commerce

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.)

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

how can onchain commerce improve an already seamless experience like card payments by 10x?

I recently talked about this at devcon. these 4 points (and everything they enable) have the potential to achieve just that.

Who is onchain commerce solving a problem for today?

both customers and merchants. most fundamental problems are the same as those crypto solves for fiat (permissionlessness, self-custody, etc)

however these won't be enough to bring most businesses onchain. a much better experience is also needed, which is what slice aims to provide