Original title: "On building mobile first."
Original compilation: Kxp, BlockBeats
Original compilation: Kxp, BlockBeats
The work in the crypto industry is always around the clock, consuming a lot of our resources and energy, and the arrival of this bear market just gives us a chance to reflect and weigh the pros and cons. Different from the traditional market, many so-called "successful" founders in the blockchain ecosystem will use Token for hype, and can earn large sums of money without any products, users or business models.
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Founder Suffering from Peter Pan Syndrome
In our industry, the symptoms of Peter Pan Syndrome are particularly pronounced, that is, although a person is an adult, he still dwells on being a child and does not want to grow up. To outsiders, we in the crypto industry, as founders, investors, or technology users, seem to be playing childish games. But as long as there are people who can make money from it, the game will continue.
Still, it will take years to build up to the multibillion-dollar scale of Coinbase, FTX, and Binance. Over the past 5 years, consumer-facing mobile applications have been the biggest driver of growth in the Crypto industry, which in part explains why Wyre and Moonpay have high valuations of $1.5 billion and $3.4 billion, respectively . What both companies have in common is that they are both critical infrastructure for apps to acquire users through microtransactions on mobile devices.
If Crypto is to be freed from Peter Pan syndrome, it has to reach ordinary people who don't care about private keys and protocol maximization. In other words, if Crypto wants to enter the next order of magnitude, it must understand what people outside the currency circle want. In this article, I want to make a preliminary analysis of the motivations, trends and opportunities in the Crypto industry, hoping to be helpful to founders who want to develop in this field.
computer interface
The reason why most Web3 applications are carried on the computer interface today is because most people in the Crypto industry entered the market between 2017 and 2019. At that time, the Crypto industry was in its heyday, with around $25 billion in funds flowing to more than 8,000 ICO projects, and anyone could trade and make money quickly. But as with most trading, speed of access to information is the key factor, and charts, communications and news are constantly being updated every day.
In that era, ordinary people entered this field to obtain enough ICO funds, and prayed for it to be listed on a larger scale, which can be said to be the most vivid embodiment of the Boss theory. Once a token is listed, you start looking for the next ICO project to deploy the funds. This is very different from before 2017, when you could only send and receive or trade digital assets. During the same period, digital wallets such as Myetherwallet and Metamask also began to carve up Jaxx's market share.
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Value Destruction Cycle Diagram
As the graph above shows, today's developers prefer to serve a small number of users with a lot of capital. When designing a product, you don't need to consider user experience too much, but focus on obtaining TVL. However, this also means that most of the ordinary users entering the ecosystem will not be able to use these new DeFi primitives for most of 2020.
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From Bondcap's 2019 report
The reason why mobile devices can host Web3 applications, in the final analysis, is because they are the most attention-grabbing. Today, smartphones are the primary way we learn, date, entertain, shop, pay and think. So, if we exclude mobile devices, we give up a large part of the Web3 market. After all, as of 2013, we already spend more time online on mobile devices than we do on laptops or desktops.
In addition, mobile devices also make it easier for people to take ownership of various types, and create opportunities for people who did not have access to these types of functions before. Applications mainly based on mobile devices can not only accelerate the process of digitalization, but also reduce the cost of using devices, allowing more people to enjoy convenience and services at low prices.
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Digital entities can often grow while keeping costs under control
Before the emergence of digital banks, lenders had to hire credit assessors at a ratio of at least 1:100 if they wanted to issue loans to 10,000 users. With the popularity of digital banking, AML/KYC and distribution functions have grown exponentially, reducing the time lenders spend on credit assessment, thereby reducing the size of their teams. Not only that, but the larger the user base, the less the team will incur to serve each new user.
And for platforms like Compound and Aave that run their smart contracts on Ethereum, they will incur lower costs. These DAOs do not run their underlying blockchains and have no credit evaluation mechanisms and AML/KYC costs.
