Trying to change the world is no small task. What is old tends to reject what is new, and what is new tends to reject what is old. Such is the cycle of life. As crypto traders, builders, investors, and analysts, our task at hand is to unseat and then replace the global fiat money financial system. Everyone knows that money makes the world go round, and we have to make it go round with our money. And like any revolutionary attempt, we need more people to believe. Of course, then, the question becomes: how do we accomplish this?

In reality, the success of crypto is largely out of the hands of any one person or entity, regardless if they’re from within or without our space. At play are grand societal ebbs and flows that are to an extent incalculable, which is a point of frustration for those who seek understanding. Will a handful of misguided actors in the public or private sector destroy what we have built forever by a careless stroke of the pen? Will regimes ban crypto altogether and replace it with their own debased, soulless version? Will our nifty experiment crash on the rocks of a market lethargy that just doesn’t seem to go away following the hundred year top of all markets and stagflation? Because nobody can see the future, nobody knows. In this position, like anything, all that we can do is as much as we can, as well as we can, and the chips will fall where they may. Below are a few ideas that I believe will help us win.

In order to onboard the next generation of crypto users, applications must prioritize a simple, convenient, and mobile-centric user experience wherein traditional payment rails are offered. In essence, we must build great applications that use crypto rather than crypto applications. While this may offend a crypto native who can operate the Curve UI with ease, I ask you to consider the context. The reputation of crypto outside of our insular sphere is not ideal. We, right now, are know for scams, ridiculous art being traded at many multiples of the peak lifetime net worth of most, and people losing all of their funds from eighty percent drawdowns in price. Granted, a year ago we were known for harboring the best performing financial asset of all time, but the memory of the public is evidently short.

Such growing pains are the product of a technology that has the power to change the world defining itself in its early stages. This power excacerbates the definitional volatility of crypto, in turn propelling the highs of the space into the stratosphere of euphoria, and plunging its lows into the pit of despair. With this in mind, it must also be recognized that we do not live and operate in a vacuum. We are creating real, tangible products and systems that we have to convince people in the world to use. What is required in such a product as we’re offering is convenience, simplicity, and integrity, and that is what we must give them.

Reddit & MoonPay

Finances are a very sensitive matter. People spend much of their lives trying to earn, save, and grow their money. It follows that the introduction of a new financial system which hasn’t been around for very long, is largely unregulated, and isn’t widely used elicits skepticism and reservation from prospective users. How then did Reddit, a mainstream social media platform with more than 300 million monthly active users, convince their userbase to trade over $10 million in volume of NFTs and create 3 million new wallets? It’s because they weren’t trading NFTs, they were trading Digital Collectables. They weren’t buying them with Ethereum, they were paying USD with their credit or debit card.

Now, Reddit certainly isn’t going to buy our bags. $10 million in volume and 3 million wallet creations are healthy numbers by any account, but Art Gobblers did quadruple that volume in two days (vs six months), and I’d guess that 95% of those 3 million wallets will never transact again. None of that matters. What does matter is that Reddit’s execution of this project is a perfect model for how we must, in the interest of adoption, orient user experience going forward. They distilled the arduous and confusing process of buying on an exchange, setting up a MetaMask wallet, transacting to MetaMask, and finally connecting a wallet to OpenSea in order to buy an NFT into one step that everyone is familiar with: putting in card details and clicking “Purchase”.

Altogether, Reddit provided new users with a convenient, familiar, and unconfusing experience, which is exactly what will allow us to onboard the next generation of crypto users. We as people are naturally inclined to favour convenience, familiarity, and simplicity. By designing and building user experiences as Reddit has, we will position ourselves to provide all of these things while quietly revolutionizing money in the background. Because crypto is new, not well known, and has yet to truly prove itself, we must provide a soft landing for those who take the leap to our side.

MoonPay is, in their own words, “a fast and simple way to buy and sell crypto”. You may remember MoonPay from their many partnerships with celebrities such as Post Malone, Jimmy Fallon, and Lil Baby during the height of the NFT market a year ago. Post Malone was even pictured buying a Bored Ape on MoonPay in one of his music videos. The platform went on to raise a $555 million Series A round of which $87 million was from an array of celebrities that used and endorsed the platform. While the interests of celebritites are not a perfect model for those of normal people, there is great significance in MoonPay’s user-product interaction. The celebrities that endorsed and invested in MoonPay could very well have done so simply for financial gain, and many of them likely did for that sole reason, but this leaves a level higher of analysis on the table. MoonPay was able to garner their interest because they made the process of buying into the hottest trend at the time easy.

