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.

To be totally real with you (as another founder building onchain commerce tools), I'm not sure that these are 10x improvements to non-crypto-native merchants.

I interviewed 50+ Shopify merchants, and *none* of them wanted to leave Shopify because they thought:

1. Crypto is more complicated than what they're used to

2. Settlement times aren't a pressing issue

3. Permissionlessness + composability aren't valuable to them

Do you have a link to your DevCon talk?

I'd love to watch it and better understand your POV!

it will require convincing also customers, as it's ultimately them who will drive merchants en masse to adopt them. luckily there are huge benefits for both.

I don't think we need to push merchants away from shopify or other tools, and instead try to integrate with them when possible

1. crypto should be abstracted away when possible.
2. speed and efficiency prevented ux to be on par with web2 checkout, until recently. settlement time is not critical but a cool perk
3. they will learn of their value, eventually

I don't have a video unfortunately. btw never said it was easy :)

The best products don't require convincing IMO.

Also - BitPay and Coinbase Commerce already have Shopify plugins and see very little usage.

Is your bet that you'll last long enough to see the inflection point?

(My POV is: lean more towards giving people what they want today in the direction of the future you believe in)

in a consolidated market like commerce, you're bound to do a lot of convincing at first. 

slice isn't going anywhere for sure, but we also have ways to tackle this problem differently than other solutions.

Gotcha - looking fwd to seeing what y’all come up with!