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Parents of my generation are afraid to use online payments
The emergence of DeFi allows everyone to buy investment bank-level financial products, which means that everyone can invest in early-stage venture capital projects. Even so, all people really want are those that are set up and don't have to be viewed in real time. This can be evidenced by a local app in India, JarHQ, which consistently ranks in the top 20 in the region for UPI transaction volume, and so many transactions by its users are aimed at buying gold for as little as $0.05.
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Oversubscribed users of this round will only receive calls from TiEr 1 VCs
How did all of this translate into DeFi? In my opinion, most founders have already started building products for institutions. That way they don't have to spend a lot of money on user experience and can just focus on a few customers while still claiming billions in TVL. Since your customers are seasoned financial managers, you don't have to spend time explaining what they're buying, and most of them are desktop users. The difference is that 90% of TWS users are on mobile devices. Therefore, the struggle between capital and users is the decisive factor for the final adaptation of the product to the device.
When looking at TVL and predicting market activity, we always forget that DeFi can be used to provide financial products, because these products often did not have investment value before.
Understand user psychology
Curious to learn more about user motivations and behavior patterns in emerging markets, I askedFrontier walletofRavindraunderstand the situation. Frontier wallet is one of the first smart contract-based wallets on the market, allowing users to view their investment portfolios on multiple blockchains without opening the browsing interface of each chain.
Ravindra observed that Frontier users, who save an average of $1,000 to $10,000, know more about Crypto than the average user who deposits assets on the exchange. Users in Indian exchanges with wallet balances around $150-$200 interact directly with multiple smart contracts and are more interested in earning USD. Dollar gains also mean a lot to users in inflationary regions like Turkey (one of Frontier's larger markets).
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Only 11,000 years have passed since the last ice age
In my opinion, the user growth curve for digital assets will follow a pattern very similar to that of digital consumption in India. The graph above shows how much time Indian Internet users spend in each category of apps in a given year. Since social media and entertainment apps are passive apps, they also have the most users.
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Technically, All Apps Can Be Dating Software
In Web3, this structure is reversed - most of us spend our time on Telegram, Discord, and Twitter, and many Web3 applications are only focused on financial or speculative fields. To expand the influence of Web3, we must focus on a larger market and develop applications for people to entertain and communicate.
In the past few years, many teams are also working in this direction. Axie Infinity's team has spent two years building one of the largest Web3 mobile device user bases, with rapid growth in 2021. Recently, Sweatcoin, a Web2 application with 3-4 million DAU, has also built a Token economy in its application.
Apps like Mirror, Coinvise, and OpenSea allow creators to build closer commercial ties with their users, but this is all based on the fact that users will actively participate in transactions, and what we should really achieve is passive participation , that is, a way for users to benefit without actively trading or publishing information. In my opinion, there is one class of apps that could lead to this shift.
Such applications are games—they often have rich digital assets, a large and diverse user base, and the lowest barriers to entry. Unlike most crypto apps today, games provide users with a sense of belonging and experience.
Since most users who participate in Crypto transactions are also keen on games, these applications can completely allow users to learn how to use wallets, conduct transactions, or interact with NFTs while playing games. In the past six months, I have been cooperating with one of the largest game studios in India to effectively combine games and education, and will release related information in the near future.
Explore future directions
Today's Web3 is still a community of tech men, but if you want Web3 to truly integrate into society, you must start thinking about how ordinary people interact with technology, and build corresponding tools to reshape people's perception of the importance of technology. In the words of Jobs, what we really need to do is to change the world.
Currently, several companies are already working toward this goal:BluejayDeveloping a stablecoin for emerging markets, Goldfinch has already issued over $100 million in loans to SMEs globally. fromCrypto-artAccording to the data, NFT hype has earned nearly 900 artists more than $100,000 in the past year, and more than 10,000 artists have earned more than $2,000. So we've made some valuable changes in the current market, but to scale that change to everyone, we'll have to use a mobile interface.
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