Went for a walk with @literature yesterday and he said something that resonated: "crypto has had mobile wallets, but it hasn’t had mobile products.” 

Such a simple insight, but a powerful one. Consumers tech is mobile, yet very few crypto products have made been mobile-first, as a first class experience. That is in part because of how difficult it is to work within the walled gardens of the App Store. But thanks to ingenuity of builders, that is changing. Warpcast, Blackbird and (soon) Zora, Kiosk and others are building mobile-first products onchain. 

Note: I’m defining mobile-first as an app store product vs. PWA because the app store is where the users are, is full featured, and PWA is for power users and lacks some features.

1/

Overall, Warpcast is a great example of meeting users where they’re at (mobile/app store) while still allowing crypto to be seen, and for users “thumbs [to] learn” new crypto behaviors.

In the Variant portfolio there are a handful of companies building mobile first. Presumably this will lead to new best practices in mobile-first onchain app development. Im excited to see the best practices crystalize here, as I I think the next generation of application in crypto will be mobile products.

P.S. an honorable mention to Telegram bots, which are another interesting design space for mini-apps that are incresingly looking like full-featured, mobile apps that benefit from Telegram's social graph, messaging, and native wallet.

3/ {fin}

Using Warpcast as an example: the pattern is to abstract crypto *almost entirely* but let it be seen through the cracks, just the right amount to surface its super-powers.  

Onboarding, users don't need to know Warpcast is onchain. Payment for certain types of onchain actions, like minting NFTs, happen in Warps (similar to an in-app currency.) 

But to transact with arbitrary onchain applications via Frames you get punted to Coinbase Wallet or a third-party mobile wallet, and here there's lots of friction to smooth out, which will happen in time, but the user gets to experience self-custody/ownership.

2/