Original article: Consumer Crypto
Author: 1 confirmation Founder Nick Tomaino
Over the next decade, my biggest belief is that cryptography will permeate every aspect of culture. The past decade has focused on deep technology and finance, but in the next decade we will see cryptocurrency consumer applications collide with news, politics, sports, health/fitness, music, live streaming, podcasts, and more of sparks. These applications will become some of the most useful and valuable applications ever created.
This may seem like a counter-intuitive view to investors, who continue to invest heavily in zero-sum products that lack innovation. On social platforms, all the talk is about certain scalable L1 and revenue-generating stablecoins, but developers are actually working quietly to develop products that can inspire new consumer behaviors, which will help us reach 1 billion as soon as possible users above and bring benefits to the world.
I’ve learned a lot over the past decade from the many early-stage consumer apps that successfully connected cryptocurrencies and culture and attracted new users (e.g. Coinbase, Opensea, Polymarket, dYdX, etc.). If you're considering the next generation of top consumer cryptocurrency applications, here are four lessons that may be useful:
Mass adoption won't happen instantly, so focus on what you believe in, beyond money, and stick with it for years to come. Polymarket has been considered a failure many times, but founder Shayne Coplan and the team still believe that prediction markets can "bring more truth to the world" and have never wavered. They encountered many obstacles along the way that would have made most people give up, but a strong belief in something non-obvious and deeper than money helped them survive. Polymarket had a trading volume of over $423 million in 2024 and now plays a major role in the 2024 US presidential election. Faith and persistence will always pay off.
The meeting point between purists and tourists is crucial. Coinbase has deftly sat at the intersection of purists and tourists over the past decade. If a product is too pure, it will remain niche and never break through. There may be a small group of people steeped in historical knowledge, appreciating the nuances and loving it, but building for purists will limit the size of your market. If a product caters too much to tourists, people may briefly like it but eventually leave. As quickly as it comes, it goes as quickly as it comes. In 2012, Brian Armstrong (founder of Coinbase) made an early product design decision to "provide users with custodial wallet services." He believed that non-custodial wallets would not contribute to large-scale market growth. Thanks to this decision, Coinbase is now a publicly traded company worth over $50 billion.
Gain a deep understanding of your users and the culture of your market. When Opensea launched in 2018, other NFT marketplaces raised more funds and involved more high-profile investors. Opensea wins because founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah don't care about false prestige or creating some false narrative around the company, they just focus on building a product that works. They talk to every NFT creator, attend every NFT event, and understand the culture better than their competitors. Don’t worry about surface narratives, dig deeper and you will outlast those who play the perception game.
Block out existing tribal noise and create your own tribe. A truly useful app doesn't require choosing and pleasing any existing tribe, but creating your own. dYdX shows the way in this regard. Founder Antonio Juliano and his team initially started in the Ethereum ecosystem, then launched L2 powered by Starkex (a Layer-2 scaling engine by StarkWare), followed by the dYdX chain powered by the Cosmos SDK. This may be more common in the future. Once you prove the utility of your application, you can become completely independent and launch your own chain, rather than giving up a lot of control and value to existing chains.
The last decade of consumer crypto has been interesting, but the next decade is going to be even more interesting, at least in my opinion. Thanks for reading.
Source
