Paid email is already one of the first truly useful applications of the blockchain. With Coinbase, we think we can prove that at scale.

As of today, Earn.com is being acquired by Coinbase! The Earn.com product is going to get bigger and better as a consequence of this deal. You can read more about the acquisition here and the history of the company here. In this post, we want to first briefly introduce Earn.com for new audiences and then explain what this means for our existing users and senders.

Earn.com at a glance

Earn.com allows senders to pay users in digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks. Relative to the status quo, the introduction of payments benefits both normal email users and large-scale senders of commercial emails.

Earn.com users complete tasks on web and mobile to earn crypto.

If you’re a normal email user, you can now earn money in your free time simply by replying to emails. You can keep the money you earn, or donate it to charity with one click. You can also use the prices of inbound emails as a signal to rank them by importance. And you know immediately what the sender wants from you in a reply, as they’ve made their payment conditional on the completion of a very specific task. Hundreds of thousands of users have earned digital currency with Earn.com so far, earning millions of dollars in their free time.

Senders use Earn.com to create paid email campaigns and surveys.

Conversely, if you’re a sender of commercial email, you can use Earn.com to pay one user or one hundred thousand to get them to quickly reply to important messages. Thousands of senders have sent millions of dollars worth of paid messages through Earn.com for recruiting, fundraising, and marketing their products. Empirically, we find that Earn.com senders get 30–70% response rates within 24 hours for $1–10 incentives, even for messages with many thousands of recipients. This is extraordinarily high relative to the typical 1.7% response rates for cold emails. As such, any business that sends cold email or conducts surveys can benefit from Earn.com.

The blockchain is a fundamental enabling technology for Earn.com, because it allows us to accommodate senders and users anywhere in the world. In particular, we can effectively compensate a user in any country with a small amount of money for replying to an email or completing a simple task, even if they lack a bank account.

Earn also has many other features, like a search engine where you can find users through their public profiles and pay them to reply, lists that users can join to make more money, a Gmail integration which allows you to bounce commercial emails sent to your address, and a shareable task feature which allows you to outsource work to your business’s Twitter and Facebook followers. And Earn.com also extends beyond simply replying to emails, because we also allow senders to create surveys, tasks, and multi-stage pipelines that combine more than one digital task.

For existing Earn.com users and senders

If you’re an existing Earn.com user or sender, everything will continue as before in the short term, with one exception: we’ve put our token launch on the back burner and will instead focus on integrating with Coinbase’s infrastructure and scaling up our service. You might be able to guess what this will enable, but stay tuned anyway as you might be surprised! Over the next few weeks, as we integrate and ship new features, we will make announcements as we do so.

Buy crypto. And now earn crypto.

Over the last several years, the primary way most people have obtained cryptocurrency is through buying it, with many of these transactions facilitated by Coinbase. With this acquisition, we allow users to also earn crypto by doing things they already know how to do — like replying to emails and filling out surveys.

If we’re successful in our long-term goals, we will be able to turn the billions of smartphones worldwide into a new source of work. Open the Earn.com app in any country — and receive a personalized, targeted list of paid microtasks and emails just for you. Thanks to the blockchain, anywhere there’s a phone, there’s a job. We think that’s an exciting vision and we’re going to work hard on achieving that at Coinbase!