Zenbase Combines Mental Health with Crypto Rewards
As soon as Connor Chase was introduced to meditation, it became a passion. “Right after my first meditation session I tweeted, ‘Man, the monks are kind of onto something,’” says Chase. In just three months he worked his way up from five minutes to twenty minutes of meditation a day.
Chase says he vividly remembers the day the idea for Zenbase came to him, back in July 2021.
“I was meditating and my timer went off,” says Chase. “As soon as that happened, I had the idea to combine cryptocurrency rewards with the practice of meditation.”
At the time, Chase was using the Brave browser, a safe browser often used with crypto. The browser blocks disruptive ads and awards you in crypto for looking at ads. With this business model in mind, Chase called over his longtime friend, former crypto day trader, and certified yoga instructor, Jessie Freelander. The two stayed up all night writing Zenbase’s whitepaper, creating the foundation of the meditate-to-earn platform. Soon after, the team added a third technical Co-Founder, Pharaoh Cambell.
Chase was able to combine his two passions of crypto and meditation in Zenbase.
“What I like about cryptocurrency is that it's decentralized, meaning no one entity has control over any of the processes and it allows for a lot more freedom,” says Chase. “I'm personally always a fan of not having government intervention to the maximum extent. That's always going to be a good thing and cryptocurrency enables that.”
Now, a little over a year later, Zenbase is on the app store and allows users to earn crypto rewards for meditation. The company calls it earning your ‘mental wealth.’ The app tracks meditation by offering soothing music to listen to, users start earning rewards after listening to a minimum of five minutes and can listen up to an hour of meditation music.
The app is currently a freemium model, with a premium offer for $4.99 per month or is purchasable with rewards. With the premium offer users earn twice as many rewards for meditating.
Currently, users are receiving a Zentoken for meditation. Unlike many other new crypto startups, the Zentoken is not a crypto token yet, but can be used as an in-app currency. Once the platform has enough users, the company will do a massive airdrop and replace what users have earned in the app with real crypto currency. Chase hopes to do the airdrop within Q1 of next year.
Along with the blockchain integration and cryptocurrency airdrop, Zenbase will offer more ways to grow your mental wealth including yoga classes, grounding, visualization meditation, ESP training, lectures, wellness podcasts, breathing exercises, ETF tapping, Qi Gong, and Tai Chi. For classes uploaded onto the platform rewards will be split 70/30 with teachers and students. The platform will also offer a marketplace where users can redeem crypto for wellness products such as yoga mats, water bottles, and gift cards.
The team also plans to incorporate NFTs into the platform. “If you're a yoga instructor, you can make a yoga class, upload it to Zenbase and make that entire yoga class an NFT itself,” explains Chase. “If other people want your yoga class NFT, they can purchase it. That new owner will be the recipient of all the streaming royalties in Zen token that it will receive.”
The app has been on the app store since the end of July and has over 500 downloads. The team now has 12 employees, with Chase and Freelander recently moving to full time.
The company is now bootstrapped, but did receive $50K from an angel investor, one of Freelander’s college professors in the very beginning.
“We're always moving fast, but we're going to prioritize product right now,” says Chase. “Just like Elon always says, focus on product. If you have a product people love, you'll go far.”