Look, I know that it’s sort of a cheap comparison to place MoonPay beside the most complex UI in crypto, but the juxtaposition of these two extremes of simplicity and usability is to illustrate a broader point. Which of the two would an average person be more willing to use on a daily basis? Athough the answer to that question is clear, it goes without saying that products such as Curve are still absolutely necessary to the end of refining and advancing the space as far as we possibly can. We can have both classes of product, but at present we only have one. This disparity in product is paralleled in legacy markets as in one transacting with Venmo vs trading stocks on TD Ameritrade. Right now, all that we have to offer is TD Ameritrade to users that merely want to send their friends money on Venmo. Does that sound strategically conducive to success? No, I didn’t think so either. We must offer simple and easy to use products to average people.

Further, the last crucial component of this new model of user experience is seamless, beautiful, and simple mobile interfaces. It does not need to be spelled out how integral mobile devices are to our every day lives, and neither does the ubiquity of mobile based payment platforms such as CashApp, Venmo, or PayPal. The cruciality of the ubiqiuty of mobile payment platforms is compounded by the fact that generally, the younger someone is, the greater their potential is to transact on these platforms. Additionally, young people are more likely to use crypto. Gone is the archaic hassle of opening a computer, signing into online banking, and performing a wire transfer that takes a week to complete. Given this, we must meet people where they are. Just take a look at your phone’s screen time.

Web2 infrastructure, Web3 Economy

We are currently witnessing Web2 giants such as Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram integrate blockchain technnology into their platforms. Coming to fruition is the marriage of the infrastructure of Web2 giants with the digital money economy of Web3. This is seen in Instagram and Facebook’s announcement of NFT integration on their platforms, and both Reddit’s Digital Collectables and new Arbitrum-powered Community Points rewards program, to name a few. What does this mean for adoption?

I don’t think most would argue that major platforms such as these integrating crypto is a bad thing, especially through the lens of achieving mass adoption. Greater visibility of crypto means that at least more people will know about it, even better become familiar with it, and ultimately, hopefully, become users. In all of this there is a tension between pragmatism and purism. Is there something lost in Web2 plucking our tech from our very hands that have been set against them thus far? Will their inevitable sterilization and corporatization reduce crypto to a non-threat by weeding out decentralization and self-custody in their interest? These are all real, important questions that we must ask ourselves upon this subject.

Many regard the concept of Web3 as nothing more than a vaunted buzzword which proceeded from the peak of the market and its accompanying euphoria last year. Some believe that the Web3 takeover of Web2 is as imminent as it is inevitable. The reality is that we simply do not have the necessary infrastructure right now to be able to offer all-encompassing viable alternatives to Web2. With that said, I believe that we can create our own infrastructure, but it won’t be any time soon. In the interim, we must take what we can get from the biggest actors if they are offering it to us, and dilligently work to create our own products and solutions that will displace them in the long run.

In Conclusion

We need to begin to imagine what is possible. Take a moment to envision a payment platform that is built on a lightning-fast Ethereum rollup, has a seamless and beautiful UI, and offers traditional payment rails. Users would enjoy near instantaneous transaction settlement, full custody of their funds, and would not have to worry about frustrating rejections or holding periods. Although our beloved tech is pushed to the background in this hypothetical, users would enjoy its benefits all the same. Given that this app is allowed to exist, on a long enough time frame, it would beyond doubt kill traditional alternatives.

In sum, this is how we must begin to think. We must build easy to use products that accomodate traditional payment rails with mobile user experience in mind, and they must quietly stand upon the very best tech that we have to offer. This is how the next generation of users is onboarded. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people, and I believe that this new model of user experience is essential to meeting the needs of those people. Foolish are those who forget that if you’re not growing, you’re dying.

Thanks for reading! Also, I’d like to extend a special thanks to knower. He is the first ct writer that I read, and made me want to write about crypto.

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