Product

Why aren't there more compelling "consumer" crypto "apps"?

1. Up until recently, blockspace was expensive and slow. In the last year, that's no longer the case. Also embedded wallets / smart contract wallets / Passkeys will continue to make it straightforward to make any crypto app aware. On-ramp APIs are also much better (but still the largest point of friction for a pure consumer app).

2. It's 2024 — the consumer web is 30 years old and the modern smartphone era is almost 20 years old. Internet software is a mature industry. Obvious ideas (regardless of whether they involve crypto) are solved.

3. So if it's an existing idea + crypto, you usually getting, at best, a 10% improvement. It's not a 10x improvement. And if it's not 10x, you won't really get people many people to switch. (And for the last 2 or so years, crypto's brand association has been more negative, so if anything it's made a product overall worse from growth standpoint.)

Why aren't there more compelling "consumer" crypto "apps"?

1. Up until recently, blockspace was expensive and slow. In the last year, that's no longer the case. Also embedded wallets / smart contract wallets / Passkeys will continue to make it straightforward to make any crypto app aware. On-ramp APIs are also much better (but still the largest point of friction for a pure consumer app).

2. It's 2024 — the consumer web is 30 years old and the modern smartphone era is almost 20 years old. Internet software is a mature industry. Obvious ideas (regardless of whether they involve crypto) are solved.

3. So if it's an existing idea + crypto, you usually getting, at best, a 10% improvement. It's not a 10x improvement. And if it's not 10x, you won't really get people many people to switch. (And for the last 2 or so years, crypto's brand association has been more negative, so if anything it's made a product overall worse from growth standpoint.)

https://danromero.org/significantly-worse-or-non-existent.html

Maybe part of the brand association thing but I would bet some folks who could build these things are on the sidelines bc of how crypto native everything is and how crazy things went last cycle and continue to go around the “non serious” ideas like memecoins