman that takes margin and keeps the data.


4. The Fragmented Identity Problem

The average person has 100+ online accounts. None of them talk to each other.

Every platform requires a separate identity. Every service starts you from zero. Your credentials, reputation, engagement history, and social connections are scattered across dozens of siloed databases with no interoperability.

A verified Uber driver with a 4.9 rating has zero reputation when they sign up for Lyft. A loyal hotel guest with 50 stays has no status when they book a restaurant next door. A professional with 15 years of certifications can't carry that credential portfolio between platforms. A concert-goer who attended 30 shows has no verifiable proof outside the ticketing platform's database.

This fragmentation wastes time (re-verifying identity everywhere), destroys value (reputation doesn't compound across services), and gives platforms leverage over users (switching costs are artificially high because your history doesn't travel).

How bonuz solves this: bonuz ID β€” a single, portable, on-chain identity that aggregates social accounts, credentials, engagement history, and verifiable identifiers into one profile at bonuz.id/[username]. Your reputation compounds. Your credentials travel. Your engagement history is yours β€” verifiable by any brand, platform, or service in the ecosystem, without starting from zero.


5. The Broken Loyalty Problem

$48 billion in loyalty points go unredeemed every year. The system is designed to waste value.

Traditional loyalty programs are built around a paradox: brands want customers to earn points (to feel engaged) but don't actually want them to redeem them (because redemption is a cost). The result is a system designed around expiration, devaluation, and siloed rewards that can't be used anywhere else.

The average consumer is enrolled in 16+ loyalty programs but active in fewer than half. Points expire, devalue, and often require minimum thresholds before redemption. Loyalty data is locked inside each brand's system β€” a hotel chain knows you're loyal, but the airline partner doesn't. There is no cross-brand composability. Your coffee loyalty and your gym loyalty exist in completely separate universes.

How bonuz solves this: On-chain loyalty mechanics β€” punchcards, vouchers, memberships, and rewards as DNFTs in the user's self-custodial wallet. Rewards don't expire unless the brand explicitly chooses expiration. They're composable across brands β€” a hotel loyalty DNFT can unlock a restaurant discount, a gym membership can compound with a wellness brand's voucher. The user owns their loyalty history, and brands benefit from cross-ecosystem engagement they could never access in a siloed program.


6. The Engagement Verification Problem

Brands spend billions on campaigns but can't prove who actually showed up.

In the current model, engagement is measured by proxies β€” impressions, clicks, likes, follows. These metrics are easy to fake, impossible to verify, and tell brands almost nothing about genuine human behavior.

A brand sponsors a music festival and gets a post-event report estimating "10,000 interactions." But how many people actually visited the brand's activation? Walked through the booth? Scanned the QR code? Nobody can prove it. A tourism board invests millions in a campaign β€” but how many visitors actually went to the promoted attractions? In what order? For how long? The data doesn't exist at the individual level. An influencer claims 500K engaged followers β€” but how many are bots? How many actually acted on a recommendation? The brand has no way to verify.

How bonuz solves this: On-chain Proof of Participation, Proof of Visit, and Quest completion records. Every engagement is verifiable β€” on-chain, timestamped, and tied to a real bonuz ID. Brands get first-party, verified engagement data showing exactly who did what, where, and when. No estimates. No proxies. No fraud.


7. The Creator Lock-in Problem

Creators build audiences on platforms that can take everything away overnight.

Every creator on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or X has the same vulnerability: the platform owns the audience relationship. One algorithm change, one policy update, one account suspension β€” and years of audience-building vanishes.

Creators can't export their follower list or engagement history. Algorithm changes routinely cut organic reach by 50-80% without notice. Deplatforming means losing your entire audience with no recourse. Monetization terms change at the platform's discretion β€” creators have no leverage. And cross-platform portability doesn't exist. TikTok followers β‰  Instagram followers β‰  YouTube subscribers.

How bonuz solves this: On-chain social connections via bonuz ID. When a fan follows a creator on bonuz, that connection is on-chain and owned by both parties. The creator's audience is portable, verifiable, and platform-independent. No algorithm can suppress it. No platform can revoke it. The creator owns their audience for the first time.


8. The Web3 UX Barrier

The technology is ready. The human layer is missing.

Web3 has been promising a decentralized, user-owned internet for over a decade. The infrastructure has matured β€” L2 scaling works, gas fees can be sponsored, smart contracts are battle-tested. But adoption has stalled at ~1% because the user experience is still built for crypto natives, not normal people.

Seed phrases are a security and usability nightmare. Gas fees are confusing and unpredictable. Wallet interfaces look like developer tools, not consumer products. The language itself is alienating β€” "minting," "bridging," "staking" mean nothing to 99% of the population. Every interaction requires multiple confirmations, approvals, and technical decisions that no mainstream user will tolerate.

The result: 6 billion people are online, but Web3 remains a niche used primarily by speculators and developers rather than everyday consumers, brands, and creators.

How bonuz solves this: All blockchain complexity is abstracted behind a consumer-grade interface. Social login onboarding in under 45 seconds. Gas fees sponsored by the platform. No seed phrases. No technical jargon in the UI. Available in 22 languages. If your grandmother can't use it in 30 seconds, it's not ready β€” and bonuz is ready.


Why These Problems Matter Together

Any single one of these problems justifies a product. Together, they describe a broken system β€” an internet where users don't own anything, brands can't trust anything, creators can't keep anything, loyalty is designed to expire, engagement can't be verified, identity doesn't travel, and the technology that could fix all of this is too hard for 99% of people to use.

bonuz exists because these problems are interconnected. They can't be solved by eight separate point solutions. They need a single, composable layer.

The bonuz ID is the anchor. The engagement protocol is the toolkit. The self-custodial wallet is the delivery mechanism. Together, they form the Human Layer β€” the missing piece between the blockchain infrastructure that already works and the billions of people who still can't access it.

Last updated