Think of Nonce 0 as the birth of a wallet. It’s an important moment marking the start of a crypto user’s journey. Yet the opportunity to build a delightful user experience around it from the onset has been largely neglected.

Imagine Steve Jobs was around today and you onboarded him to crypto with Metamask. I’ll leave it to your imagination to think of his reaction.

I’ve been thinking about the pain points for new users after downloading a wallet, how products today are trying to shape that user journey, and what may come next. There’s a gap when it comes enjoyable web3 experiences for first-time wallet users that keep them engaged. The “fun zone” doesn’t stop at day zero, it’s merely the beginning.

The Missing Piece

Many liquidity mining incentives are unsustainable given high CAC and low retention, so projects are rightfully leaning further into using credentialing and bounty platforms. Are quests and bounties the best we can do for new users? Sure they’ve been effective to a degree, but for some, they’ve made using crypto feel more like a laborious task than something leaning into the magic of crypto. This leads to a tough spot for the day 0 - day 90 wallet age cohort in the proverbial “fun zone”. Web3 is missing a fun entertainment experience that evolves alongside you in your crypto journey.

In some cases like with Degenscore, on-chain reputation is used as a means for early access to products. The more history a wallet has, the more valuable it becomes as a “target user” to design around. However, this leads to the chicken and egg problem. You need solid on-chain scoring to access early products (which also leads to airdrops) but new users who have potential value are left on an island as they start with a lack of wallet history. You can’t open the floodgates to these new wallets because of sybil attack risk.

Brenner nicely articulates the problem we are facing, “Every transaction on a blockchain tells a small piece of a larger story. We are in the hieroglyphics era, staring at Etherscan, trying to make sense of what’s happened”

Perhaps we make web3 less confusing to start and repackage that into easy to understand information in the form of features or products.

We need a better context layer that surfaces information and leverages it into a fun experience whether it be during wallet transaction #1 or #1000.

So what else exists today?

Phi is built on top of ENS and creates a social graph by visualizing on-chain activity as digital objects which users can organize to represent their web3 identity. Phi is versatile in that it can turn into a social metaverse play while simultaneously being able to serve as a quests layer. I would caveat that while the composability of ENS is powerful, for the day 0 - day 90 cohort it adds an extra layer of friction to have an ENS domain as a prerequisite. Perhaps offering subdomain names like Coinbase does can alleviate this.

From a wallet standpoint Rainbow and Coinbase have done a good job giving more life to the onboarding experience. They are leaning a bit more into curation and encouraging exploration. While Coinbase’s above approach mirrors some successful patterns of web2 onboarding, it doesn’t necessarily capture the magic of the birth of a new wallet and how the evolution of that wallet’s transaction history impacts the experience.

Now let’s dive into another project that is on track to the “fun zone” but perhaps a few ingredients away from becoming more exciting and thus viral.

Metagame takes a crypto-native approach towards solving for the “fun zone” and has a lot of white space it can grow into. Like many others, Metagame is building infrastructure for NFTs earned by on-chain and off-chain activity but with a twist using the help of dynamic NFTs. Let’s dive into 4 types of NFTs they’ve rolled out as outlined by the team on Twitter.

• Birthblock - “Birthblock is an NFT that represents your wallet’s age. Each tree ring represents 100k Ethereum blocks. The color of the tree changes based on the age of the wallet, too. The 5 other circles represent the month/day/hour/min/sec your wallet was born”

• Token Garden - “Perpetually-expanding 3D garden of flowers that grows with every NFT your wallet mints. Listening for mint events on your wallet, Token Garden sprouts a new flower with every new NFT"

• Heartbeat - “Heartbeat is the heartbeat of your on-chain activity. It speeds up the more active you are in the past week. It grows brighter the more you are over the last month. It grows spikier the more active you've been in your lifetime. It even stops moving after a week of inactivity and turns grey after a month of inactivity.”

  • My screenshot above doesn’t really do things justice, check out the real-time heartbeats and graveyards here

• Logbook - “Detailed aggregation of on-chain activity like an "Earned Loot". It combines…

  • The data you have produced on-chain

  • Evm-translator: an open-source package by Metagame

  • Community-contributed interpretations of contract interactions”

After browsing through Metagame’s NFTs, it’s clear to see how organically earned NFTs bring a fresh vantage point in how gamification can be built.

There is no shortage of brilliant founders and teams building towards long term goals of identity and reputation layers, but what has been overlooked in the interim is the fun factor. I’m sure I’m not the only one who views doing quests as more of a chore and don’t care for grinding to get whitelisted. Realistically, any existing projects could easily lean more into the “fun zone” if desired, but I think it’s fair to say that more exploration should always be encouraged regardless of who gets there first.

Looking Ahead - “Fun Zone” Creation

Lean into Further

• Curation / Discovery - Until wallets have enough on-chain activity to offer “smart recommendations” of new apps to try based on tx history, a Spotify-like onboarding experience to set the groundwork for discovery features could suffice. For example, upon wallet install, users can browse through prompts and pick areas of irest:

  • What are your favorite categories (Art, Music, Games, Sports, etc)?

  • What are your preferred DeFi segments? (DEX, Perp, Lending, etc)?

• Display - Users will need a proper place to display their various earned and interactive NFTs, express themselves, and discover other like-minded wallets. 2D environments to display NFTs like Gallery or an OnCyber virtual world would keep early users engaged.

• Sponsored Transactions - New EOA wallet users today can’t even make a transaction without first sending themselves crypto from a CEX for gas payments. With account abstraction (ERC-4337), sponsored transactions will allow app developers to pay fees on behalf of their users. This opens the design space for more creative onboarding care packages delivered to new users too.

Ideas to Explore

• Games - What if new wallets were paired with free digital companion NFTs that dynamically update alongside a crypto user’s journey. This could be something as complex as an egg to start, eventually hatching into an interoperable game character with various power-ups based on the “highlights” of a wallet’s on-chain repertoire. Alternatively, wallets could lean into cutility by offering NFTs similar to Finiliars out of the gate.

• Art - If a wallet is the paint brush and its transaction history is the color palette, what if wallet owners could mint unique generative art at different periods in the wallet’s lifecycle. Wallets can be visualized in many ways as demonstrated by Metagame.

• Multiplayer Mode - Every new wallet today starts in single player mode. What if there was an option to opt into a multiplayer environment from the get-go and compete in mini-games amongst small groups of users to both learn how to interact with crypto and earn prizes in the meantime? Games > Quests

• Crypto Chronicles - Digital scrapbooks for wallets could be used to preserve and share a user’s journey in crypto. Don’t you want your grandkids to get riled up to see you made generational wealth the last cycle only to blow it by investing it all into Pixelmon? More simply, web3 versions of “Spotify Wrapped” for wallets and “Myers Briggs personality tests” (Shoutout Charisma), would also work here.

• Dynamic NFTs tied to the real world - Since most new users’ activities like events and purchases are tied to the real world, it’s important to also bridge the gap between IRL and crypto. Sporting tickets can be implemented as interactive NFTs for game attendees. Tickets can update based on in-game results (i.e. if a home team scores 100 points, the ticket updates to reflect a free taco voucher).

  • Brands could better engage with users by targeting them with metadata trait drops or NFTs based on relevant PFPs or prior events attended (i.e. POAP tracking). Check out Playground for more on dNFTs.

Wallets start off as empty digital backpacks. Let’s fill them with enjoyable experiences.