🔸 BUILDING PRODUCTS IN TRADITIONAL CENTRALISED VS BLOCKCHAIN SPACE

To build with a new paradigm one thing that doesn't change is what is the "need" and for "who".
In the blockchain space there are really two types of users:
If building a wallet, the end user is a Consumer.
If building a decentralized lending protocol, the user is Developer.
Traditionally building for the end user, you have your own

• database

• back-end service

• front-end

• application layer

Basically all the layers of the stack.

If you want to implement different features, you can change every layer of the stack to meet that need to build new use cases and find better product market fit.
But in blockchain space, you may build a Dapp on top of already existing infrastructure so you can't make as many changes to your back end (blockchain ) so it becomes really important to think about the idea of flexibility and control.
Avoid the mentality "build and they will come"

The idea of understanding on a rigorous level what is bringing people to the product that you're building.

🔸 USER-FOCUSED VS DEVELOPER FOCUSED PROTOCOLS

Bitcoin initially started as a peer-to-peer money monetary system over time it's evolved into a store of value.

Bitcoin today:
Native asset gets value from their utility and from their degree of widespread acceptance.
Protocol value comes from the degree of security and decentralization that exists so there's a huge community around Bitcoin.

On the other hand, Ethereum started as a generalized computer and from the start has been really appealing to developers.

In 2017 with the ICO craze, it became a really great place for crowdfunding.

Ethereum has a ton of value today derived from this Rich developer ecosystem.

🔸 HOW IS CRYPTO DOING?

The future looks like there is a huge amount of open space in terms of building a great product.

this just shows the market cap of all crypto assets and how they compare to other kinds of markets that exist, there is about 4X between crypto and apple.

🔸 CELO: CASE STUDY

CELO's goal is to build a more open and accessible Financial system.
Over 1.7 billion people worldwide have no banking access but over two-thirds of that group has access to a mobile phone.

That market size where over a billion people globally have access to everything on the internet but can't send ten dollars to a family member overseas.
CELO started out as a fork of Ethereum, it's a layer one as well as a set of smart contracts and an application layer built on top of blockchain which is proof of stake based.

As a fork of Ethereum, analogue to ETH is CELO Gold (native asset).
On top of it there's a set of native smart contracts encoding CELO Dollar which is a stable value asset pegged to the US dollar and a lightweight identity system and then a set of applications on the CELO wallet as well as a developer SDK.
Users Vs Developers and how they two play together:

From the start, CELO was focused on a wallet and end users and building to that need as a result what's come to be a broader sense of what those users might need.
Then as a result definition of what a developer ecosystem might want to set out to build the initial approach being building for an end user and then becoming the first consumers of an SDK and then building that SDK to meet a range of different use cases.

🔸 HOW CELO IMPROVED USER EXPERIENCE:

Sending money and then seeing a loading screen that took forever so they put focused effort on reducing the time of that sink.
Now CELO wallet runs a light client that syncs blockchain state and this allows for a user to both sign transactions as well as send them from their device itself, now the experience is really fast.

🔸 ELIMINATING RISKY GAS CURRENCIES

In Ethereum, no matter what asset you're transacting you need that asset as well as some ETH to have a transaction go through so if I'm sending someone 20 DAI I need DAI as well as a little bit of ETH to make that transaction go through one.
CELO noticed that they have to give people both CELO Dollars as well as CELO Gold in order to perform transactions like say even buying a sandwich.
For Mainstream usability, having people use two different assets just to transact in one as a comparable to cash or even like a debit type system it seems like a bit of a regression in user experience.
So one innovation that came out of that was allowing for gas to be paid in a stable asset CELO dollar.

🔸 WHAT SHOULD NEW FOUNDERS DO?

While building products, think about ways to get these learnings higher up in the stack as quickly as possible so that you can make changes lower down because changes at the most fundamental and lower levels are a lot harder to make.

🔸 TWO KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Start with the biggest need rather than technology, think about what is the biggest possible problem that you can solve and how might you use the toolkit that you have at your disposal with blockchain to solve that problem best.

2. Think about how at every single layer of the stack you can build a bit more full stack or at least think in a more full-stack way in order to build something that meets a more cohesive need of USER.

   User-Need Focused approach
   Build in a way that controls the whole stack to meet that user's need and builds with one core purpose in mind.

That’s it for today, thank you for reading!