“Onboarding the next billion” is a flawed narrative for driving real impact in web3, and we desperately need a new one. Why? 

Crafting narratives for products that spark cultural movements. Awakening the soul through myth, tech, art and spirituality ⚡️

Words have tremendous power. Our narratives will shape what we build, thus they must evoke the feeling of what we wish to see built. Some may dismiss this as mere semantics, but to not see the power in our language is to blindly accept someone else’s embedded value system.

Keeping that in mind, the term “onboarding” is not about creating real systemic change in the world, even if we hope and assume that will be the byproduct. 

At best, onboarding is an empty narrative and an unfulfilling vision: it gives clear direction and absolutely zero purpose. At worst, it is a rallying cry to drive prices up without any demonstrable utility undergirding adoption.

At our core, I believe that the web3 community genuinely cares about making the world a better place, and solving for the vast landscape of systemic issues highlighted by the 2008 financial crisis that spurred crypto’s creation in the first place.

A note of interest: while @base has been and still is a main entity propagating the onboarding narrative for builders, they have been adding others to it in order to actually reach those users, including “updating our financial system” and elements of “fixing a broken system”. 

The narrative of “onboarding a billion users” and creating “mass adoption” give us faulty metrics to gauge progress and connotate little beyond adding holders and getting people psyched. Fine and well, but none of this provides substance or solves any concrete, real world problem